Umair Haque is at his usual stimulating and frustrating best in a recent post comparing Apple and Facebook’s third party application strategies. Stimulating because he is looking at an important topic and pointing out interesting differences. Frustrating because Umair’s free wheeling style and usage of otherwise well defined terms leads to conclusions that seem unwarranted (at least to me).
There are two important differences between the Apple application model and the Facebook model
Apple allows for paid apps, whereas all Facebook apps are free (and hence ad supported)
Apple screens apps prior to their release, whereas Facebook has no such mechanism [CORRECTION: As a commenter points out I am wrong here – Facebook does have an approval process for the directory. It is, however, possible to build and release an application without approval.]
Somehow in Umair’s view this makes Apple’s app strategy a “market” and genius and Facebook a failure. This strikes me as a gross exaggeration. It is worth examining both of these differences more closely.
On the first point, it turns out that many of the popular apps in the Apple app store are in fact free. So it does not seem that Facebook made a huge mistake by not supporting a paid app model from the get go. It is well known though that Facebook is working on a payment platform and I would not at all be surprised if once it launches Facebook too will support paid apps. Price would be used as a form of hygene, i.e. to keep app spam out, only if no *free* apps were permitted. Clearly that’s not the case in Apple’s app store. The compalints about Facebook app spam also seem grossly exaggerated. People do in fact learn how to uninstall apps and Facebook has toned down the potential for apps to be spammy. So this does not seem to be a dramatic difference today and is likely to disappear entirely as a difference.
On the second point, Apple had to have a screening mechanism to make sure that apps don’t brick the phone. This is a result of Apple’s decision to let apps execute native code rather than putting apps in a strict sandbox. While that is a valid reason, it clearly provides Apple with power and control that it can and will exercise to the detriment of consumers (and to its own benefit or to the benefit of its carrier partners). The best example of this is of course the on-again off-again availability of the NetShare app. Facebook on the other hand took a completely fairly [CORRECTION] hands off approach, to the point of allowing apps such as Scrabulous which was ultimately shutdown because of another third party (Hasbro as the copyright holder).
Umair also rips into Facebook for making something that was open more closed (the Internet) and lauds Apple for making something that was closed more open (mobile apps). While I agree with his assessment, it is irrelevant to comparing the dynamics between the two app ecosystems. This is somewhat akin to comparing two popular books on physics and concluding that one is remarkable because it was written by a journalist (who knows very little about physics) whereas the other is deemed dumbing down because it is written by a nobel laureate in physics.
Bottomline, seems to me that the two app systems are not nearly as different as Umair would have it and if anything are likely to converge further over time.
