'Tis The Season Of Desktop PC App Stores: Allmyapps Launches One For Windows

Allmyapps has picked a weird – or genius – time to announce the launch of its independent application store for Windows PCs – Apple has just announced that it will be opening up its Mac App Store for business on January 6.

The French startup, which recently raised €1 million in venture funding, was also just blasted by Robert Scoble, after an apparently gruesome pitch at last week’s Le Web conference. They responded to his blog post with one of their own, saying Scoble was right about Windows but wrong about them.

But why not decide for yourself?

Allmyapps, now in public beta, bills its desktop app as the “easy, fun and fast way to discover and manage Windows applications”. Through the Allmyapps market, users can browse for specific software categories, read reviews, launch web apps and download free and paid applications via a mobile friendly interface designed for use on tablets, laptops and netbooks.

Once purchased through Allmyapps, verified paid apps are automatically updated, and can be re-downloaded and removed with a single click.

Windows is still, of course, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, so the potential is there, but so is the competition. There’s no shortage of software suggestion and download sites for Windows-native applications, so it will be difficult for Allmyapps to make enough waves to establish themselves as the “iTunes for Windows apps”.

Besides, the chances of Microsoft starting up a similar endeavor in the near future, especially with rivals Apple and Google swiftly moving to the app store distribution model for desktop client software, are rather big.

That said, Allmyapps is part of Microsoft IDEEs program in France, which aims to foster a select number of innovative French software startups, so perhaps there’s some exit potential in that regard.