App Store Standards, and the Open Source Opportunity

by Sam Dean - Jun. 11, 2009Comments (2)

Savio Rodrigues has an interesting post up called "Yes, we need an open App Store standard," in which he cites some of the many advantages that could come of shared standards. Online App Stores, of course, have become all the rage, especially with the success of Apple's App Store. Android Market, too, already has over 3,000 applications, many of them great, and free. With Apple, Sun, Nokia and others so focused on the downloadable mobile apps phenomenon, isn't Rodrigues right? I'd say he is correct. However, I'd also say that open source players are the only ones who stand a chance of making this idea work.

Fragmentation of useful applications across platforms is an old story, and has always come primarily from aggressive protection of proprietary standards and operating systems. In the early days of the personal computer, for application developers, there was the Mac platform, there was DOS, there was Windows, there was Unix, but there were also countless other platforms that people don't even bring up much anymore, such as OS/2.

For years, applications that flourished, on, say, the Mac (such as Photoshop), had no close counterparts on other platforms. Fragmentation was the order of the day, and if you were a junkie for many great applications, you used many platforms and you got your applications through various sales channels.

In today's mobile era, there is the same kind of staggering fragmentation of platforms and standards for app developers to contend with. Savio Rodrigues points to this thought form Mike Dolan:

"I can’t help but think with Apple, Sun, Nokia and others with 'AppStores' live and working or clones in the works, is it time to have 1 set of open, 'AppStore' APIs? I certainly wouldn’t expect it from Apple as they’re currently the market leader, but all these 'me too' players should consider consolidating resources for 1 API set that could be shared and collaboratively built upon."

Dolan makes a good point that Apple is very unlikely, as the market leader, to buy into an idea based on open standards like this. Indeed, Apple has drawn much criticism for how tightly it has held the reins on application development for the iPhone.

On the flip-side of that problem, though, Rodrigues considers the potential for open source platforms and open standards to create an advantage out of a unified App Store model:

"Most ISVs will wish to submit their applications to multiple stores. For instance, an ISV with an application supporting Linux would want the product listed on the Novell, Red Hat and Ubuntu application stores. Reducing duplicate, or worse, conflicting work, while packaging and submitting the application to these three stores would definitely be a good thing."

I couldn't agree with that more, and it is an opportunity for the Linux-based mobile operating system players to really consider. The open source players out in the fragmented world of applications and App Stores have the largest opportunity to create a federated app development effort that could work. Many developers would probably welcome this model, it would indeed create efficiencies such as reducing duplication of useful apps, and users of open source mobile platforms would undoubtedly end up with more apps to choose from.