In today’s smartphone market the key to success is measured by the Apps Market. That’s a reality likely to haunt Research in Motion as it tries to generate buyers and buzz for its new BlackBerry Torch.
One of the main differences between the iPhone and the other smartphones, is the ability for users to personalize their phones.
Today, Apple’s iPhone has got about 250,000 apps; where as BlackBerry’s App World has just over 8,000. The Android Marketplace has about 100,000 apps. At Palm, there are only 3,500.
It’s not just numbers of apps that matter. Apple’s iPhone App Store is the industry’s undisputed leader in app quality as well as quantity. All the Apps have to pass a strict — and controversial — set of protocols to clear Apple’s famous quality-control standards for its store.
Open-source Android seems to be the only other application platform has shown signs of being able to catch up to Apple. And many quality apps that were exclusively available on the iPhone are now making their way onto Android phones.
Importantly for developers, iPhone users are more willing to pay for apps than users of other devices: Twice as many iPhone users regularly download paid apps, compared to Android and WebOS users, according to AdMob.
The major challenge app developers face is to make their programs work on different platforms, that means rewriting that code multiple times. But there are companies offering toolkits to the developers to generate code for multiple platforms at once.
