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역시 Giz... 깔끔하게 정리...
우후죽순처럼 App Store 같은 어플리케이션 market이 각 플랫폼마다 만들어지고 있습니다.심지어는 삼성도 만들고... SKT, KTF도 한다고 하고... 우리나라도 제대로 만들었으면 하는 바램입니다.

[Giz Explains: All The Smartphone Mobile App Stores] - Gizmodo

It's been less than a year since Apple launched the iPhone App Store, but now virtually every mobile OS is showcasing its own take on the mobile application storefront. How do they all stack up?

Thefirst thing you'll notice about these efforts—coming from suchtraditionally competitive companies as Palm, BlackBerry, Nokia andMicrosoft—is just how similar they all sound. App World? App Catalog?App Market? Mobile Marketplace? This outward likeness actually runspretty deep—these stores are advertising uncannily similar featuresets, for both users and developers:

Although it might not evident in the feature-by-feature breakdownabove, there are two distinct kinds of app store: The primary store,which is the first and only source of an OS's apps (seeApple), and the secondary store, which is built around an existingstock of third-party apps, and with preexisting developers in mind (seeBlackBerry, Microsoft, and Nokia). It's a combination of thesedifferent lineages and divergent policy choices that make thesmartphone app store experience so varied.

Apple's iPhone App Store
At least for now, the App Store is the standard by which all others arejudged. Beyond that, it's given us a rough guide for what works.With a $99 dollar developer's fee and a novice-friendly SDK, thebarriers of entry for an iPhone developer are fairly low. Distribution,payments and to a large extent marketing are managed by iTunes, whichiPhone owners are necessarily familiar and comfortable with.

And, of course, there's the iPhone: This store may only serve onehandset (and its very similar nonphone brother), but it's a wildlypopular one. This makes the app store uniquely attractive todevelopers, because it provides access to the largest uniformapp-buying market in the world. Microsoft can argue that Windows Mobile6.5 will connect developers to x gajillion different customers throughy zillion different handsets, but this variety is a curse: Handsetshave different resolutions, processors, 3D hardware, input types andbasic feature sets. A motion-sensing 3D game with a GPS socialnetworking feature won't work on a lot of WinMo handsets, but a 2D,keypad-controlled Asteroids clone won't make a developer rich.

But the App Store is far from perfect. Apple, like all App Storeowners, has the final say in what gets listed, delisted or banned, andthey aren't afraid to remind us of this. Along with the typicalrisque/racist/infringing content prohibitions, Apple enforces strictand often limiting rules against apps that compete with the iPhone'snative set—iTunes, Mail.app, Safari to name a few—and apps that theirpartnered carriers aren't too fond of, i.e video streaming andtethering apps. Now, all these rules are showing signs of loosening with OS 3.0, but as long as the App Store is the sole source of iPhone apps, anyrules will seem like too many rules—especially if you're accustomed toa totally unregulated system like Windows Mobile 6.1's. Hence, the gray market.

Android App Market
This second major entrant into the app store race represents a consciously different approach than Apple's, but not in that many ways. Immediately, we see a lot to compare: A single-handset userbase (at least for now), low costs for developers and a presence as the primary—though not sole—source of apps from Day One.

But the App Market is a different breed than the App Store. Mostimportantly, it's not the only place you can get apps. Google has beenmuch more lenient about what they allow in their store since thebeginning but in the rare case that they don't approve of an app, as in the case of tethering apps earlier this month,you can just go download an .APK file and sideload it onto your G1anyway. This is a healthy middle ground for everyone involved; Googledoesn't alienate users by destroying entire categories of apps, butisn't forced to come into conflict with carriers because of overlyliberal policies. Google has also made their Market more friendly toconsumers, with a no-questions 24-hour return policy.

Great! Then why is the App Market so underwhelming? Well, the G1wasn't exactly a runaway hit, and the store got off to a slow start.Paid apps weren't made available for months after launch, and when theyarrived they didn't benefit from the convenience and familiarity of astorefront like iTunes. Moreover, there's no guarantee that things willchange that much in the coming months—more handsets from moremanufacturers will boost Android's user numbers, but will lead to theWinMo-style toxic fragmentation that Apple so adamantly avoids.

BlackBerry App World
Matt took a dive into the newest mobile app store, and found it agreeable,but not spectacular. RIM's is the beginning of this "secondary" appstore concept, and it shows: You'll be hard-pressed to find anything here that wasn't previously available elsewhere. It is simply an aggregator for existing applications.

