Apple kills Chomp for Android
Apple acquired app discovery service Chomp earlier this year, betting that it would help make app discovery easier and better on its iTunes Appstore. The casualty of that acquisition is the Chomp for Android app which seems to have been discontinued.
Context & Ripple Effects
Chomp built its name on the other side of the aisle: in 2010 it pitched itself as the Google of apps, and by early 2011 TechCrunch argued it had solved Android's app-search problem. Apple's acquisition earlier this year flipped that positioning — the discovery engine was bought to serve iTunes, not the platform it was best known on.
The shutdown of the Android client makes the exclusivity explicit, and the story travelled widely on pickup from The Verge, CNET, The Next Web, MacRumors, AppleInsider and others — a measure of how closely both ecosystems' watchers track app-store moves, especially with Android's own store leadership having just shifted to Jamie Rosenberg in March 2012.
First-order effects
- Android users who relied on Chomp's semantic search lose their discovery tool outright, since the app now exists solely as technology inside Apple's iTunes App Store.
- Apple signals that acquired cross-platform services get folded into iOS on Apple's timetable, setting expectations for how it will treat future third-party app-discovery purchases.
Second-order effects
- Google's Android Market has to close the search-quality gap natively rather than letting a third party do it — a task landing squarely on Jamie Rosenberg's team after Eric Chu stepped back from overseeing the store in March 2012.
- Alternative Android storefronts such as Amazon's appstore, already squeezed by Google's tightening market rules, face pressure to differentiate on curation and discovery now that the leading independent search tool is off the table.
Third-order effects
- If acquirers keep stripping cross-platform products down to single-platform assets, startups building discovery layers across ecosystems become harder to fund as independents, pushing innovation inside the platform owners themselves.
The trend: App-store competition is shifting from catalog size toward discovery quality, with platform owners buying and internalizing search technology instead of leaving it to neutral third parties.