Apps in your Browser … Is it the beginning of the end for the Idea of the App Store?

I just read an interesting article on CNN Money about Mobile Web Apps being developed on Browsers, see Mobile Web apps escape Apple’s iron grip. And it got me thinking about the future of the online app economy. In a few years will anyone download apps to their phone or will they just access it through their browser? Will all of  these app stores continue to grow or even exists? And will the power shift even more towards the developer or will it fall back to the heavy hitters?

The App Store business model is a sound one (Apple, Amazon, Android) all take a cut of the developers revenue for providing the distribution channel, and more recently Apple announced recently that it wants to take a cut of any type of content or subscription sale made through it’s apps. As you could imagine this doesn’t sit well with most developers and from a business revenue stand point if you’re already giving up 30% and then paying taxes and operating fees your app revenue disappears quickly. So developers have started to build apps that are OS agnostic and can run through any of the widely accepted web browsers.

Thanks to HTML 5 we may all be accessing our apps through browsers very soon.