It’s all about the Apps
It’s no secret that part of the iPhone’s success is due in part to Apple’s addition of the App Store. Apple announced earlier this month that 1.8 billion apps have been downloaded. Keep in mind the App Store has only existed since July 11, 2008, that’s just over a year. The App Store began with 500 apps and now has over 75,000.
Next month will see the release of the Motorola CLIQ which will come with an impressive list of preloaded apps including LastFM, Amazon’s MP3 Store, QuickOffice, and TeleNav Navigator.
Currently, the Palm Pre is considered the iPhone’s closest competition. They opened their app store yesterday and it’s looking like Palm is starting off a little too good. Palm Developer Community Manager Chuq Von Rospach posted the following on Palm’s developer discussion boards:
We got more applications than we could handle well, which is a good problem to have. Unfortunately, it means we dropped some things on the floor, and that’s bad, but with the impending “stuff” that’s coming, this is all going to get a lot easier for everyone and a lot more transparent.
If you didn’t get a response in a timely manner, let me apologize to you. We should have done a better job on this, and I apologize for this. I’m working with the people I work with on this to try to make sure we do a better job of this moving forward. Good news is we’ve hired some people — one’s started, one starts next week, and the third starts the week after that, and that’ll give us some great people and some new resources to make sure this gets fixed and works properly.
chuq
This is indeed a good problem for Palm to have. Palm had one foot in the grave prior to the Pre and now has a lot riding on it. As smartphones are becoming more like portable computers cell phone makers are going to need apps to go along with their phones. Consumers are going to be considering more than just the phone in the future, they’re going to demand new software regularly to use.