Do ‘Web app’ stores matter in age of mobile apps?

Mention an “app store” today and you think about mobile apps, driven largely by Apple’s iPhone app store and increasingly the Android Market. If that’s the case, why all of a sudden are we seeing  a surge in “web app” stores — or marketplaces for applications that can run on the Web AND on mobile OSs? Count Mozilla — maker of the Firefox browser — as the latest entrant, following on the heels of Google with its upcoming app store for its Chrome browser. What gives? Mozilla’s app store play is actually bigger than a storefront (though it’s built a sample app store too, dubbed AppMonkey). Overall, thought, it is aiming to build, in its own words, an “open web application ecosystem”:

The open Web is a great platform for rich applications. It would be even better if it had additional capabilities to ease discovery, acquisition, installation and use of apps, while also enabling monetization for developers. We designed and built a prototype of a system for open Web apps: Apps built using HTML/CSS/JavaScript that work both on computers and mobile phones, have many of the characteristics that users find compelling about native apps and provide developers with open and flexible distribution options.

By leveraging the latest HTML, CSS and Javascript standards, Mozilla apps would be able to run on any modern browser, including mobile browsers.
Even more than the more democratic (versus the iPhone) Android Market, efforts to enable the creation of more cross-platform apps (including apps that cut across the desktop and mobile) could potentially have a huge impact on the evolution of mobile apps. Will the iPhone model of a large user base and relatively closed yet elegant OS and developer tools rule the day? Or will a more Web-style of app and service development rule the day?
On the Web, developers loved the ease in which they could build new web sites and apps — and more importantly new startup businesses — leveraging only their own skills and bright ideas. In mobile, at least so far, developers seem drawn to the simplicity and built-in customer base of the iPhone.
Things are about to get a lot messier, and more interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBFVrmyald4&feature=player_embeddedby Rich KarpinskiOctober 20th, 2010