That's not out of the question - it all depends upon what the particular partner wants to do.  We have not demanded that applications be free on these devices - however, that's the trend across all of the competing content systems for these devices (FrameChannel, Microsoft FrameIt, Yahoo ConnectedTV, etc).  Some partners might have the brand leverage to buck that trend - we'll see.

It's true that developers like app stores, and hardware manufacturers like app stores, but it's not entirely clear that *users* like app stores.  You can already see in Apple's store that the pressure from users is for apps to be free or extremely low cost - and some developers are responding by making free or cheap variants of applications that are otherwise for-pay. The general trend is lower and lower prices for apps, asymptotically approaching "free".  It's getting tougher and tougher for applications to make money like they used to do back when the store was new, even though the user base has grown tremendously. Some developers are already asking Apple to do something about that, ie "protect our revenue stream", otherwise they're threatening to leave the platform - this may be an empty threat, but there you go..  The system is quickly evolving to a system were only a very few applications make enough money to pay for their development.  This situation will probably get worse as other app stores on other platforms put additional price pressure on iPhone developers, ie "I can get the same Android app for free, why does it cost $.99 on the iPhone?"

When we started Chumby, "app stores" for such devices were carefully controlled by the carriers - every application required a long certification step that often cost many thousands of dollars and several months per application, and as a result, they were expensive and apps were few and far between.  Middlemen emerged - publishers, aggregators, certification houses, etc, all taking a cut of the pie. The platforms languished - a small handful of companies made money, but small developers were almost entirely locked out.  Risky applications don't get made - things like the "Screen Clean" widget or the some of the sillier (but popular) iPhone applications would never emerge in such a system.

Chumby was one of the first companies to buck this ridiculous system - Apple has done the same, and it appears Google/Android will as well.  All these companies have significantly lowered the barrier for the deployment of applications, but there's a side effect - the trend toward free.

We skipped the whole thing and went to where we thought the trend was ultimately going anyway.  While it might alienate some developers, it enables others that might not otherwise be attracted to the platform.

What we think will happen is a phenomenon that has already happened on our platform, and is starting to happen in the iPhone ecosystem - the hiring of developers by content providers to create free applications. A few of the developers in our community have been hired by companies to create widgets, and a number of studios are starting to emerge in the iPhone community.  Many applications and widgets are being created as movie and product tie-ins, where it's completely OK, and indeed desirable, for them to be free, because the revenue comes from some other method.

Anyway - what we *are* telling potential partners is that they should strongly consider keeping the barriers to publishing content to the platform as low as possible, otherwise, they'll never get the richness and variety of content to have value to the user.

There's a lot to think about, and we'd have to change many things.

For instance, at the moment, a developer can pull their widgets off the system at any time.  Once users start paying money for widgets, then that ability would have to go away and the developer would be on the hook to support that widget indefinitely.  We would also have to handle widgets that break - presumably a user would want a refund or credit for a non-functioning widget.  Chumby, as the first point of contact for the users, would have to have some sort of policy in place to recover payments from the developer if he or she is not meeting the obligations of the sale.

We'd also have to prevent gaming of the system - are widgets purchased for the account, for individual chumbys, or something else?  Can a user place as many instances as they want of these "pay" widgets on as many devices as they like?  What prevents someone from buying a widget and inviting other people to register hundreds of chumbys on that account to use it for free?  Would we end up having to police that?  Would we have any obligation to protect "pay" widgets from being reverse engineered and reproduced as a "free" widget?

Again - this is something we're looking at, but there are *lots* of edge conditions, and once money comes into the picture, a lot of the flexibility (for both users and developers) will have to be removed so that the system remains fair for everyone.

This all naturally risks the creation of adversarial relationships between Chumby, developers, and users, which is something we've been trying to avoid.  Right now it's tough to come up with a scenario where we'd have to send a lawyer letter to anyone, because there are so few targets of opportunity to game the system to one's advantage.

I'm sure that Apple has a lot of staff just to deal with all of the headaches associated with their store.

At this point, we have no problem with individual developers charging for access to the content that a widget provides.  For instance, if cbreeze wanted to charge a subscription for access to the Chumbyland world while keeping the widget itself free, that's fine - he can police that system on his own servers.

Thanks for the serious and lengthy answer Duane. I agree that the downward pressure on app costs means that many commercial developers struggle to make money on $0.99 apps. But (and I'm being selfish here) I *can* make money in that market since as a 'garage' developer I don't have the overheads that a commercial team has. I suspect that there are many Community Developers here that are in a similar position to me.

Here's another idea that might cut through some of the issues you raise. Make all widgets free, but give users the chance to 'donate' (Users buy Chumby points and donate them and the developer can redeem them as currency ?) to their favourite apps either as a thank you, or to support future development. The user would be clear that the app is not being sold, so is still an 'as is' product with no warranty / support, but neither are they required to pay. The developer would then have more reason to continue development / add feature requests as he/she is getting some revenue, and the users choose whether or not they value / want to support certain apps.

If a developer produces a low quality / low featured app, they are unlikely to get any revenue, so this is also a spur for the developer to spend more time and effort polishing their apps.

On the subject of widgets for the new (differently specced) versions... Do you expect the hardware manufacturers to put together their own software teams so that they have apps at launch ? Or will they be turning to the community for that ? I can't imagine them wanting to launch new hardware with no apps. But I can also imagine that building their own software team is an unnecessary expense when there's a great pool of talent here...