What's "King" These Days?

People always can reasons to debate whether "content," "distribution" or "context" is king. Perhaps nobody yet is seriously arguing that "location" or "presence" or "social connections" or "mobility" is king, but one can predict that somebody will make those arguments.

One of the debates which slowly is growing, though, is over "openness" and "curated" approaches to end user experience. It would be too easy to say Apple is the foremost proponent of curation ("closed") while Android, Chrome and Firefox are examples of openness.

It might be more accurate to say the trend to curation is growing, across all platforms. You might think of curation as a culling, optimizing or editing process, where apps and software are optimized and filtered. Apple always has done this to optimize end user experience. But app stores, both mobile and soon Web app stores, also are curated environments, to a greater or lesser extent.

In Mozilla's view, for example, the open Web is the way to create rich applications, while Apple takes the opposite approach. In Apple's case, the company plans to create a new Mac Apps Store containing software expressly optimized for Apple devices and the Mac OS X operating system.

Apple plans to curate significantly, rejecting buggy apps, betas, apps built with Java, apps with Easter eggs, apps that aggregate content, apps that duplicate Apple's own apps, apps that contain pornography, violence, promote drinking and drugs, for example.

Mozilla Foundation is taking an entirely different approach for its new "OPen Web Apps" store. Designed around a "use any browser" approach, the idea is create a store that allows creation of Web apps that work in any modern desktop or mobile browser (Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile).

Consider the Mozilla initiative an example of the "write once, run many" approach to software. In Mozilla's vision, apps are designed to run independently of operating system or hardware. See http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/10/19/prototype-of-an-open-web-app-ecosystem/ for more detail.

Open Web Apps will use HTML, CSS and JavaScript and will supoprt installation to a mobile or desktop Web browser, or to a native OS desktop or mobile home screen.

Open Web Apps will use existing identity systems like OpenID and support portable purchases, meaning that an app purchased for one browser works in other browsers, and across multiple desktop and mobile platforms without repurchase. Think iTunes and you have an example of the difference between the Mozilla and Apple approaches.

Open Web Apps will support access to one or more advanced or privacy-sensitive capabilities such as geolocation on a user opt-in basis.

In Mozilla's view, apps must be distributed by developers directly to users without any gatekeeper, and available through multiple stores, allowing stores to compete on customer service, price, policies, app discoverability, ratings, reviews and other attributes.

Open Web Apps will be able to receive notifications from the cloud, and support deep search across apps. In other words, apps can implement an interface that enables the app container (generally the Web browser) to provide the user with a cross-app search experience that links deeply into any app that can satisfy the search.

In essence, the debate over curated and open approaches is a preference for, or against, gatekeepers. But the emergence of new app stores, already announced by Google, Apple and Mozilla, should change the software development business in some key ways. Web apps should grow in popularity, and make more rapid development of lower-cost apps and lower-volume apps available in substantial quantity, as app store publishing will cost a lot less than traditional shrink-wrapped apps store in physical and online retail stores. See http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/10/web-app-stores-how-they-compar.php for more detail.

About the only safe statement is that all the traditional arguments about openness and curated approaches, including the issue of gatekeepers, are going to heat up again as the web app store trend gets established.

Watch a Mozilla video about the new Web Apps Store here: http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/labs/openwebapps/openwebapps.webm