Commerce: June 2008 Archives

Will the Apple App Store Stick to Just the iPhone?

By Kee Hinckley on June 12, 2008 9:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I brought this up a while back when Apple first announced the store, but now that analysts are estimating possible revenues of $1+ billion in 2009, I think it's worth repeating.

Apple's App Store could emerge as $1.2B business by 2009 AppleInsider

Investment bank Piper Jaffray is urging investors who typically focus only on Apple's hardware announcements to also pay attention to the company's iPhone software strategy, particularly its upcoming App Store, which could balloon into a $1 billion market by next year.

Once you've gone to the trouble of setting up all the infrastructure necessary to sell, deliver and update applications—why stop with just the iPhone? You've done the hard work, everything else is just incremental costs. The Macintosh is the obvious next step, but there's no reason not to provide Windows applications as well. The market potential dwarfs that of just iPhone software.

The initial folks who stand to lose are places like Kagi and Digital River, who currently provide payment and (in some cases) delivery services for small software vendors. But they don't provide marketing, automatic updates, signed applications, and FairPlay copy protection. Apple is going to roll right over them; but they won't stop there.

See The iTunes Trojan Horse: Selling Applications for more thoughts on where Apple might go.