Experience shows that a successful app store now needs to do much more than simply deliver apps to narrow categories of devices. It needs to deliver a comprehensive e-commerce user experience across device ecosystems, throughout entire content and device lifecycles.

The following sections describe some of the key features of a successful app store.

Rich user experience:

A successful app store makes it easy and enjoyable for customers to find content:   

• Shows what content is available for the user’s software and hardware environment;
• Promotes attractive content or other offers based on the customer’s profile;
• Engages customers with content ratings, reviews, product wikis, blogs and forums;
• Enables users to find, buy, download, install and update content with one click;
• Provisions applications in a format native to the device and works transparently with existing native systems, processes and tools;
• Identifies, downloads, presents and installs any required patches or updates automatically;
• Provides options for tiered customer support.

Easy to buy content

A successful app store removes barriers to closing a sale:

• Supports international currency transactions and multiple languages;
• Calculates sales taxes automatically;
• Enables different pricing models such as micropayments, one-time and subscription payments;
• Enables chargebacks;
• Detects fraudulent activities.

Easy to run your app store business

On the back-end, a successful app store also needs to deliver advanced capabilities for content publishing, management and integration.

• Content providers need a way to get their products and services into their app stores with all the right packaging for different targets.
• Application store managers need an easy way to create and manage multiple application stores and marketplaces for different customers, while ensuring product and service consistency.
• It needs to be easy to integrate and complement content libraries, payment systems, third-party tools, and existing release management processes that may already exist for the underlying device and software distribution.
• There needs to be clear processes to administer content, publishers, and entitlements; fine-tune business models; promote content; report financials; and so on.

How does your app store compare?

Apps2Market delivers all these capabilities and much more in a robust, extensible and flexible SaaS model.