Posts tagged App Store
This anti-piracy battle may nearly be won, but the war isn’t over
Jan 19th
Minecraft.net's Web strike day splash page graphic.
By Brian Jackson
“PIPA and SOPA? How about NOPA!” So read the protest splash page on Minecraft.net in place of its usual content during Wednesday’s Web strike against anti-piracy legislation being considered by U.S. lawmakers.
While the legislation hasn’t been defeated yet and many Web firms that joined in the protest say they aren’t done, surely they must be doing at least a small happy dance after the Web strike stunt went so swimmingly. Twitter lit up like a Christmas tree with support for the movement and shocked statements of surprise about Wikipedia not being available to instantly deliver answers (which made me concerned about some student’s ability to research, but I digress). Several U.S. law makers publically backed away from supported the Stop Online Piracy Act (in Congress) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (in the Senate), and Google reported that 7 million signed its online petition against the bills.
Even the White House publically acknowledged a petition against the bills, saying “we will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”
But the White House staff writing the letter also had this appeal: “Rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right.”
This points out that even if SOPA and PIPA are defeated, the root problem hasn’t been solved. There are powerful content-based industries out there that see their business model as being under threat. Without the ability to control the means of distribution as it used to, the movie and music industries are seeing what used to be profitable business models slowly erode. While I’m skeptical that piracy has played as crucial a role in this as industry lobby groups say that it has, it is no doubt a part of the problem. Piracy, and Internet distribution systems in general have created a generation that expects to be able to receive content for free.
This race to the bottom on price is perhaps most evident in the mobile app market, as I was reminded when attending this week’s GameON: Finance conference in Toronto. A couple of years ago, it was common to see almost as many paid-for apps in Apple’s App Store as there were free apps. But now there are so many free apps to compete against that most mobile developers consider it folly to even try to put a price tag on their product. The accepted ratio of mobile app downloaders willing to pay versus never willing to pay is two per cent to 98 per cent. Read the rest of this entry »
10 billion apps sold on Apple App Store
Jan 18th
By John P. Mello Jr., PC World (US)
Apple’s App Store is closing in on selling its 10 billionth app and when it does, someone is going to receive a $10,000 gift card to the iTunes Store.
“As of today, nearly 10 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store worldwide. Which is almost as amazing as the apps themselves,” Apple said on its website Friday. “So we want to say thanks. Download the 10 billionth app, and you could win a US $10,000 iTunes Gift Card. Just visit the App Store, and download what could be your best app yet.”
App Store for Web browsers coming soon
Nov 30th
By Katherine Noyes
Along with its audited financial statements indicating a revenue increase of 34 percent last year, Mozilla late last week also published a “State of Mozilla” report providing a glimpse at what the organization is planning for the future.
Firefox for Android is one part of those future plans, of course, and will be released “in a few months,” according to the report.
Even more intriguing, though, is the company’s confirmation that it’s planning what it calls an “Open Web App ecosystem”–also known, in other words, as a platform-independent app store.
Device-Independent
“The current app model has traits that threaten some of the characteristics that have made the Web so vibrant a platform, particularly in the mobile space,” Mozilla explained in its report.
Specifically, “apps are often device specific and platform specific,” it said. “Information we create in an application is stuck in that application and / or that platform. One doesn’t join a unified whole as one can with the Web. App-related information isn’t generally linkable or findable. In addition, developers often need to get permission from one or more gatekeepers to reach people–from a network operator, a device manufacturer, a ‘store’ operator. Similarly, consumers must go through these filters to access new functionality.”
Related Story: Toronto students behind Firefox browser’s amazing overhaul
As a way to remedy such problems, Mozilla has designed a prototype of an Open Web App ecosystem, it says, noting that “this includes a system design, technical documentation and examples of what such a system would look like and work like.” A video on YouTube offers further explanation.
HTML5, CSS and Javascript
Taking inspiration from the success of Apple’s App Store, of course, Google has been working on its own Chrome Web Store as well. Mozilla also mentioned similar plans back in May.
“Supporting the needs of Web developers in their efforts to develop websites and apps that aren’t bound to a specific browser and work across the Web is core to Mozilla’s public benefit mission,” Mozilla wrote back then.
Accordingly, an open Web app store should “exclusively host web applications based upon HTML5, CSS, Javascript and other widely-implemented open standards in modern web browsers – to avoid interoperability, portability and lock-in issues,” it explained.
Such a store should also “ensure that discovery, distribution and fulfillment works across all modern browsers, wherever they run (including on mobile devices)” and “set forth editorial, security and quality review guidelines and processes that are transparent and provide for a level playing field.”
Finally, an open Web app store should “respect individual privacy by not profiling and tracking individual user behavior beyond what’s strictly necessary for distribution and fulfillment” and it should “be open and accessible to all app producers and app consumers,” Mozilla wrote in May.
Too Many Apps For That?
App stores are becoming a ubiquitous part of the Internet; in addition to Apple’s longstanding offering and the planned entries from Google and Mozilla, there are also app stores from Research In Motion for the Blackberry phone and from Microsoft for Windows Phone 7.
Then, too, there’s Apple’s Mac App Store for desktops and Google’s assortment for Google TV, among others.
Few, however, can boast Mozilla’s commitment to openness and open standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Google’s Chrome store notwithstanding, it seems to me that amid all these platform-specific offerings, a device-agnostic store is just what we need.
iPad will revolutionize publishing – someday
Jan 29th
v1.0 shows platform still a work in progress
By now, even my disconnected mother sitting on a beach in Florida has heard about the iPad. And while geeks debate the name, whine about its lack of a memory card slot and USB port and slice Apple a new one for once again handing AT&T a golden egg, I find myself thinking about my mom, and whether her world changed a bit yesterday.
See, she reads books. Lots of them. She’s also a technophobe who views her laptop with a curious mixture of fear and indifference. 
Publishers tend to appreciate folks like my mom because she drives demand for their wares. Unfortunately, printing books is a complex, expensive and often messy business. As the record industry discovered in the 1990s, the Internet is changing the way we consume this content, and the industry would like – indeed needs – to transition my mom and everyone like her into an electronically distributed reality.
But in the absence of a realistically usable device or form factor – no, she’ll never read a book on her Byzantine-for-her laptop – that simply wasn’t going to happen. Amazon’s Kindle showed us the possibilities, but despite its pioneering success in defining the e-book reader market, it’s failed to break out beyond a niche product for cash-flush book lovers. It isn’t, and probably will never be, the reader for the rest of us. Read the rest of this entry »
