Mobile App Stores Are Going Away

Big changes coming to Android may cause a huge shift in the way game developers work with app stores on mobile devices.

Since the first App Store was introduced for iOS, developers were flocking to this digital platform. However, now after so many years have passed, app stores across different platforms became sort of huge wastelands, oceans of content. To find the right app is virtually impossible, to find the right game is even harder. Apple had to come up with more editorial methods to highlight great content, but it requires a lot of resources. There’s currently 2.2 million apps available in the store. How do you manage all that? You’d better ask Google.

Google Play Store is even a bigger mess, you might say. And you’re absolutely right, but Google is aware of that and the company is working on a solution. This solution takes us away from the constraints of modern app stores and returns developers to the open green pastures of the Internet.

Basically a week ago Google announced a new feature that Android lets users “install” web pages from the Chrome web browser. so that, These pages will look just like apps downloaded from the Google Play store. It’s sort of similar to the good old feature “save to Homescreen,” but a little better.

Progressive Web Apps is a new quick way for mobile users to communicate with your product. It reduces the gap between installation and usage. Powerful native features with all the functional from web will be available on your phone in a minute. And, of course, its a big step forward for the mobile industry.

If you have an Android phone you can already check it with Twitter, Google+ or Tumbler. Every web based app will allow you to access to the content without installation. You will not need to search it in app store and download/update every time after. Just save the bookmark to the Home Screen. E-commerce, service apps, news magazines will be adapted to it very fast. But it will take some time (years probably) for game developers to run their products on web apps. Hope that HTML5 technology will help them to do it faster.

Denis Levchik, Xsolla

The coolest thing for game developers in these circumstances is that Google claims that ‘homescreen apps’ will work just like apps from the store. This means they’ll get faster and more reliable, plus they’ll be able to work with mobile payments from Google. Will we see the integration of alternative payment methods in here? That’s an open question so far, but it might get a positive answer. And this will probably change the entire game for game developers in the mobile market.