Huge HTC app store must happen

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 10 November 2010 23:16

Your IT - Mobility

Learning Apple's app store lessons and applying them to any online market, store, place or shop of its own for all of its handsets would seem to be the happening thing to do, because after all, no-one wants to see HTC hapless, but instead, in apptopia.

Clearly not wishing to rush and hap any app store in cotton wool, lest it be beat up for arriving too early and without enough killer content, HTC's foray into the app store world must leave its users, its content suppliers, third party developers and itself all happy chappies.

The rumoured app store is supposed to be available for both HTC's Android and WP7 phones, with HTC also apparently hiring up to 100 new staff as content editors for its supposedly upcoming store, with those staff to be posted at various locations around the world.

Sounds pretty cool, and sounds like it would give HTC a chance to build a deeper connection with its hardware users beyond the HTC Sense user interface that is now a hub on WP7 devices and may be subsumed by a future version of the Android OS that reportedly won't allow third party UI skinning, just as Apple and now Microsoft do not let phone makers interfere with their carefully designed UI experience.

Launching an app store of the kind Google has with its Android Market has resulted in an app store with little organisation, and no way to easily browse apps on your desktop computer with some Google equivalent to iTunes, even if fully web based, the very thing that Google is expert in.

Perhaps Google's search engine itself is meant to be the real Android App market, but with Google having done such a poor job compared with Apple's all powerful, all ruling and all app consuming iDevice app store and iTunes desktop browsing, shopping, buying and syncing experience, it's time for companies like HTC to step up and app on out.

Delivering a customised app store experience, with even customised versions of popular apps that take particular advantage of any HTC special hardware features to come, is an obvious move.

But even if obvious is as obvious does, getting it right is, obviously, difficult.

Were it a simple matter, HTC's app store would already be ruling across our digital domain, but instead it's Apple that has truly kickstarted the mobile app revolution, with over 300,000 apps, and 40,000 of those specific to the iPad.

The challenge continues on page two, please read on!