I think Hal’s category-based approach to app store maturity useful because WP actually does okay in the “top 25″ discussion. I’m not an Instagram user, but most of the other “biggies” are there for me. The ONLY thing that still makes me consider jumping ship is that neither of the banks I use offer WP apps. Back when I travelled a lot for work, I wouldn’t have considered a platform without a Delta app. The convenience these things bring to life is a big return on the non-trivial investment we make in smartphones.

My partner works for a large firm that serves military folks (among others). Because their customers are deployed across the world, they have an aggressive mobile strategy. They have apps for iOS, Android and WP with very rich feature sets including things you can’t do on the web, and they work hard to maintain feature parity among platforms. Currently, that means moving their WP app to WP8…but instead, they’re looking at the numbers and considering dropping the platform. Why? Because for consumer-facing enterprises like banks or airlines, this stuff isn’t cheap. The company’s WP app isn’t hacked up by one or two devs — there are teams of developers, projects with project managers, server-side architectures and APIs, complex business/regulatory/security requirements, testers, multiple tiers of dev/testing/staging/QA/production environments to maintain, etc., etc. From their point of view, the WP app is only buying them the satisfaction of a small handful of customers, so they reasonably wonder if the platform is worth further investment.

It’s not really fair that MS has to prime the pump for such a great OS, but they were late to market and need to get a virtuous cycle going: either new apps attracting new users or vice versa. If not, a vicious cycle of platform abandonment will eventually set in, because creating and maintaining apps isn’t free or even cheap for most businesses of any real scale. Yelp and WordPress can get away with half-assed WP apps, but real-world businesses with paying customers generally can’t.

I don’t think it’s a matter of a certain threshold so much as perception of momentum and importance of the platform. That depends on whether people see more Windows Phones around them (which they do here), media narrative (i.e. whether there’s constant whining about apps or not), sales reps attitude, abundance or lack of ads etc. – interconnected things that also affect consumers.

Overall I’d say that the situation is better everywhere outside the US. Mostly because of less distortion caused by carriers.

I’m not a developer, but I have been listening in on these type of conversations a long time, the HTML 5 thing reminds me of when I was a kid, and they used to say we would all be on the metric system when I got older.

Wasn’t that even in Apples original plan for the iPhone, to have everything be web based applications, not apps? Is html 5 hard to develop for? Where are all these html 5 advances I have been hearing were supposed to happen in 5 years, like 5 years ago? Why did Facebook give up on developing their app in html 5, is it difficult? I’m only asking because I really don’t know.

Your comparison of business exec/road warrior targeted apps made for very interesting reading, as have the comments and your replies. It seems like there was a bit of a bias towards the North American market. Did it make a difference if you looked at these kind of apps available in other regions of the world?

Also, did you you initially look at any other categories such as games, streaming media, social media and/or messaging at any point? While these might be more consumer-focused than business-focused categories, it would be interesting to see what sort of discrepancies this approach showed.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky