do Apple charge a listing fee like Ebay?

yeah, they take 30% of your gross

not only that you have to buy a mac to dev on and regiter and pay $99 per year

Very interesting read. Much appreciated!

Nope. He used to work at Nokia, he worked for an Apple partner, among others. I think his CV and references are in his blog. Feel free to post on his blog and he will answer you.

I remember a presentation Craig Barrett from Intel gave in my university in my last year there. There was a slide about the dot com bubble; in a carthesian diagram (two axis). It showed the amount of money invested versus the amount of money made (or something like that); and it showed the huge amount of cash being spent; then the steep downfall and then a slow, but sure growing up to now.

I think that is what may happen to the App stores; the bubble will pop; but eventually profitable models will emerge and they will slowly climb to be a stable revenue source.

That would/could explain why Nokia is not so worried as to having an uber App store now; but instead lying the foundations to cover as many platforms as possible in their foundation (through Qt) and build up from there.

Time will tell.

Standard population collapse, no? Too many participants (app stores) fighting over limited resources (developers, users) resulting in a fallout and reduced population. Likely this will take OSes with it, or will result in fewer stores per OS.

Chances are we'll see non-Google App Markets die off, Moto and Samsung's proprietary OSes will be undermined, and if MeeGo takes off its AppUp model (common back-end, vendor specific front-end) may take hold (doesn't hurt that Qt gives it a good degree of platform independence.)

With luck this will result in handset providers having hardware marginalized and focus less on lock-in and more on providing services (say, free services for handset buyers available to a fee for non-owners?)

I don't think the dotcom bubble comparison is accurate. They're similar only in that (anything) new generates hype in the beginning, before it slows down and generate a more steady incline (whether up or down).

One big differentiating factor between the dotcom bubble and this proposed AppBubble is that the dotcom boom was fueled by investors with no direct knowledge of the market, whereas the app developers have a direct link and feedback from the market; so that they get quicker read of the market and can (if they want to) make the necessary corrections.

The underlying variables to boost this spincycle up:
- Increasing # of potential customers (if you stick to lowest common denominator; in requirements)
- Increasing skill and experience of developers (lower cost, higher quality)

Actually, even though the Apple store may be bubbly for developers, it is still very good business for Apple. (*) Point being, I'm quite sure Nokia does care about the revenue they're not getting right now.

(*) And for all those small development houses who can charge $15k-$50k per app from their clients...

I think that, right now, fueled by the hype there is people (be it developers, companies, investors) thinking "there is gold in those phones" and are blindly jumping in the hype without further consideration of better ways to spend their money.

Mind you, I don't think it is going to be so huge as the dot com bubble; but when the music stops, a lot of people will not have a chair to sit on.

There is a developer testimony in the comments, which is also very interesting, check it out by Colm McMullan.