RIM’s just-launched Blackberry App World “provides [some] Blackberry users with a central location from which they can find, purchase and download 3rd party applications for their handhelds,” Wellington Financial reports via Seeking Alpha. “The store seems to function fine… that is until it’s time to pay!”
In Apple’s iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPod touch (and future devices), “with one or two clicks, an application can be downloaded and billed directly to your credit card. Not so with RIM’s App World! For some strange reason, they have decided that the only method of payment will be PayPal… yes, the payment service synonymous with (and eventually purchased by) EBay,” Wellington Financial writes. “Want to buy an application? Sign-up with PayPal first… and give this service — one rife with consumer complaints over locked accounts, fraudulent charges and other malfeasance — your financial information!”
“It’s little wonder that the price of programs in the App World are significantly higher than in Apple’s App Store ($2.99 vs. $0.99 or even free!) with so many mouths to feed — developers, RIM, credit card processing fees and now PayPal… [Don’t] expect user acceptance to even remotely approach the levels Apple has been able to generate to date,” Wellington Financial writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple’s iTunes Store, which includes the App Store, currently has over 75 million credit card accounts and adds, on average, conservatively, 35,000 new accounts per day.*
* iTunes Store celebrates its 6th year anniversary on April 28th. 6 years * 365 days = 2190. 75 million accounts / 2190 days = 34,247 accounts per day average over a 6 year period. We say “conservatively,” because iTunes Store adds considerably more users these days than it did in its early years.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
