“I was once an App Store skeptic. When Apple said it would use the iTunes online store to host a range of applications from third-party developers for its iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices, I doubted that this newcomer to wireless would get things right in the first go. Surely major cellular carriers would block outsiders’ data-hogging features,” Cliff Edwards reports for BusinessWeek. “And would Apple really let indie coders tinker with its vaunted iPhone?”
MacDailyNews Take: Edwards must have missed Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ iPhone 2.0 SDK preview way back in March or he wouldn’t have harbored any such doubts.
Edwards continues, “As I write this, I’m eating crow. After trying out Apple’s App Store for the past few weeks, I can say categorically that Apple has hit another home run. The App Store has truly unshackled the high-end cell phone.”
“Apple has embraced the developer community with gusto as it looks to third parties to help round out an already feature-packed iPhone and iPhone 3G. App Store launched with more than 500 free and paid applications in July and in little more than a month has grown to more than 3,000 (of which about 600 are free),” Edwards reports.
“With App Store, Apple has taken take myriad software tools and features and created a well-organized method for making them accessible to users of its iPod Touch and iPhone devices. Apple took the same approach with iTunes, using the online music and video store to goose sales of its digital music players. It’s what we in tech circles call creating an ecosystem, and Apple appears to have done it again. There are not many products out there that keep me occupied for hours with a wealth of entertainment, information, and productivity features,” Edwards reports. “For that, you’ve got to give the company credit.”
Full review here.
