Article by Laurie McCabe

What is an App Store?

An app store, which offers a lot more than just mobile apps, is a Web site that aggregates software solutions for business or personal use. App stores, also known as an applications marketplace, are typically created and built by a “marquee” vendor, such as Adobe, Apple, Google, Intuit or Salesforce.com, that serves as the anchor tenant for the marketplace. App stores serve as a hub where you can discover, search for, purchase and deploy integrated third-party applications.

The marquee vendors that run the marketplaces typically have a strong brand and a large customer base -- but no one vendor will ever have the time or expertise to build every possible application that a customer might want. But marquee vendors can attract developers to build complementary applications to sell to their large customer bases.

The developer gets a new sales channel, and the marquee vendor can offer customers a bigger, more diverse array of applications than it could possibly provide on its own. In many cases, developers must also build their applications on the marquee vendor’s platform so that they will integrate with other applications in the marketplace.

File sharing and synchronization service provider Dropbox this morning announced that it has passed the 4,000,000 user milestone. The startup, recently crowned the Best Internet Application at the Crunchies 2009 awards ceremony, has also announced that it has hired a VP from Salesforce.com to lead its marketing and sales efforts going forward.

Dropbox was founded by CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi in 2007, and received seed funding from Y Combinator soon after. The company went on to raise $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.