With all of the application stores opening up, seemingly everywhere, is there more room for another? Verizon seems to think so, since they are launching their very own application store, V CAST Apps.
V CAST Apps will launch only on the Blackberry Storm initially, and then find itself onto more RIM devices. Other operating systems should follow shortly. For the Blackberry user who loves the AppWorld store, you’re out of luck. It will not come preloaded on the device, which sounds like it could be a deal breaker for some. Still, Verizon has ways of making people see the benefit in their own products, so hopefully that will work. Of course, you can always live without it.
Verizon is thinking smart – smartphones, that is. As the market for smartphones grows and grows with more adoption than ever, Verizon wants to secure a piece of the pie from their users. Verizon recently announced the new Skype application, which is only for a select nine smartphones at the moment. It’s this kind of push on smartphones makes me wonder if they will give much less attention to feature phones, which could make someone who doesn’t necessarily need a smartphone, but utilizes many of the features of their feature phone, feel a bit left out in the game. Verizon obviously won’t abandon feature phones, but with their very own application store for smartphones, they may just be widening the gap even further between their feature phone and smartphone users. This could also be a move to get more feature phone users to switch over to a smartphone, which seems like it may work.
Much like Apple’s AppStore, Verizon will be taking 30% of revenue from the developers, and letting them keep the remaining 70%. Verizon may be thinking it’s in the customers best interest to start it’s own application store, but by removing the original appstores, that’s almost going to far, in my opinion. Hopefully one can just somehow install the devices native appstore. But if Verizon was to do something crazy, say,replace the Android Market with their V Cast Apps once it becomes available for the little green robot OS, (which will probably never happen) things could get heated.
So what do you say? Yay or nay to more and more appstores?
[Via: PaidContent]