SweetLabs announces new app install platform

Building on the success of Pokki, a lightweight app store and Start Menu replacement originally built for Windows, SweetLabs today announced its new “App Install Platform,” a service with an aim to help hardware manufacturers (OEMs) increase their per-device revenue. App recommendation is a massive market. Facebook and Twitter make gobs of revenue from ads pushing high grossing apps that plow their revenues back into garnering more users. SweetLabs’ App Install Platform (AIP) wants to cut device manufactures into the game. Broadly, SweetLabs first brought lightweight mobile apps to the Windows desktop with Pokki, and then leveraged Windows 8′s lack of a Start Menu to its advantage, by fusing its app store into a replacement menu. The company then molded that consumer-facing product into something that it sold to OEMs, helping four of the top six device manufacturers pick up a small slice of app revenue. Now, with AIP, it’s taken that OEM-facing tool, increased its feature-depth, planning to hand it over to the OEMs to run for themselves.