Can Apple’s App Store sustain in the future in the UK?

1780 Words4 Pages

Chapter One: Introduction

1.1 Rationale for the topic

After the first smartphone application store was established by Apple in July 2008, Apple App Store has developed from only 500 to more than 425,000 applications and contributed 15 billion downloads (Dredge, 2011a). Moreover, the enormous sale of iPhone and application helped each other boost snowball effect. The innovation of Apple not only brings substantial profit to the company, but also establishes a new sale model of smartphone software. Application store provides a convenient and efficient software sale platform for the third-party software developers which allows them participating with unprecedented enthusiasm (Singh, 2011). This new change adapts to the increasing demand of personalisation of mobile users which helps smartphone software industry entering a rapid and healthy development (Singh, 2011). Because of the great success of Apple App Store, more and more firms such as mobile manufacturers, Internet companies and mobile operators followed Apple’s step join in this market that makes application store become a business hotspot.

In another word, the success of Apple makes App Store become a symbol of the new business model. Many followers such as Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Microsoft Marketplace, and even many individual developers participate in this business activity (Protalinski, 2011).

In fact, how does this new type of business model influence traditional telecom sales mode and how Apple integrate the upstream and downstream value chain are worthy for further study. According to Chesbrough & Rosenbloom (2002), a successful business model not only can create value, but also can sustain value gets from rivals, while maintains cost and pricing ...

... middle of paper ...

...t, mobile phones are only used for voice and text service. However, with the development of communication technology, mobile phone not only provides voice and text-messaging function, but also provides high speed mobile Internet (Miller, 2010). The Third-Generation (3G) technology brings people from computer network era to mobile phone network era, which allows people enjoy Internet service through smartphones without sitting in front of computers. According to GSMArena (2010), the number of 3G subscribers reaches 500 million worldwide. In addition, the 3G technology accelerates the development of smartphone, receiving and sending emails, watching online videos, listening cloud music and even managing your bank account without a computer become possible (Miller, 2010). Therefore, all the needs bring a huge opportunity to the third application developers.

More about Can Apple’s App Store sustain in the future in the UK?

Open Document