5 Reasons the Palm Pre’s App Store Can’t Beat the iPhone’s
Loads are trying their hand, but no one seems to be able to push Apple out of the #1 position when it comes to serious innovation in getting applications out onto phones. Their app store and its inherent organization and closed system are just too strong, and there are an absolute ton of great developers out there too.
#5: Apple’s road map is seriously good
You’ve got some software and hardware makers who change up their plans every few months, and bombard the market with more phone models than is ever necessary. Apple didn’t do this — they just made the one phone, worked insanely hard on making it really good, and haven’t deviated from that plan so far.
#4: It’s just all about the damn developers
Since there is already an extremely healthy, motivated, and design-conscious community of developers out there doing work for OSX (and who have been working with macs for a long time), it means that apple’s development kits are very good, and there are already a lot of people who know how to write great software. A lot of these people are now working on the iPhone, too.
#3: The iPhone OS is to phones what OSX is to desktops
No rocket science here, really — if you can control your hardware well enough, and make the software, too, your quality should automatically go up, especially when your QA standards are as high as Apple’s. No huge range of phones or clones to run the software, and you avoid all those pitfalls that come with every other mobile OS out there.
#2: Apple always likes a fight
A lot of people expected the iPhone to fail — the mobile market was simply massive, they said, full of established players who wouldn’t let Apple come in and do whatever they wanted. They continued to say this after the phone was released — basically until the app store exploded. No one is saying it anymore.
#1: From Steve Jobs on down, high standards are crucial
Because Apple worked so hard on their operating system, phone hardware, and built-in applications, those standards are passed down to the developers. If there’s one ‘very simple reason’ why so many of those applications in the app store are so good, it’s this — rigorous standards at the top lead to high quality, all the way down the line.
