Competing with Apple's App Store

Now that the App Store has over 15,000 applications, Google (GOOG), Research In Motion (RIMM) and now Microsoft (MSFT) seem to want to jump on the bandwagon as well. Chances of them succeeding is slim given the momentum the App Store has already gained.

Here are my reasons why they will not succeed:

Can I trust this applications ?
Who will ensure that the applications are well behaved, do not introduce problems and are not virus's ? Who will make sure that the applications do not steal the user's personal data from the phone ? Google & Microsoft are not going to be able to do that as they do not have any incentive to do that. While Google gives away the software for free, it does not have any incentive to spend and make sure that people do not download trojans. Microsoft barely gets a few dollars in royalty which does not make it worthwhile either. Apple is the only one who makes roughly $500 per phone and has a huge incentive to sanitize the applications before it allows it in the store.

Non-standard hardware: Except for RIMM's Blackberry, neither Google nor Microsoft have control over the hardware that their software runs on. This is a great disadvantage. Developer's have to write for a platform with different display types and sizes. They will have to deal with phones without an alphanumeric keypad, full ASCII keypad, mouse like pointer, touch screen, single/multi-touch availability,presence/absence of GPS, presence absence of Camera etc.
Either the applications will need to deal with these various hardware combinations after installation or the store is going to have to group applications by device like they do today for the few mobile applications. A total mess! Writing and testing all these combinations on each hardware is going to be a nightmare for a small developer. How many platforms will developers really adopt.

Life is very easy for an iPhone developer. He knows the size of the display and exactly what is available and needs to test on only one platform. Apple has an extensive development platform that is unavailable elsewhere.

Stay with Java if you must: Will Google and Microsoft be able to convince developers to adopt yet another programmatic interface ? Most applications written so far for these platforms have been in Java which run in their own virtual machine and are thus portable., This is OK due to the momentum Java has already attained. Exposing any other API at this time will be a disaster. The problem is that Java applications are still a few years away from competing with the look and feel of native applications besides performance.
In my view, the only way these other vendor's can survive is by focusing on Java applications instead of releasing their own proprietary API.

Yet another store ?
To make an application as easy to install as on an iPhone, user's are going to have to create a user account at Google's and Microsoft's sites with their credit cards etc. This is an iffy considering the response Google Store has already received and failed. Apple on the other hand has its iTunes installed on over a 100 Million Windows machines and has already established a trust with its customers by selling music.