Thursday, January 29, 2009
What's the best way to get your apps?
Something hit me last night. With the landscape constantly changing for the way we distribute software, which modern-day method will be dominant in the coming future? Today, we've basically got three primary channels for giving users access to applications, highlighted by each platform's canonical champion:
- Shrinkwrapped Software (Microsoft) - the classic means still heavily pushed by vendors to get the fruits of their programming labors onto the hard drive of constituents. Whether through fresh installs or over a network, forced licensing is rapidly falling out of fashion.
- Cloud Computing (Google) - 2008's Next Big Thing saw a huge surge of interest move towards the concept of having Internet applicances access services exclusively online. Lots of SaaS traction. This has benefits in administration, maintenance and leveraging users to run commodity hardware with broadband connectivity, with all program access, data storage and persistent settings residing in the cloud.
- App Store (Apple) - Steve Jobs shook up the world by creating a hybrid of the two former schools of thought, having mobile users provision native OS apps over-the-air for free and for for-cost. This leverages an advantage of going beyond the limitations of web apps, being able to engineer functionality to access hardware features directly (e.g., accelerometers, GPS, cameras, etc.) Rival wireless operating system developers, notably Google and RIM, quickly made plans to launch similar app stores for Android and BlackBerry, respectively.
So which is the best going forward? It depends. Cloud computing, which gained favor after the iPhone App Store really took off, basically renounces Apple's approach of sustaining the market for installed apps. Web development certainly does have its limitations, and there's only so much you can do over AJAX, snazzy UIs, limited bandwidth and mobile browsers.
What do you think?
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