OPENapps, a marketplace for web applications, launches its beta service today. OPENapps allows app developers to easily get their application to market and provides website owners a way to find and integrate apps into their sites while still maintaining their own branding.
According to Joseph Puopolo, Director of Marketing and Community for the Toronto-based startup, OPENapps addresses two issues in the web apps marketplace: First, site owners, particularly small and medium-sized businesses, want to have advanced functionality on their websites but often have neither the time, technological resources, nor money to implement them properly. And second, web app developers often feel compelled to choose a single platform on which to develop their apps and struggle to both market and monetize their applications.
While there are several other major app marketplaces, with Google announcing plans for an app store at Google I/O last month for example, Puopolo stresses the importance of being “platform agnostic.” To that end, OPENapps will not restrict developers to a single platform or language. “Develop once in your preferred language, and it’ll work on every web publishing platform – Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Moveable Type and others. There’s no longer any need to make tough platform choices when building your web application.”
The benefits for website owners are clear as well, as the apps can be skinned to match a website’s branding and look and feel, avoiding what Puopolo calls the “inelegant solution” of iframes.
“There is a general sentiment out there that people are looking for an easier way to deploy applications on a website and developers are looking for better ways to develop and sell their applications to a broader audience” says Adam Sadowski, President of OPENapps.
As web apps continue to be touted as “the future,” OPENapps hopes to be able to help developers find a market for their apps and help website owners easily implement them.
