A recent article on Fierce Mobile Content points out that the number of applications in the Apple App Store has passed 100,000. This is an incredible number of applications and raises a whole lot of questions about the mobile application ecosystem.
With so many applications available, there is bound to be a wide range of quality, from the excellent all the way down to the truly awful. In addition, there will be a large degree of overlap in functionality contained in apps in a given genre. For a mobile application developer, it is going to be difficult to differentiate his or her application from the crowd.
From the perspective of the consumer, finding the right application in all this noise is going to be increasingly difficult. So we have a two sided discoverability problem, for consumers finding suitable applications and for developers finding customers.
However, the biggest problem that has been pointed out by a number of commentators is how the developer can establish a sustainable business model, and I have yet to see concrete suggestions about how to address it. The price point of between US$0.99 and US$4.99 is quite low, given the amount of effort and cost that it takes to deliver a mobile application. Without a sustainable business model, are mobile apps going to be stuck either as an adjunct to a PC application, an extension to a web site or as a hobbyist experiment?
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