App stores, pfft. Developers are Mom&Pop corner stores, it's only right they be corralled by monolithic entities. They were letting the kids run riot, shoplifting and such, and now that Mom is ailing and Pop's had his knee operation, the son has come home to sell with a McDonald's franchise deal.
Curated app stores are an interim measure. What should really happen is all these independent developers sign up with one of several big media distributors. Apple will be one. Microsoft apparently won't, I keep reading M$ has matured as a company and isn't going anywhere new anymore. And yay for Android and Google, the open source greasers.
You know what open source means? It means the arguments about cracked software being theft are, even if ever so infinitesimally, suspect. And what's more, if the developers sign up with monster media companies who restrict distribution to household and client devices that only work with proprietary parts of the sky, then the whole thieving argument turns back to where it should be, developers versus corporations. I'm so tired of how normal people have been fooled into thinking grabbing an apple off a neighbour's tree is as significant as reinventing an entire playing field and setting contract terms for thousands if not millions of employees. Hell, setting prices even. How did the corporations stop being the bad guys in this story and the multitudes of disorganized, unaligned users start?
Naturally, one is looking ahead to a world where media does not exist in discrete packages. MP3z, jpegs and avi's will be pointlessly old-hat in the cloud space. You'll have to try maintaining your old PCs if you want to play with them. In a genuinely wired world, it's all docs in space.
So how's it going to fall apart? It must. No vision of idealised futures ever come true. they get filled with pragmatic grit. Like cell phones. "Mobile communications" began as brick-like devices, and are still no closer to being wrist or collar-bone implants. So.... the wired world.... what's going to make it look more like a real world? App stores, probably.