Comments on: App Store for Web Apps

By: Adam Wride

Adam Wride — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 02:50:26 +0000

Another post worth adding to the mix: The app store: The new "must-have" digital business model

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=1172

By: Mark L. Smith

Mark L. Smith — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:17:45 +0000

Or maybe not 99%: http://bit.ly/7W8Qvt

Regardless, big!

By: Adam Wride

Adam Wride — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:27:42 +0000

According to Gartner (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1282413) Apple owns 99.4% of the app store market.

We gotta break into that!

Via: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/app_stores...

By: BigBrassNews – Hybrid SaaS: Musings on Fever and the Cloud

BigBrassNews – Hybrid SaaS: Musings on Fever and the Cloud — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:18:00 +0000

[...] How about this hybrid approach utilizing the open Web App Store API? (see our previous post on an open standard for a App Store for Web Apps) [...]

By: Mark L. Smith

Mark L. Smith — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:24:39 +0000

Once we do shake this API spec out a bit more, doing a sandbox is a good idea. It can call into the app to show what the App Store would see.

By: Adam Wride

Adam Wride — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:07:31 +0000

Another data point. OneForty just launched their premium Twitter apps store. Here's the TC coverage: http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/14/oneforty-r...

Here's a link to the technical info: http://oneforty.com/pages/seller_guide#sell

Important points:
1. oneforty is acting as the store and the processor
2. They only support one-time purchases just ask this API would support (they do plan to support recurring transactions in the future though)
3. They have a sandox to test the connection http://sandbox.oneforty.com before passing real transactions.

By: Adam Wride

Adam Wride — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:57:17 +0000

Just (re)found this "store" at Apple. http://www.apple.com/webapps/

This was way back before there were iPhone apps and you had to create apps for the iPhone using the web. This is a store in the sense that it is a directory (and probably pushes some number of users to the apps), but they are not selling the apps - so not really a store =)

By: Adam Wride

Adam Wride — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:05:52 +0000

Great link. The listing of SaaS in once place is great, but from what I can tell you can't actually buy anything through them directly (you still have to jump over to the vendor's website). Is that right?

We should pull GetApp.com into this conversation =)

By: ntalbott

ntalbott — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:19:57 +0000

Your examples kind of illustrate my point I guess: in both the insurance company and the AmEx case, there's a central entity dictating the API. It might be "open" in the published sense, but it wasn't created in an ad-hoc, open source manner. Not saying that's bad, I just wonder if a laissez faire approach works for this kind of standard.

I totally agree that this could be a coup in terms of lowering the cost of doing co-marketing/co-sales deals. Bring it on! But at the same time, the pre-release Partners API that Spreedly exposes (and B3 uses) already attempts to do that. Not sure yet how it will pan out as we land other partners, but it will be interesting to see if it turns into something general purpose.

When I said this didn't address "aggregation", I meant the actual work of integrating application A with application B. In other words, your use case of creating a favicon from a PNG isn't really helped by having the three tools bought from the same place or even at the same time - what really makes it easier is someone wrapping those three tools up into one seamless workflow.

Really interesting stuff to think about! Another resource to check out is the http://thesmallbusinessweb.com/ - they've taken an interesting approach to trying to solve this problem.

By: ntalbott

ntalbott — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:05:01 +0000

Not in particular, no; I first saw Web Hooks in use in DabbleDB and really liked the way they did it. Worth looking at/thinking about when designing inter-app API's.