More on Apple’s future growth.
As June 9th approaches the rumours around the new 3G iPhone are flying fast and furious. However little, if anything is being said about what I think will be one of the most exciting new developments – the App Store. In my opinion, the App Store is to iPhone what iTunes is to iPod. It will be the service that unlocks potential that we’re not even thinking about right now.
Right now, the blogosphere is filled with iPhone 2.0 enabling location-based services, I wrote a while ago about how iPhone’s accelerometers enable physical tracking services. Simply putting the two of these together opens up massive opportunities. (Imagine a location-based Nike+ type thing.)
Mobile services can inherently be much more useful than web services because they can be contextual. My iPhone is with me more than anything else in my life. This means that the market for types of services is almost unlimited on the iPhone. And, because the iPhone will be the first to open up this kind of standardised service delivery, I think it will become the defacto standard for a whole new class of services further solidifying the iPhone as the dominant mobile platform.
I think this will open up growth similar to the growth the iTunes created. The chart above shows iTunes downloads plotted against stock price. While the scales are different, the correlation is fairly clear. Even if App Store doesn’t generate revenue directly, I think it’s the key to much of the next period of Apple dominance.
