[asterisk-users] 3rd party app store

[Steve Underwood]

  On 09/19/2010 12:06 AM, Darren Nickerson wrote:
> On Sep 18, 2010, at 11:41 AM, Mark Deneen wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 11:52 PM, Dean Collins<Dean at cognation.net>  wrote:
>>> Any thoughts on why the lack of traffic?
>>>
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Dean
>>
>> Not enough applications to play immature bathroom sounds.
> You could well be right, but consider for a moment a few alternatives.
>
> Perhaps it's the $5000 up front just to be listed? I see the fee's reduced to $2500 now as a promo, but still .... that's a huge barrier for most.
Even $1 will keep most free solutions out of a forum like that, so a 
blanket fee strategy must have been specifically chosen to skew things 
in a particular way. Seems like it worked very well.
> Or perhaps its the fact that the nature of the apps that get listed means they aren't usually 'purchase-able' with a simple 'click to buy' (how do you sell SIP trunking with a click-to-buy???)  - and as a consequence there's no purchase capability built into the asteriskexchange site, just link outs to different purchase-ish URLs for the various products.  Anyone looking to sell their app would need to develop their own point-of-sale/payment processing systems  .... so it's really not an 'app store' at all in the traditional sense.
That is a pretty basic problem for some things, but not for everything. 
Plenty of telephony stuff is a "thing" for sale, even if some after 
sales support is needed, to get over installation issues.
> Kudos to digium for realizing this goal, but I think the $5000 get-in cost has resulted in the lack of interest/popularity, and limited the listings to only the largest, most profitable asterisk/digium partners.
>
Kudos to Digium for taking an idea that could have worked against their 
interests, and sidelining it so well nobody created a real marketplace.

The bottom line, of course, is that if people like regular posters here 
didn't know about about the site, the real target audience most 
certainly does not. Nothing more is needed to explain the low traffic.

Even if you are serious about creating a vibrant, orderly marketplace, 
its really hard. Look at the variation in quality between them. Even 
Google, which is basically a marketing company, seem to have no idea how 
to make the Android market function.

Steve