UPDATE: Another Day, Another App Store

If you own a phone — and who doesn’t these days — you are a wanted person. If you doubt that, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in the smartphone world. Hardly a day goes by without some company introducing their brand-new app store, a place where you can buy and download programs from your phone, for your phone, right on your phone. It’s a frenzy of app stores and it’s all because you are so wanted by these companies.

The latest company to enter the app store madness is none other than Verizon Wireless. Verizon announced at CTIA this week that they are proud to offer their customers the “Mobile Web Games and Apps Store”, a real mouthful, to be sure. This store will be cross-platform as Verizon handles phones from all sorts of handset makers, but rest assured they have your best interests at heart. Like all the other app stores, this one is aimed solely at making it easy for you to get programs right on your phone. Honest.

This brings the number of app stores in existence to…heck, I don’t even know how many. Apple (aapl) has the App Store, Google has the Android Market, RIM has the BlackBerry App World, and Microsoft will soon have the Windows Mobile Marketplace. Those are just the ones I can remember. Rest assured that all of these app stores have the same goal as Verizon’s new store: make it easy for you the consumer to get those must-have apps right on the phone. You should feel so wanted, I’m telling you.

Why are there suddenly so many of these app stores? I’m pretty sure that all of these companies have been sitting around watching the success of the Apple App Store and a bunch of managers were wondering why they weren’t cashing in, too. We’re talking big bucks for Apple and they all want a piece of you, the wanted consumer. I hate to break it to all these other companies, but there’s likely a few things about the Apple App Store that they’ve overlooked in their zealousness to get in your pocket phone.

1. The iPhone is a locked system. The Apple App Store is the only place to get apps.
2. The iPhone has been one of the hottest handsets in the world. Big customer base.
3. Apple extended the apps to the iPod Touch to make the market even bigger.
4. Most apps “sold” by Apple are the free ones. Apple thus pays for the distribution.
5. The iPhone interface is tailor-made for cool apps.
6. Apple controls phone updates. They can make changes to the App Store and push them to the iPhone at will.
7. The Apple App Store is part of the wildly successful iTunes Store.
8. The iPhone is a locked system (worth repeating).

So, handset makers/carriers opening app stores, do you get it yet? To even begin to get the same results as Apple you’d better make sure your app store is the only place to get apps for your phones. This seems obvious to me, but apparently many of you haven’t thought about this long and hard.

You’d better have a major, hot phone to dominate the world sales charts. A bunch of lesser phones won’t do it; developers want to spend time working on just one phone. It’s that bigger potential market thing.

Be ready to spend a lot of cash distributing free apps in your store. That’s where the big sales are. Then make sure most of the other apps in the store are of the <$5 variety. It pumps the numbers up so you look successful.

So there you have my advice to you, all of you with the shiny, brand-new app stores. Just consider what I’ve laid out and follow my advice. Your app store will be exceeding the sales of the Apple App Store in no time. Sure it will.