On 29/05/12 14:42, Anant Narayanan wrote: >> Let's try and get back to a high level. Do we want multiple flourishing >> competing web app stores, or not? If so, don't you agree that this >> feature works against that? If not, how is our store different in >> approach to the Chrome, Apple or Google stores? > > Yes we want multiple, flourishing competing app stores. No, this feature > does not work against that. There are several ways in which our > marketplace (and the apps ecosystem as whole) is different: > > - The first big difference is that in Apple or Google's case there is no > other way in which apps can be acquired on their respective platforms, > so neither users or developers have any choice. Our marketplace is > simply one of many.
There are other ways to acquire apps on Android. But network effects have meant that none of the alternative app stores has really taken off. They don't have the apps, so they don't have the users, so they don't have the apps... If they were able to offer all the existing free apps for Android, they'd have a much better chance. install_allowed_from for free HTML5 apps seems to me to be a way of perpetuating first-mover advantage, if you can persuade free app developers to only allow your store, or if you can rewrite the served manifest to say that. > - A user is able to purchase an app once (from any store of their > choosing) and run it on any of their HTML5 compliant devices. Apart from those which don't support WebRT? Or are we going to fix that? > That looks like an open app ecosystem to me. I entirely agree it's a lot more open :-) But I worry that network effects mean that, in practice, there will be no viable competitors to the Mozilla Marketplace. I don't want to build things into the protocol that make that more likely. > The real competition between stores is going to be based around who can > attract the best paid apps and that in turn will be based on how > competitive the revenue splits will be, and is very likely to break the > 30% "industry standard" that's in place today. That's the big picture. But many stores will want to be one-stop shops. That means that they need the best paid apps, sure, but they also need the same baseline of free apps. Amazon is successful precisely because it stocks pretty much everything. If Free app A is only available at store X, and free app B is only available at store Y, then customers of both stores X and Y lose out. Gerv _______________________________________________ dev-webapps mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-webapps
