One more quick post about an event. This time, the Motodev Summit 2010, that happened this last Wednesday, May 5th, 2010. I don’t have too much to say about it; in summary, it was a lot more marketing from Motorola than I was expecting. I was expecting more deep, technical stuff.

One of the talks...

But there is one point I would like to make about Motorola, which is the reason to write this post. Motorola is releasing the Shops4Apps store. It is basically one more option for developers to sell mobile applications. It took me a while to understand why they are doing it, since there is already an Android Market, and almost all of their phones are Android phones today.

So here is what I think they’re doing: they are trying to beat Nokia, directly. Nokia has their own market place, called Ovi Store. It is out there, running and being used for a while now. Motorola wants to have their store as well. Simple as that. Also, I can think of one more reason they might be doing this: competitive advantage against other Android devices. Something like “our Android is better than the other’s”.

Boring... lets check e-mail...

Now, as far as I know, we have quite a few market places / stores to sell mobile applications already: the Apple App Store (iPhone, iPad etc), Android Market, Ovi Store and now Shop4Apps. And this is to talk about the big ones; there are smaller initiatives out there.

What do you think? Is Motorola crazy to try to compete in this market all by itself instead of, for example, joining the Android Market or something like that? Or is this the right move? And what about the other markets? Do you think they are viable options to make some money? I might be wrong, but here in Brazil, at least for now, the Apple App Store seems to be the only place you can make some money today.

Please leave a comment with your thoughts!