New competition - app.net

[Luke Bennett]

Just seen this on TechCrunch: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/13/app-net/

Looks like we have competition in app.net in terms of trying to provide an abstraction over app stores with a landing page on the web for app developers. Though obviously dotApp has advantages in the form of the gTLD and a community focus rather than a profit-driven one.

Be interesting to see how this one plays out.

Luke
http://lukebennett.com
@developerluke

[Ash Mokhberi]

I don't think the .app project should be focusing on an app store as the core part of the project, nor does the project have any competitors.

People are always going to try new things in tech, and things copied from things that already exist, even more so. App stores will start popping up all over the place over the next few years, many will fail and a few will succeed. I think it's important to remember the true aims of the project, for as long as the project is open to everyone it competes with no-one. 

While add-on services are beneficial to the community, it is ultimately up to the community to decide how and what these services should be/do. I also think that maybe is a smarter approach to look at api's over services, and a connected app infrastructure over an app store. In the spirit of entrepreneurship and decentralisation, I think it is our job as an open project, to give the community the ability to innovate on top of a core platform. Not to do everything as part of the project. This open decentralisation has its benefits and drawbacks, but that is why we are relying on the community to provide insight into how things should be tackled.

Don't get me wrong I think an app store is a great idea, how that is implemented/consumed is a topic for further discussion, and should be looked at once we have successfully acquired the .app domain

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Ash

Tel: 07886 298 285

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[Luke Bennett]

I agree with all that - whilst I've referred a few times before to the concept of a "distributed app store", I probably haven't been clear that I meant it in terms of the infrastructure - a way of connecting the 1000s of different apps together and presenting them in a uniform way, without that necessarily involving a full app store environment where users can purchase and checkout etc. I think an API focus is very much the way to go, leaving the community to decide how to make use of the data. Time and time again businesses and projects have found that the best use of their platform has come from third parties in ways they never envisaged, and we definitely want that to be the case here.

So in this respect I don't see app.net as immediate competition. However, in encouraging developers from all platforms and devices to use their platform as a landing page for their apps they are doing the same as we will be doing, albeit with different objectives. So in this respect they are competition and we will need to make sure we clearly spell out the benefits of .app in this respect, and that developers (and search engines) can clearly distinguish the two projects.

There's also the fact that there's every chance app.net will seek to offer a similar API in the future and/or engage the community more, which would bring them closer in line with .app's objectives.

At this stage I don't think we need to care too much about what they're doing. But I think it's useful to have on our radar.

Luke
http://lukebennett.com
Twitter: @developerluke