Samsung Application Store announced, the mobile mall gets a little more crowded
Oh, look, it's another place to buy bite-sized mobile apps, this one courtesy of Samsung. The company isn't exactly new to the whole application store thing, launching a little outlet for Nokia users earlier this year …
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's announcement lands seven months after Nokia unveiled its own app store at MWC 09, confirming that the storefront has become standard equipment for major handset makers rather than an Apple-only experiment. The company has been building toward this on the developer side too: two weeks earlier it opened its Mobile Innovator portal, giving widget and mobile developers early access to TouchWiz widget technology.
Engadget also notes Samsung had already run a small application outlet earlier in 2009 — oddly aimed at Nokia users — so the new store reads less as a first attempt than as a consolidation of that effort under Samsung's own brand.
First-order effects
- Samsung device owners gain a native storefront for bite-sized apps, giving Samsung a direct sales channel it controls instead of routing through carrier decks.
- Mobile and widget developers now have one more storefront to certify and publish against, alongside Apple's and Nokia's.
Second-order effects
- Every additional proprietary store raises porting costs for small developers, pushing them to prioritize the highest-volume platforms and leave smaller OEM storefronts thin on content.
- Carriers lose further ground as handset makers capture app billing and discovery relationships directly, weakening the operator's role as the phone's gatekeeper.
Third-order effects
- If every OEM insists on running its own mall, mobile software fragments into per-manufacturer walled gardens, and scale — not handset hardware specs — becomes the deciding factor in which stores survive.
- A storefront arms race among handset makers invites consolidation, with weaker players eventually ceding shelf space to platform owners who can guarantee developer reach.
The trend: Following Apple's App Store template, handset manufacturers are each standing up their own application storefronts as default phone infrastructure, setting up a fragmentation-and-consolidation cycle in mobile distribution.