Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest App Store? | Hacker News Reader

Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest App Store?

blogs.sun.com

22 pointsiamelgringo15 comments

This is rather disturbing. Not only does it abuse the idea of trusted updates even more, since it's bundled with an important runtime you probably won't be able to opt out completely.

Certainly not what the users signed up for when they bought that computer or installed that runtime. And now every company with some installed base is going to try this. I can't wait for the Claria/Gator/Yahoo/AOL App Store!

"As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution - but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. "

I mean, come on...

Yeah, that made me gag too... their PR department is really over-selling things. They also overlook a very embarrassing fact: in spite of all those "users", I bet they have almost no brand recognition whatsoever with at least 75% of them. Most average consumers install Java because some website told them that they have to and they've long since forgotten about it (or at least until the updater nagged them from the Windows task bar that updates were available).

Isn't this the "if we can get just 1% of the people in China, we'll have 10 million customers!" strategy?

Java may have a great development platform, but it's not a great end-user platform. As a user, I'm never going to go to the Java App Store to shop for software.

You don't have to. They can push it to you with an update, and damn near everyone has it installed already. PR is hyperbole of course, but they do have a very large installed base, who are used to it being on their machines even if they're not sure what it does.

The trick will be to invite users in such a way that it doesn't look like a browser popup.

Will the Java Platform Create The World's Largest Crap Store? (sun.com)

There fixed that for ya. Java might be extremely popular but it is not known for its aesthetic qualities. You can get away with it on the back-end but I don't believe they really know how to appeal to users/consumers (hence the roaring success of JavaFX or any other Java UI tech /sarcasm).

No.

Sun has a habit of using JavaOne to beat developers over the head with whatever shiny, new idea is perceived to make it the most money (or, in past years, will cause analysts to increase price targets). Schwartz loves to talk about "billions and billions" like Carl Sagan, but his numbers are irrelevant when it comes to predicting partner revenue. His reasoning is much like that of an entrepreneur saying, "If we only capture one percent of this market..." Nevermind, in this case, that there are fewer and fewer reasons to build a desktop app instead of a webapp.

Awesome. Fresh off of the incredible non-success of our client-side Java Applet, Java Web Start, and JavaFX platforms, we're going to take advantage of our required JRE download to push out software that users probably don't want it. (I mean, if the user really wanted that stuff, they could just go to the vendor's web side, am I right?). If you thought the default Yahoo toolbar was annoying, we're just getting started!

So why do they still get to ship their runtime with Windows? Is that a relic of the anti trust settlement?

Separate lawsuit after MS broke the Java license with their own semicompliant JVM.

No. because all Java desktop apps run like crap.

Many do, but they don't have to. Look at Eclipse as an example of what can be done.

Also, there's no indication that the store will be limited to Java apps. Sun is basically selling slots inside its Trojan horse.

While Eclipse is indeed one of the best Java desktop applications I've seen, it's still much worse than most "native" desktop applications (at least on OS X) in terms of polish and performance (though it certainly has a lot of functionality)

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