Intel AppUp

» see appup.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In 2009 the App Store was two years old and every company with a processor in a device decided it needed one. Intel's logic was not stupid. It made the chip inside hundreds of millions of cheap laptops, those laptops ran Windows, Windows had no app store, and the gap was sitting there.

AppUp was announced as a beta at CES on 7 January 2010 and came out of beta on 14 September. It was a storefront with a client program you installed, and behind that a full developer program with an SDK. Developers got up to 70 percent of the money, plus APIs for licensing and crash reporting and in-app purchases, in C and C++ and Java and .NET. It sold in more than 60 countries and could actually take your money in over 45 of them, in five languages. The catalog ran the usual store categories from books and finance through to travel and weather, and yes, it had Angry Birds.

The strategy underneath it was that Intel would get the hardware makers to ship AppUp as their own branded store on their own machines, so that an Intel chip came with an Intel marketplace attached. That part worked about as well as every other attempt to put a second app store on Windows.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the netbook years ~

Netbooks were everywhere here for about two years. The Asus Eee PC and the machines that copied it were the first laptops a lot of Turkish households could justify buying outright, small enough for a school bag and cheap enough to replace. I was in my mid twenties then, working as an engineer, surrounded by them.

I have no memory of anyone opening the Intel store icon on one, and neither, from the evidence, did most of the world. The store's whole premise was that the netbook was a device class with its own software needs, something between a phone and a laptop that wanted its own small cheap programs. It turned out the netbook was just a small cheap laptop, and what people wanted on it was the same software they already had.

~ the funny part ~

Intel announced the shutdown on 29 January 2014. The store closed on 11 March. Email support ran to 15 June, refunds had to be requested by 19 December 2014, and apps that needed to check in with the AppUp client were given until 15 May 2015 before they stopped working.

Liliputing covered it under the headline "Intel's app store closes in March (Related: Intel had an app store)." That parenthesis is the most accurate sentence anyone wrote about the product. Intel's own statement was the corporate version of the same admission: closing AppUp was a tough decision, and the company was realigning to focus on the needs of enterprises and business users. Four years after building a consumer storefront, the answer was that consumers were not the customer after all.

~ what it took down with it ~

The developer program went with the store, and it had been the more interesting half. Intel had spent four years telling small Windows developers that there was a distribution channel for them that was not a shareware download page and not a retail box. The ones who built against the SDK on that promise got a refund window and a date.

appup.com still exists as a hostname and has done nothing but redirect to intel.com since before the store closed. The Internet Archive holds no captures at all of appup.intel.com, so the storefront itself is not really in the record. For a product from a company that size, that is an unusual amount of nothing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »