14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that Research in Motion is set to make the big step into the mobile app store area as soon as April 1st. To be more precise, the company's co-CEO Mike Lazaridis is expected to announce at the CTIA wireless annual trade show in Las Vegas the much expected online application portal. The new BlackBerry App World should be able to offer users a wide range of software solutions coming from third-party developers and available for download onto BlackBerry devices.
The trend of application stores has been launched by Apple, which unveiled last year its software portal for the iPhone, and which has in its offering thousands of software solutions coming from independent developers. Other industry players, including Nokia, Microsoft, or Palm, are also moving into the area, so as to rival Apple's successful App Store. “There's going to be a significant counter-challenge to Apple,” says Gartner's Mike McGuire, cited by BusinessWeek.
RIM's App World will have different rules than those imposed by Apple, starting with the fact that the company intends to charge developers only 20 percent of the app's price, compared to the 30 percent asked by Apple. At the same time, the minimum price for the allowed apps on the portal is $2.99, as opposed to Apple's 99¢. This should also attract developers, in the sense that they should receive more for their apps.
RIM also has a history in software development for its devices, as the company has been working along with developers since 2002. Yet the applications available for the BlackBerries haven't been put together in a single place up until now, but spread around the web. Given the company's offer for developers with the BlackBerry App World, they should be attracted more into coming up with applications on the portal.
Given the great number of smartphones that are shipped currently, and future previsions that say their number is expected to rise even more, mobile application stores should also become a more popular trend in the future. The number of users that would be able to access the Web from their handsets is expected to rise up to 295 million in 2010, compared to 139 million registered last year.