But for the iPhone/iTunes you will have the following downsides, not in any order: 1. Give up control and predictability of your deployment cycles, and hence c

But for the iPhone/iTunes you will have the following downsides, not in any order: 1. Give up control and predictability of your deployment cycles, and hence can't time and plan marketing effort as well. 2. Be in a closed market which does not allow you any alternative to better discovery of (your) apps. 3. Be in a closed market which provides high visibility for top-X apps. i.e. hits-based, and very low visibility for non-hits apps. 4. Due to (2), your pricing strategy is much constrained. And there is downward pressure applied to pricing due to (3). 5. You can't charge for upgrades (vs. desktop apps). You can charge for "content subscriptions", but the audience aren't trained for it and there is also policies on what you can charge for. 6. Because of (5), you have lose a major incentive for doing upgrades, but because of (3), unless you have a very successful initial launch, you may need to proceed with free upgrades anyhow. 7. No way to provide trial software, although many have adopted free software as an alternative. 8. Can't track analytics for iTunes. Of course you can do it for your own website, but after users click your link to open iTunes, you don't know if they convert.