Motorola one-upping Android Market with their own app store: SHOP4APPS

Oh how I hate word tricks and all caps when naming a product or service. Motorola however is a long time fan of all caps so it’s nothing new I guess. Grammatical nitpicking aside, at first glance Motorola’s attempt at their own app store seems as “too little too late” with many people thinking in their heads “why?”. I myself asked that very same question until I read a little further into what SHOP4APPS would offer. Besides your now common library of apps and categories to run through, the biggest feature is that it is a web based store meaning mobile devices and traditional computers will have access to the store.

Currently, the Android Market is only available via mobile device. Let’s face it, as much as we love our Android devices, there’s times when we just want to browse for new apps and such via a much larger screen with physical input. Sometimes it is just easier. A computer based app store for the Android Market has been one of the biggest requests since the launch of the OS and Android Market more than a year ago.

I should highlight that you can get desktop access to a few handfuls of more popular and featured apps via android.com/market. But that’s just a smattering of the ever growing availability the true Android Market offers. It’s no where near robust enough as it isn’t really a desktop app store at all. More like a “best hits” catalog if you will.

Carrier or manufacturer branded app stores are usually a poor implementation all things considered as they are heavy on fluff and hype and low on actual content and value. Even if Motorola’s SHOP4APPS app store lacks as large of a library as the actual Android Market, as the only desktop accessible Android app store for the time being, it get’s my nod. Though at some point, Google/Android will have to add desktop support if they want to continue experiencing the growth and popularity they’ve been experiencing.

By this point you’re probably wanting to know what it looks like. Unfortunately, after a brief revealing online, Motorola removed access to SHOP4APPS. Thankfully some prying eyes were able to nab a few screenshots. So while we can’t actually use SHOP4APPS yet, we can at least oogle at it.

What do you think, will SHOP4APPS sink or float?