Mobile Wars: Mobile Market Place

It seems that every mobile operating system has its own Market Place. A short while ago, there was no on-device market place to download and purchase applications. (Yes, I know that some app portals did build a device client, but it was poorly implemented and never received any traction) But are all market places created equal? The answer is a flat out – NO.

Google’s market place is loaded with applications. In much the same way as Apple advertises, there is an app for that with Android.  Perhaps it’s not as full, but I never had a problem finding an app to do what I was looking for. Further, almost all the apps are free. Sure, free doesn’t help put food on the table for the developers family. It does appeal to my cheap side however. You may find an application here and there that charges, but overall that’s rare.

 

When you take a look at Microsoft’s market place for mobile, you’ll have a much harder time finding free applications. While I don’t mind paying for the right app, it’s also much harder to find the right app.  There are few applications available on Microsoft’s platform. In fact, the market place is lacking so much, that there is now a free alternative called OpnMarket – which has substantially more applications that Microsoft’s version.

There are a number of reasons why the Microsoft solution has yet to take off.  The largest issue is cost. Cost comes into play in a couple different ways. First, as a developer, you can’t develop applications for mobile devices with the free version of Visual Studio. That means you have to fork over some serious cash in order to purchase a copy that will allow you to compile for mobile and that’s not cheap. Second, Microsoft charges developers $100 to list 5 applications in the store. Now, to break that down a little – listing an app will only make it available in one region and for one platform. So if you wanted to list application XYZ as an application for Touch, Non-Touch, as well as in the US and Canada, you have just used up 4 of the 5 slots. We haven’t even talked about releasing a patch! Before you know it, you’ll have to buy more slots in the application store, and you can be sure those new slots won’t be as cheap as the $99 for the first 5.

Microsoft’s market place also suffers from restrictions that prevent you from viewing and installing applications that are listed in regions other than your own. As well as limiting where you can install the program – storage card installation is not supported unless you have run out of space on the main memory of your device.

What does all this mean? Simple, Microsoft has a long road ahead to fix their on device market place if they even what to be on the same level as what Google has done with Android. By no means am I saying that Android is perfect. I’m just saying that Windows Phone is a long way from Android in this area.

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