Google: App stores won’t last for long
By
Mihir Patkar |
Updated on 17-Jul-2009
Well, this is just out of the blue. Apple has recently announced that its App Store has seen more than 1.5 billion downloads in its first year, Palm has just released the WebOS ‘Mojo SDK’ devkit for apps for the Pre, and Symbian is talking of starting apps for its platform. Apparently, Google Engineering’s vice president Vic Gundotra thinks they are all being myopic and barking up the wrong tree.
At the opening keynote fireside chat of the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco, Gundotra spoke about “The Recipe for a Winning Mobile Platform”, along with Dr. Tero Ojanpera, head of services at Nokia and Palm’s head of application software, Michael Abbot. And surprisingly, the other two speakers were quite supportive of the Googler’s claims.
Gundotra said that the app stores did not represent the future of the mobile industry, adding that the Web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers.
“What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers,” he said. “Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning.
“We believe the Web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing,” he added.
Abbot backed him up by saying that HTML5 allowed Web apps to tap certain features like accelerometers.
Ojanpera said that Nokia was helping web developers with its Qt cross-platform application framework.
Even with Apple’s success, Gundotra was quick to point out that Steve Jobs had seen the potential for Web apps when he asked developers to “build for the Web” at the iPhone’s launch.
The timing was not right, he suggested, but “the rate of innovation in the browser [over the past 12 months] is surprising.”
“I think Steve really did understand that, over the long term, it would be the web, and I think that’s how things will play out.”
Source: Financial Times