FT: The iPhone's "App" Battle
The Financial Times has decided Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone doesn’t have the monopoly on smartphone programs any more, even though it practically invented the category, and even though the iTunes App store has 100,000 programs for the iPhone and counting.
Today’s think piece by FT writer Joseph Menn, of the Silicon Valley bureau, says that Google’s (GOOG) Android operating system now has 20,000 programs and counting, so “it’s no longer about quantity” of programs for phones, “it’s about quality,” Menn concludes. He quotes venture capitalists who assert it takes less than $5,000 to port a program from the iPhone to another operating system.
