Insight Community

The prospects are good for any mobile app store -- people want functionality quickly and easily, and anything that provides a way to get that functionality will easily return a profit.  Anything that allows developers easy access to the API's necessary to code for mobile platforms will result in a tremendous boost in mobile funcitonality, as seen in a huge surge in apps available through these portals.  

Security issues

First of all, nothing will prevent apps from having viruses.  The michelangelo virus was spread years ago in a commercial, pre-packaged installation, so if that can happen it is impossible to prevent viruses 100% of the time.  However, whitelisting software to be sold is a smart idea.  That will at least reduce the odds that a particular package didn't get looked at thoroughly before being offered for sale.

Usefulness issues

Usefulness will be decided by consumer demand, assuming enough developers are interested in developing for the platform.  If there is a need, eventually a developer will attempt to fill that need.  The "best" applications usability-wise (the ones that are useful enough and not too annoying) will be obvious from the usage statistics off of the app stores.  

Compatibility

Eventually every type of "phone" will have an app store, and while apps may not be cross-platform compatible at the source level, there will likely be a verstion of core applications for many different mobile OS platforms. 

Diversity of platforms and applications

I encourage all of this development to happen, because in a big way this is the dream of what PC's should have been were it not for a certain monopoly causing many people to have few choices in their applications.  The mobile world will be better off for all this  diversity.

Consumers are hungry for more options in the mobile market. The Open Handset Alliance working on the Android Platform for mobile devices will open the field for developers and its success will be based on whether they take up the challenge or not. Judging by the response to the call for more apps, there will be plenty of developers making applications for the new platform. Competition should increase drive the development of better more useful apps.

Google appears to be trying to bring standards to mobile, and hopefully will bring its awareness of accessibility to this market. With the integration of closed captioning support to You Tube, Google has taken a lead in providing accessible content as well as being a host. Though they haven't gotten it completely right with the lack of ability to add captioning to another user's video or providing captioning services, they are realizing that keeping people on their sites will require a variety of tools. Apple has recently done this with the release of an accessible iTunes 8 and the 4th Generation Nano with spoken menus which will allow blind and visually impaired users greater access to the variety of Apple content, and keep them coming back. Hopefully, accessibility won't be the last thing on developers' and phone makers' minds as the mobile market continues to develop and grow.

T-Mobile is unveiling their G1 phone, and the first Android phones will reach consumers in October. But are consumers just as hungry for its store of third-party applications?

I predict it'll be a hit. Developers are already excited about reaching millions of consumers on a cutting-edge handheld platform -- and it's not just that the platforms are open. They'll also have major support from industry leaders like T-Mobile. (And there's always a buzz around anything that Google does.) Even Microsoft is now scrambling to create their own application store though the last prediction I saw suggested that "Skymarket" won't be fully rolled out until the end of 2009. That article points out that Apple has already racked up $30 million in the first month of running its own App store. Now that the industry has embraced open platforms, there'll be no going back.

With this kind of major support, it's almost inevitable that we'll end up with some good applications. Yes, if the platforms are truly "open," the stores will end up offering both the useful and the useless -- but it's trivial to sort the applications by "most popular." (If anyone knows how to order search results, it's Google!) And because open platforms allow many more developers, it's more likely that "niche" audiences can be sastified (instead of creating only applications which offer a universal "usefulness".) I have a friend who's a diabetic, and he was thrilled when someone finally developed a handheld program that helped track his blood sugar. There may ultimately be a "long tail" for applications -- with a wide variety of small communities delighted that there's an open platform where developers can reach them.

A lot of the concerns about application stores are based mostly on speculation. Information Week wrote an editorial arguing that the applications apparently will be submitted to the store without an approval process -- but I'm sure that the model will evolve over time. And I have to remember that "security" was always a bogeyman used to discourage people from using open platforms. And the advocates for openness always had a compelling comeback.

With a million eyeballs, all security issues are shallow!