Can Anyone Out-App Apple?

(MoneyWatch)  There's a mad scramble among Microsoft, Google, Research in Motion, Nokia, and even Verizon, to climb back into a race that Apple has all but already won.

The only surprising aspect in the news out of Apple yesterday that it has sold more than 1.5 billion mobile applications for its iPhone is that it hasn't sold even more. Apple can sell apps better than anyone because it makes it as easy for customers to buy them through its familiar iTunes interface as it does for developers to sell them. Guarav Agarwal, of Mumbai-based mobile apps publisher Amar Chitra Katha, wrote in an email that Apple provides back office functionality and marketing data such as units sold by app title, country and date. Agarwal noted that the iPhone app store is

the most efficient way to sell comics as operation/distribution costs are nil and we can spend more time in promoting our products.

Likewise Jean-Marc Orselli, CEO of French mobile app vendor Never Alone Anymore, told me yesterday that Apple's new development platform (SDK 3 unveiled this spring) makes it possible for his company to create better apps than it could for other stores.

Contrast this with the lifestyle-enhancing flailings of Microsoft, which hopes to compete with Apple's physical retail stores, as my colleague Erik Sherman discusses, while scrambling to attract developers to an app store of its own and backtracking on an earlier decision to lock out phones running anything older than version 6.5 -- which it hasn't even shipped yet.

The term "as if" was invented for situations like this.

Except for the fact that Microsoft invites the comparison, it would seem hardly fair to compare Microsoft's attempts to convince consumers that PCs are as good as it gets with Apple's ability to create a world that seems to revolve around its products. As Orselli said of Apple's branding, "They invent the life that goes with their product."

Perhaps the only vendor that understands branding at that level is Nokia, but its Ovi app store is limping badly, while Research in Motion continues to focus on the physical device at the expense of apps-driven excitement. It may be to much to hope that Motorola uses Android as an opportunity to recapture some excitement -- which would be welcome if only to keep Apple on its toes.

[Image source: Rustybrick via Flickr]