This is a really boring topic that is overblogged by and large, but here goes anyway. I was struck today by two pieces of news which make the death of the AppStores as a concept seem like a real possibility. The first was Larva Labs's excellent post on how poorly they've done with their game in the Android App Market. While most people are using this data as evidence that we need to keep putting up with Apple's BS when it comes to their walled garden, I think the real story is slightly different.

The second piece of data was the release of JQTouch, a jQuery plug-in that does a lot of the heavy lifting on behalf of a webapp so that it feels more native. I have not used it (yet), and it's probably not until the 3GS and 3.0 that you could really pull something like this off, but the promise of coding for the browser (albeit an HTML5-enhanced one) is alluring.

Taken together, here is a possible way to connect the dots: in classic "cargo cult product management," every big tech company and carrier now wants to have their own AppStore. All of us will fail. We will fail mainly because of our own app stores' siloed nature and because we will end up fracturing the potential audience. First to fail will be all of the Android-derived app stores where the vendor adds little value and fails to get Google's approval (which will be most of us). But all the rest will fail as well: Pre, Symbian, etc. None of them will be able to withstand the onslaught of the open web. In short, we are building today's Compuserves, Prodigies, and AOLs because it seems that walling up the apps gives us a new business model. Consider it the tech company equivalent of the newspaper industry's attempt to just now charge for content.

Meanwhile the Apple AppStore will continue with its impressive American Idol dynamic. That is, a few developers will become rock stars and cause everyone else to line up around the block waiting for their chance. But for most of them, it's not going to happen. Sure, a few mom and poppers will emerge and lots of "eff the man, eff the VCs!" blog posts will be written, but in the end, the Apple AppStore ecosystem of the next decade will look a lot like the VB ecosystem of the 1990s: a lot of small players enriching the ecosystem for Apple who will reap the bulk of the rents. The one exception will be startups, seeking distribution, who will put out free apps that do useful stuff as a way to get users to their sites. This is a good strategy.

In the meanwhile though, two things will happen. The open web will become stronger. And hopefully, everyone will learn about the power of side-loading, or letting users put whatever software they want on their devices. You can do this on Android today (assuming the vendor allows it) and you've been able to do it on the non-Apple platforms since the start. Then we'll be back to the same PC dynamic of ubiquity versus native integration and software developers will be able to make their own choices.

Generative platforms people, generative platforms! That is where the real Awesome happens.