Is There an App for That? The Mac App Store
January 10 2011 by Stephanie Ryska ~ 1 CommentTaking “is there an app for that?” to a new level, Apple has opened the Mac App Store. Long story short, it’s the desktop version of the app store on the iOS systems for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. The app store gives people the exact same process for finding, buying and installing apps.
What does this all mean for marketing? Most importantly, there is a new market for apps for Apple computers. Think back to 2007, when the iPhone was introduced. It changed the market for Apple and for AT&T. But it also created a new market for mobile apps. That same market was expanded for iPads. The revenue for mobile apps for Apple is about $2 to $2.5 billion a year, with 300,000 existing apps. Apple was not the only one that had a great year in apps; the app businesses for other companies like Android, Nokia, and BlackBerry grew, too. According to Mobclix survey, an average smart phone user spends 2.8 hours per day using applications and 3 in 5 people first turn to an app before searching the web. Due to the growing popularity of apps, the natural next step for Apple was apps for Apple desktops.
The Mac App Store creates a central location for customers to go and makes downloading software very easy. In the old days, you bought software from a store, drove home, took it out of the box, put the CD in your computer and installed. More recently, due to better and faster connections, you could download computer software from the Internet. But that still entailed going to the website and navigating through a check out process. Now, with the Mac App Store everything is, for the most part, one click. The one click removes barriers.
Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, said of the App Store: “We think users are going to love this innovative new way to discover and buy their favorite apps.” And he is right. In the first 24 hours that the new App Store was live, there were over 1 million downloads.
Will other ecommerce sites and retailers take a page from the new Mac App Store? According to the Wall Street Journal, “Steve Yankovich, vice president of eBay Mobile, said it plans to take advantage of the always-on ability of the apps to offer features that it can’t include on its website, such as notifying users when bidding on an auction item is about to end. ‘If I’m just in the browser I need you to launch the browser, but if I’m an app, we can grab your attention,’ he said.” Although, we have not seen a online stores in Mac App Store yet, the potential for grabbing your attention is great, so it’s probably only a matter of time before we start to see online stores take advantage of desktop apps.
Another area of opportunity is games. Games were huge in 2010, with FarmVille and CityVille and others gaining millions of users. Angry Birds, a favorite game for smart phones, has hit 50 million downloads. The app is one of the top paid apps in the Mac App store right now. Apple offering games in the app store fills an area that Mac computers were missing in the past. Another important point is that ad spending in mobile game apps for 2010 was $87 million and is predicted to increase to $894 million in 2015. Mobile app revenue was at $4.9 million and is predicted to reach $35 million in 2014. In the upcoming weeks we are going see more game apps that have done well on smart phones hitting the desktop market.
Only time will tell what in store for desktop apps, but I can tell you this: It’s already changed some of my habits. Since I downloaded Twitter for Mac, I have been only using that instead of going to Twitter’s website.
What are you thoughts on Mac App Store?
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