In a bit of a surprise stance, Google has gone ahead and declared "app stores" a dead end. This comes right at the heels of the 1-year anniversary of Apple's App Store, with every other mobile company (from manufacturers to carriers, including Google's own Android Market) angling to set up their own.
Not that Google's particular stance is any surprise. Throughout its operating cycle, the company has made a point of solidifying its intentions of a web-based ecosystem for both PCs and mobile platforms. As such, while download storefronts for apps have proven a profitable venture (Apple claims that the App Store has already seen over 1.5 billion downloads in just one year), it's a very temporary infrastructure and will be rendered obsolete once the web takes over.
“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing,” says Google's engineering VP Vic Gundotra, during the Mobilebeat Conference in San Francisco. He cites that as the main reason for the company's decision to invest their efforts on web-based solutions, such as ChromeOS and numerous online apps.
Of course, not everybody shares that belief. While the web is winning, it certainly doesn't look like it's going to be game over anytime soon. If you've even tried backing up your hard drive over the "cloud," you'll know it's hardly an ideal process, taking days, weeks and, likely, months for those in countries with less-than-ideal internet infrastructures.
“It’s not about web applications or desktop applications, but integrating the internet in the cloud into these applications that are on both my phone and the PC,” says Michael Gartenberg, a technology strategist for Interpret. For most end-consumers, this is really all that matters, after all, because it's the state of the technology now.
Cloud computing will probably be the wave of the future. Unfortunately, that future seems to be at least five or ten years away. Unless, of course, Google knows something we don't.
Photo Credit: Android Community
Well Apple / Developers sure are making money out of app store. If google declare it as dead then either they are coming up with something better or they are going Microsoft way and just couldn’t be happy with someone else success.
I think HTC has its own store for Android apps and its working out to be pretty good. I don’t know why google will not have android app store. App stores are not dead even if you have free applications on it.
At the moment, Apple seems to be making hell lot of money with its app store. However we don’t know what the future holds and what Google has said can actually happen. Logically, Google would set up an Android app store as well and compete with Apple, but they may have some other things on their mind here. Lets wait and watch.