Application stores differ significantly in terms of the breadth and quality of service they offer application publishers to market their applications. The objective of this report is to give corporate application publishers guidance in selecting the right app store.

Within this document, 26 major smartphone applications stores are analyzed and ranked according to the benefits they offer for corporate application publishers. The main criteria that determine the quality of a store are as follows:

• Competition level, which is determined by the number of current applications and registered developers.
  
• Monetization opportunities reflected by the quality and number of available business models a developer can leverage (e.g. download, subscription, and in-app purchasing and transactions), as well as pricing level options, potential reach and the developer/publisher revenue share.
  
• Discoverability features that are made available to publishers that make an application easily searchable and visible via lists, category screens and “related” content features.
  
• Quality of support and submission processes, which have a major influence on time-to-market and the required effort for identifying and accessing information and resources to effectively build and publish applications.

Stores’ performance in each category is based on how a store is rated according to specific criteria, and each criterion is assigned a certain weight. Stores are ranked according to their total score and grouped according to overall performance (high, medium, low). The application store ranking results provide a snapshot of today’s attractiveness of major stores for application publishers.

The app store ranking is part of the comprehensive “Global Smartphone Application Market Report 2010 (Update: 1st Half Year 2010)”.