In case you’ve been in a cave for the past several weeks, the iPhone 3G launches tomorrow. Better yet, the App Store scheduled for tomorrow’s launch is already available (latest version of iTunes required). Current iPhone users will be able to use many of the apps that don’t hinge upon GPS.
But the main point is that the App Store’s standardized development and easy access will do for mobile apps what iTunes did for music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, etc. And since mobile and local are inherently related, we’ll see lots of development of local search apps.
Many have already been announced, including Yellowpages.com, Yelp, Loopt, UrbanSpoon, and WHERE (see a YouTube demo here). We’ll demo a few of these in a mobile session during the TKG track at SES San Jose next month.
In the meantime, get ready for lots of application launches over the coming weeks (not to mention the next 24 hours), as well as individual application reviews we’ll provide here.
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Very excited for this nascent app adoption, as it will continue to optimize the local search experience for the small screen. However, I think we’ll see another exciting adoption wave as local search services migrate from downloadable apps to mobile web.
Andrew Weinrech just made a similar point on an LBS panel as it relates to online dating. There’s nothing more instructive to the future of mobile services, than history of desktop services, which generally migrated to the web.