Apps business next phase will be more user-centric and decentralized

Apple opened its App Store in 2008 It was the start of a totally new type of business Now we can run apps on iOS Android TV sticks computers earlier they were just programs Many other service providers like Zoom Stripe Weebly Snowflake and AWS also make it possible to build and offer apps and services on their platforms It appears that enabling apps on a platform is a popular way to scale up businessesWhat could we see next The big players monopolize the current app marketplace but this old model has its challenges for new players The future disruptive marketplaces will be more decentralized and have new data modelsApples App Store has played a vital role in getting the iPhone to be the most successful mobile phone but the apps themselves are a significant business to Apple The App Store has been an enormous success and has become Apples most profitable business Even though Android is the most extensive mobile operating system its applications havent seen similar success There are many reasons for this Apple controls its ecosystem but the Android market has been more fragmented with fewer controls allowing lower quality apps As a result Apples environment generally offers a better user experienceApple has been able to take a massive 30 fee from sales on its platform Epic Games has challenged that position in the last year by bypassing App Store payments in its games and suing Apple for its monopoly position in the App Store Now a group of Senators in the US is also considering how to restrict Apples and Googles control on the app market We will see how this endsNo other platform has achieved a similar position to the App Store However this hasnt stopped multiple parties from expanding their platforms to third-party applications and targeting lower margins from the sales of apps Sometimes the target is really to make additional revenue but often it is just to get more popular applications on the platform and in that way get more use and usersThe value of application stores and marketplaces for users is primarily in accessing good quality applications in one place buy pay and install them easily Thats why they have become very centralized services basically one place to purchase and pay for all applications App Store or Stripe payment solutions have been the most straightforward solutions for consumers to payAll this has been very centralized technically also from the business model point of view Now we see a move to more decentralized solutions utilizing blockchain whose journey has been bumpy It also means there are new ways like NFT to make payments create economic models and monetize applications Andreessen Horowitz has been the most active Tier 1 VC to invest in distributed models and their a16z podcast discusses how nowadays a marketplace makes sense to build on distributed architectureThen we have another important megatrend privacy and how users can better control and utilize their own data This creates another challenge for centralized application business models Many of these applications want to collect users data and share that data with other parties or utilize it to target users Users have become more skeptical of this model and Apple has also started to restrict itThese things together lead to a new era in the application business and marketplacesUsers can use them with their data not share the data to the application provider eg the application can be run on the users cloud or data storage Application stores can be decentralized and where payments can be processed using NFTs or other token solutions you can get the app anywhere run it anywhere and pay any way and Applications can be run in different environments eg purely serverless frameworks like React or other container types eg KubernetesThe change from the old centralized application business to a more distributed model wont happen overnight and it takes time It is hard to envisage emerging new big platforms using the old model like Apples App Store The centralized application marketplace business is a copycat business nowadays The disruptive application marketplaces will come with new modelsIn the future you can keep your financial and health data to yourself and run applications to analyze it and get practical advice for your life You can run it in your mobile or personal cloud and pay with a commonly used token eg on Ethereum for each time you use it There is no need to give your data to someone no need to pay a fixed fee for the application and no third-party monopoly to dominate the marketplace Sounds ideal Of course each model has its challenges but we have a real opportunity to move to a more user-centric application business The next big success stories in the consumer market will be achieved with these new marketplace models