Selling mobile applications for smartphones is a hot business, but can all these copycat application stores expect to find the same access？
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced its Windows Marketplace for Mobile. And on Tuesday, the company said that the company would be accepting submissions for its application store starting July 27. The Windows Marketplace for Mobile is expected to launch in the fall. The company also said that it will support Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 by the end of 2009.
Nokia has launched its own application store using its Ovi platform. And the Symbian Foundation is also working on a developer program to get more applications on the market for consumers with smartphones running the Symbian operating system.
Google’s Android Market has also launched. Google professes it has a long term advantage over the iPhone because it’s developer community is more open. And while the store is still young and relatively small today, it will likely have a large following among developers.
A year after it launched, Apple claims the App Store now has over 65,000 applications and that users have downloaded more than 1.5 billion apps. The software developer community has also exploded with over 100,000 developers creating applications for the iPhone.
With statistics like this, it’s easy to see why Steve Jobs, chairman and CEO of Apple, is not worried about competition from others developing their own application stores.
Indeed it will be hard to catch Apple now.
This news is from China electronics manufacturer.