Entrepreneurs Teck Chia, Flora Sun and Tim Wuu launched OpenAppMkt, a new marketplace promising iPhone web application developers a new channel to distribute and monetize their efforts separate from Apple's control. According to OpenAppMkt, its storefront is completely open and curated by the developer community, promising an efficient and intuitive installation process and credit card billing as well as close integration with social media and marketing tools--in addition, developers earn 80 percent of all resulting download revenues, compared to the 70 percent cut offered by Apple's App Store.
OpenAppMkt is open to all applications running on the Safari browser. Its storefront closely resembles the native App Store, offering screen shots, user ratings and reviews--consumers can also browse according to familiar categories like Games, Music, Lifestyle, Social Networking and so on. "Because Apple created this great way to distribute and monetize mobile applications [i.e., the App Store], the web has kind of fallen by the wayside," Chia told The Motley Fool. "Part of the reason is that there are not enough services and tools to help developers monetize and distribute their web apps. And it's also not very easy to find web applications for mobile devices, and very few people know how to add mobile web apps to their home screens. So we decided to build this." Chia adds an Android version of OpenAppMkt is in the pipeline.
For more on OpenAppMkt:
- read this Motley Fool article