This was a given, as developers have been cranking out BlackBerry appsfor years now. But App World was a great opportunity for RIM to givethe lethargic dev community a shot in the arm. Instead of doing that,they've made the store almost hostile to would-be app writers.

Listing your wares in App World costs a hefty $200, which gives youthe right to upload 10 apps, but doesn't come with any new SDKs ordevelopment tools. The payment system is PayPal, which is clumsy to useand a pain to set up. A minimum non-free price tier of $2.99, probablyintended to filter out spammy apps and cover PayPal's transaction fees,discourages developers from even trying to make simple,useful apps, eliminating the $.99-to-$1.99 sweet spot that has beencentral to Apple's success. App World feels like an afterthought, and areluctant one. UPDATE: It should be noted that the 70% devrevenue share figure in the chart is incorrect, and has been update to80%—a marked advantage over the other stores.

Windows Mobile Marketplace
With Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft will introduce the Windows MobileMarketplace. So far, their announcements have shown an awareness of thepitfalls of both Apple's and RIM's approaches: They're emphasizingnon-exclusivity and app approval transparency, a 24-hour return policyand wide device support, but also making sure to get big-name app andgame developers on board to ensure that users actually have something new to look forward to at launch.

On the developer side, it's a mixed bag. As in every other store,the dev take-home is 70% of each sale, but the listing fees aren'tgreat. $99 gets you five apps a year, but anything beyond that willcost an additional $99. I'm sure this will help vaccinate theMarketplace against the fart app epidemic that Apple has proven soprone to, but it'll do so at the expense of potentially useful free and$0.99 apps—again, a crucial price range. One important factor that'sstill TBD is the payment system. Microsoft says they'll support bothcredit card payments and carrier charges, but hasn't yet said howthat'll look. In both cases the process will need to be as seamless aspossible.

Nokia Ovi Store
You probably haven't heard much about this store, set to debut within amonth, but it's kind of a big deal for the 40m+ Symbian S40 and S60users that it'll serve apps to. It's planned to shoehorn into Nokia'snew Ovi app suite, which we were introduced to with the XpressMusic 5800,and provide a go-to source for not just apps, but ringtones,wallpapers, and basically everything else that you might have found ina 2001 vintage carrier WAP store.

There has been a decided lack of fanfare surrounding this launch,probably because there just aren't that many Nokia smartphones in theUS. But its success or failure will be informative: It will be the mostopen of all the app stores. For the time being, there is no developerfee, and app listings are free and unlimited. You can easily publishtons of different kinds of content—Flash Lite apps, Java apps, NativeS60 apps, multimedia uploads and others—which will be subject to avetting process that Nokia has assured will be minimal. As Nokia-averseAmericans, we can view the Ovi Store as an experiment in laissez-faireapp-mongering—a multi-handset, mixed-media, unfiltered feed of Symbiancontent.

Palm App Catalog
And finally, we have Palm's App catalog. This is the store we know theleast about, but that is already set for a different course than allthe others. At launch, the only handset it'll serve will be thePre—though Palm has indicated that other WebOS handsets are inevitable.It'll be the first—and likely exclusive—source of WebOS apps, anddevelopers will be furnished with a solid, though fundamentallylimited, SDK.

Palm's still-vague plan for the App Catalog will no doubt be centralto the success or failure of the Pre, but we can make an educated guessat what to expect, assuming that Palm doesn't get taken over by idiotsin the next couple months: Palm will vet the apps thoroughly, providean in-house payment system, and make development simple and cheap(previewed Mojo SDK apps have shown great promise). The end result willprobably look something like the iPhone App Store, but with one hugedifference: there will be no local natively running apps—the Mojo SDKdoesn't provide for that, just for what amount to turbocharged,locally-stored web apps. Granted, these web apps will have privilegedaccess to some of WebOS's core functions, but it's doubtful thathigh-end gaming, as we've seen on the iPhone, will even be possible onthe platform. These limitations (along with WebOS's multitaskingadvantages) will affect the nature and quality of the apps that arelisted in the store much more than the Catalog's policies, thoughexactly how, we'll have to wait and see.

Still something you still wanna know? Send any questions aboutapp stores, SDKs or the finest in fart-app technology totips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.