Chrome App Store

As I am sure you are aware by now google have made available the first publicly usable version of the Chrome App Store. Here is my take on it.

The aim is to make web apps easier to find and that I applaud. It reminds me of a long time ago when the likes of Tucows and Download.com where king and you would head to one of them to find software. I hear it was a bit of a golden time for software development as initially to get a bit of good software popular all you had to do was put your software on there.

Initially developers loved this but as more and more apps where released it became harder to get noticed and developers had to learn marketing techniques to succeed. The same can be said for the mobile phone app stores, if you were there before the gold rush started it was easy to get noticed but if you came after that period you should expect to have to market your app to get it noticed.

The Chrome App Store also provides an easy to use billing system and potentially a way to download apps that developers have packaged together. It also lets you just create apps that are just links to web apps on, err well, the Internet. That is good but it does mean there is not going to be a pre gold rush phase as it look pretty quick to put a link in for your web site, I mean app, and there are a lot of websites out there ready to be added.

Pretty much if you are trying to promote something you have written it make sense to spend the time an promote it there. I know as I create some web apps I will certainly include the web store as part of the marketing. I could also see myself using it as a payment system if I need one, just because it looks so easy to set up.

Now if Chrome OS becomes popular, and I have no idea if it will, then the Chrome store will become very important to web developers as it will be an easy way to access that group of people.