How Important Are 3rd Party Apps?
There does seem to be a strong correlation between apps leadership and audience growth / marketshare.
Start with Windows. It’s probably never been the best OS. But it continues to dominate the desktop and laptop OS marketplace (even post Vista), mainly because 3rd party business apps work best on Windows.
Now we’re watching Facebook catch up to My Space in unique monthly visitors, a trend that began to accelerate after it opened its platform to 3rd party apps a year and half ago:
Does this mean the iPhone’s leadership will be hard to unseat? From RIMarkable Rapid Fire movie download : “Regardless of if you are an iPhone / iPod fan or not, 500 million downloads in a year and a half half a year is impressive…”
Worth watching.
(Thanks for the iPhone stat, James!)Trapped Ashes buy
You make a great point. To pile on, you could look at Google, Wordpress and Twitter’s growth and associate it to their ability to court developers. Google with search Distribution and with their open architecture, LAMP. It’s funny how they would never admit it, but Google and Facebook have in many respects cloned what MSFT did best in the 80’s and 90’s.
Twitter thrives with their open API allowing developers to build on top of the platform.
Most of their traffic comes from these 3rd party clients. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_twitter_clients_definitive_list.php
Wordpress is driven by an open culture and agreement with developers to release their work under an open source license. Mullenweg is becoming the Jobs of his time to developers that continue to fuel their growth. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/16/the-state-of-wordpress-2008-awesome-growth/
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