In what appears to be a last-minute effort to play catch-up, Microsoft and Verizon have put out a call for developers to code for their mobile platforms.
Verizon is planning a July 28 conference in San Jose, California, to attract software developers to its mobile platform. And Microsoft announced that on July 27, the company will start accepting mobile application submissions in advance of its launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 in the fall.
The companies appear to be responding to Apple, which announced this morning that its iPhone App Store, now only one year old, has surpassed 1.5 billion downloads and is serving 65,000 applications.
“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a press release. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”
Though press releases are inherently boastful, Jobs is correct that Apple is well ahead of its competitors in the mobile software space. The company launched its application store in July 2008 with the release of the iPhone 3G. The App Store’s consumer friendly interface, which makes purchasing and downloading applications as easy as downloading songs in the iTunes Store, is benefiting software developers, some of whom have become rich thanks to explosive sales of their apps.
Other tech giants, including Research In Motion, Google and Palm, followed with announcements of their own mobile-application stores, but their launches were underwhelming compared to Apple’s. For example, Palm’s application store had only 30 apps after its first week; Apple’s App Store opened with 500 applications ready for download.
“The OS wars have finally begun,” said Michael Gartenberg, technology strategist and vice president of Interpret, in a June interview with Wired.com when Apple launched its new iPhone 3GS handset.
Verizon is the latest to join the application-store fray, which is an uncharacteristic move for the telecom giant. Historically, the company has not given developers control over pricing of their apps. But now, Verizon promises to provide a lucrative and simple process for its developers, Verizon vice president Ryan Hughes told GigaOM. However, the company has not disclosed details of its revenue-sharing program.
How will Verizon compete with Apple? The company is adopting a “platform agnostic” philosophy, hoping to aggregate mobile apps from four developer communities: Windows Mobile, Palm, Android and RIM’s BlackBerry. This way, developers can code for whichever platform they wish. And they can decide whether to share their software with Verizon, which would provide APIs and tools to make the software compatible with Verizon phones.
The idea, then, is for developers to maximize profit from a single application by selling it to not only BlackBerry customers, but Verizon subscribers as well, for example.
Though Apple is ahead of its competitors in numbers, it does not mean the company is going to stomp rivals into nonexistence, Gartenberg said. Rather, many companies can compete and still co-exist in the new smartphone OS space.
“At the end of the day, for Palm to succeed does not mean that Apple has to do badly, and likewise for Apple to succeed doesn’t mean that Palm is going to go out of business. There’s going to be a lot of room in the market for several players here,” Gartenberg said. “What’s hopefully going to drive a lot of this stuff forward is who gets the developers, who gets the exclusive apps and who gets the additional functionality beyond the out-of-the-box experience.”
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Photo: B.K. Dewey/Flickr
