It’s Official. Google Wave to Get Its Own App Store (with potentially more than just apps)

My fellow writer James Glick attended the Google Wave GTUG (Google Technology User Group) meeting in London yesterday and came away with a few interesting nuggets of information regarding the future of Google Wave.

Aside from news on extra functionality and awareness of its current slowness, one particular point stood out above all, Google’s definite plans to create its own Wave App Store, making it possible for developers to earn money for their efforts developing for the platform.

While most of us were aware of the Wave API and the potential for developers to build and charge for their applications, Google’s intentions to build a full fledged app store were not so concrete yet highlights their commitment to the platform and the developers building for it.

The most successful app store yet, the iPhone’s, has just blown past the 100,000 approved iPhone app mark and clearly Google have taken notice with their own Android Marketplace. Despite Apple’s success, it is undoubtedly Android who will win on numbers, with developers swayed by Google’s open source values and the openness of the platform as a whole.

With an app store specifically for Google Wave however, the potential for something as great, if not greater then than the iPhone App Store is a distinct possibility. Already, independent software developers have built and tested Wave applications that handle such tasks as teleconferencing, videoconferencing, and multiplayer gaming, but while the Apple App Store sells software only for the iPhone and Touch, a Wave marketplace could stock in-Wave applications, along with desktop applications, browser extensions and a world of devices, from laptops, phones, tablets and more with built in Wave support.

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Don’t just take our word for it, in a recent Business Week article, Lars Resmussen (Google’s software engineer and man behind Wave) himself stated “We’ll almost certainly build a store…So many developers have asked us to build a marketplace—and we might do a revenue-sharing arrangement.”

Assuming Wave takes off, and people begin to “get it”, expect big things.