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World+dog has online app store

But what's in it for me?

That could well change, following examples recently reported by Private Eye: Amazon, in helping punters pick out a good read from a similarly-sized mountain of options, will helpfully recommend a "Deal of the Week" while charging the publisher £3,000 for the privilege of being listed thus. In the physical world things are more blatant: WHSmith will tap a publisher for £25,000 to be "Book of the Week", or £10,000 for the deeply ironic "Great Price" tag.

Such tricks aren't yet evident in the mobile apps business, but with Google making no money at all selling software it's impossible to believe such services won't be available soon. While one hopes that such partisan arrangements will be swiftly identified and outed by the internet community, that hasn't happened to Amazon, WHSmith or Waterstones.

Nokia's Ovi store will, apparently, work out what we want to buy from our location and what our mates are buying. It's an interesting idea, though it's hard to believe that's actually going to help much when there are tens of thousands of applications to pick from - better to have someone else do the filtering for you.

Cutting the crap

Another brand to launch in Europe in the last few weeks was HandMark, peddling an on-device application that provides both free and paid content as well as an application store. HandMark reckons it can differentiate itself by providing proper support for applications, and applying strict quality control to what gets listed.

So confident is HandMark that it is keeping to the industry-standard 30/70 revenue split, believing that the increased sales resulting from providing a quality service will fund the support and filtering costs. HandMark is also pleased with the on-device nature of its store, though that's less of a differentiator than it used to be.

Network operators have tried this before: O2 long emphasised the quality of the applications offered on the portal, rather than the quantity, but these days punters are more likely to be looking for a specific application and will go elsewhere if they can't find it.

This presents an interesting problem for the monopolistic providers, Apple and Palm: as the only source of applications for their respective platforms they will inevitably have to provide a huge range of applications, forcing customers to sift through mountains of rubbish to get to the content they are interested in.

On iTunes this has resulted in a morass of low-standard apps being sold for a couple of dollars to punters who are so enamoured by the novelty that they don't care. One can only imagine that Palm's rapid development environment will only make things worse in that regard.

Can the ecosystem survive?

Back in the early days of the internet there were hundreds of small applications that users could download from Tucows and its brethren for a few quid, many of which were essential to productive use of a computer. But as those features got increasingly folded into the operating system, became features of other applications or released as freeware, the small-scale publishers have been pushed into niche markets and the lone developers increasingly recruited by larger concerns.

If the desktop software market is indeed a suitable model for mobile applications - and there seems no obvious reason why it shouldn't be - then we can expect publishing brands to become increasingly important as punters become tired of searching through aggregators' expansive catalogues. That in turn means that the app store revenue stream has a distinctly limited life, at least for those who don't hold a technical monopoly on distribution. ®

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