Apple’s App Store: Another Home Run

“Apple has embraced the developer community with gusto as it looks to third parties to help round out an already feature-packed iPhone and iPhone 3G. (The) App Store launched with more than 500 free and paid applications in July and in little more than a month has grown to more than 3,000 (of which about 600 are free).” So writes Cliff Edwards for BusinessWeek. As others may have been, Edwards was an App Store skeptic when Apple first announced it. He found it hard to imagine how Apple would use the iTunes online store effectively to host a range of applications from third-party developers for its iPhone and iPod Touch. MacDaily News, in reviewing Edwards’ article points out that he must have missed the iPhone 2.0 SDK preview back in March, where Apple CEO Steve Jobs presented all this, or many of those doubts would have been cleared. This is probably true. Those of us who write and read more widely within a specific Apple focus are less skeptical than those in the general business world; it’s one of the reasons that we so often puzzle over the lack of understanding in some sectors about how great Apple would be, and is, in the Enterprise.

But, as with most Apple doubters, Edwards saw the error of his ways. “As I write this, I’m eating crow. After trying out Apple’s App Store for the past few weeks, I can say categorically that Apple has hit another home run. The App Store has truly unshackled the high-end mobile phone.”

Apple offers an array of games, productivity tools and other features. They are easy to search, and easy to install. For Edwards, the bottom line is that this is a “hot new approach to delivering software quickly and efficiently to mobile devices.”

“Best of all,” he writes, “Apple has made it easy to sift through that astronomical (and growing) tally of games, productivity features, and other downloadable tools. On the computer screen, you can browse top-10 tabs for both paid and free programs, scroll through newly added applications, and sample either What’s Hot or Staff Picks.”

Apple has taken the myriad software tools and features, provided a well-organized method for making them accessible — in much the same way that they did with iTunes. It is, Edwards says, another “robust ecosystem”, for which he gives Apple much credit.