App shopping and app portability | Hacker News Reader

App shopping and app portability

meyerweb.com

7 pointsjoshsharp2 comments

Why do we even still need articles like that? I think the argument is already lost the moment you have to justify things.

So what is left is: if the app store is good enough for you, go for it, whatever.

I used to care more, since I have a vested interest in people deciding against the app store, but I don't think new arguments will be made by now. Also people won't switch sides because of arguments. By now, you are either a Mapple person, or you are not.

Except that’s only true because until now, nobody has launched an alternate store that offers web stack applications (WSAs). Maybe that’s because nobody is really building WSAs yet, at least not in numbers large enough to justify building a store to sell them. But then, maybe developers aren’t building WSAs because there’s no central place to sell them. The centralization of stores is at least as attractive to sellers as to shoppers.

We've done a poor job of raising awareness about this (I promise we're trying to do better), but we've been quietly testing out using our store, AppStoreHQ (http://www.appstorehq.com), as a mobile web app store (what Eric calls WSAs). We also promote native iPhone and Android apps. I could go on and on about what we're doing, why it's cool, and how it helps developers, but Eric does a relatively good job of explaining that.

Instead, I'll just give you a tidbit of information about how we're _actually_ seeing this work in the wild: In short, it works. I developed -- as the first test app available for purchase on our mobile web app platform -- an app I named fortysquires (http://fortysquires.com). Fortysquires is just an HTML5 frontend to foursquare's API. I open sourced it so developers could see just how simple it is to integrate with us (http://github.com/iseff/fortysquires).

What's amazing about fortysquires is that I really didn't expect to sell more than a few copies. It was built just to be a reference app. Remember, this is a paid ($0.99) app that competes against free, more well-featured native apps for Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry. There's also a mobile web version of foursquare (but it's not HTML5 and doesn't include geolocation, etc, like fortysquires does). I really thought I'd sell maybe two or three copies to developers looking to test out the workflow.

Yet, what I'm seeing is that real users are purchasing this app, everyday. Everyday, I sell at least one -- but typically more like 3-4 -- "copies" of the app. It's not a gold mine, of course, but it far surpassed my expectations. These are users from all over the world on all sorts of different devices. iPhone usage is >50%, but Android is close to 20%, and Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, and Samsung all make the cut. And 50% of visitors are from the US, 25% from western Europe, and the rest is divided between many, many countries like Canada, Australia, Israel, Russia, many Asian countries, Costa Rica, Maldives, Camaroon, Kyrgyzstan, etc. In all, more than 70 different countries have checked out fortysquires!

We have a lot of work to be done to build a great platform for mobile web app developers to sell their apps (read: we need to make distribution even better for developers, and the purchasing workflow even more frictionless for users, among many other things), but I think we're well on our way to doing so. Mobile web apps may never compete head-to-head with native apps in certain categories (Games), but I think we're proving that they can compete -- and even win -- when the ability to discover and purchase the apps is easy and the apps are great.

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