An App Store For iPhone Software

Steve Jobs demonstrated a new "App Store" that will be pushed out to all iPhones in June. It's available now in beta. This will be the exclusive avenue developers will use to get their iPhone apps, written to the newly released SDK, to customers. Developers will get 70% of the proceeds from sales of their goods on the App store, with no further charges for hosting, credit-card processing, etc. Jobs called this "the best deal going to distribute applications in the mobile space."

Comments

not a free service for iPod touch users

[Anonymous Coward]

apparently it's free to use for iphone users, but ipod touch users will have to pay a fee.

Mr. Carmack are you still around?

[Tibor the Hun]

The main question I have, is if John Carmack has anything to add to the discussion.
With his latest interest in portable gaming, I hope he could see some value in the iPhone/touch platform.
The screen on the phone is phenomenal (in terms of pixels/inch), touch gestures and accelerometers should add quite a few new exciting additions to the gaming world.
I hope he has an intel Mac and time to download the beta of the SDK and try it out.

With Doom, or even Quake on my iPod touch, I don't think I'd ever leave the bathroom at work. (80% serious, 20% joking)

Re:Mr. Carmack are you still around?

[John Carmack]

We (Id) have put in our application like everyone else, so I don't have any inside information at this point. I think Steve is still pissed at me over some negative comments I made about iPod development tools a while ago. Just based on the blurbs, it looks very good -- a simulator plus debugging on the native device is the best of both worlds, and a 70% royalty deal for apps over iTunes is quite good.

The iTunes distribution channel is really a more important aspect than a lot of people understand. The ability to distribute larger applications than the over-the-air limits and effectively market your title with more than a dozen character deck name, combined with the reasonable income split make this look like a very interesting market. This type of developer / customer interaction is probably the wave of the future for mobile devices, it will be interesting to see how quickly the other players can react. Based on our experiences with the carriers, I am betting not very quickly.

John Carmack

What a strange angle

[iluvcapra]

The app store is news, as it the 70/30 split, but what about these submissions:

SDK features:

Cocoa Touch: Multi-touch events, Multi-touch controls, Acceleromter, View Hierarchy, Localization, Alerts, Web View, People Picker, Image Picker, Camera Media: Core Audio, OpenAL, Audio Mixing, Audio Recording, Video Playback, JPG, PNG, TIFF, PDS Quartz, Core Animation, Embedded OpenGL Core Services: Collections, Address Book, Networking, File access, SQLite, Core Location, Net Services Threading, Preferences, URL utilities Core OS: OS X Kernel, BSD TCP/IP, Sockets, Power Management, Keychain, Certificates, File System, Lib System, Security, Bonjour

OpenGL Games:

Stoked about the little SDK that was announced today? Apparently, so was Apple, as it's already starting to announce the first games to go along with it. For starters, we've got Touch Fighter and Spore (!!!), the first of which was somehow thrown together in two weeks, the latter of which won't be available until September. Also, users can expect Super Monkey Ball, which was hailed being a notch above your average "cellphone game." Simmer on that for a second, we'll keep updating as we get more in.

MS Exchange:

Apple announced that it has licensed Exhange ActiveSync protocol from Microsoft, which will make it easier for business customers to get their email on an iPhone.

Or mine:

Apple has just wrapped up their iPhone development roadmap and here are the features to be presented with version 2.0, due in June: Push email and contacts, ActiveSync supporting Exchange, remote wipe. Several video games were demoed using the iPhone accelerometer and OpenGL on the iPhone, such as Spore and Super Monkeyball. SDK with development in Xcode was announced, performance suite and remote debugging of iPhone apps over the sync cable. Apple will sell apps through an iTunes-style store, that will work OTA from the iPhone or with the host computer.

It would appear the slashdot editor simply went with the submission with the most "Apple is teh EEEEVILL" slant.

Re:FYI

[iluvcapra]

30% off the top isn't great, but it also doesn't require hosting, fulfillment, or anything else. Just ship them a binary and they send you a check in the mail each month until people stop buying (or an ABI change breaks your binary). I don't know how refunds are handled (or allowed at all), or documentation or support either, really.

Apple also will allow you to notify your purchasers and update your apps on their handsets through an automated system tied into the store; this was something that was really lacking on Palm IMHO. A new version would come out of some little helper widget and you'd never know since you'd never visit the site again.

Re:except direct sales

[MBCook]

Yea. Apple takes care of notifying users of updates. Apple takes care of bandwidth and server costs. Apple takes care of anti-piracy. Sounds rather nice to me. I'd be willing to give up only 30% of my possible profit to avoid all those different headaches. If your application becomes popular, those things can get complex and expensive.

It will be interesting to see what some of the Mac Developer Bloggers think about this (Daniel Jalkut, John Gruber, and Wil Shipley for example).

Re:What about free apps?

[revscat]

Apple, I am a fan, and most importantly, a paying customer. However, give up the MS-like control. Charging developers $100 for a cert then telling them that you are going to take 30% of the sales? Lame, freaking Lame.

Do you think so? I don't. For that 30% you get a distribution network, a way to notify your users of updates, and free advertising via the integrated download client. Seems pretty fair to me. And the IDE and SDK itself are free. IIRC Palm charges charges similarly, and you have to buy the IDE. (I don't know about RIM.)

Re:Triple dipping into the jar might hurt Apple?

[Swift2001]

I can't see how anybody who saw the demo of the SDK can say this. There's a whole new platform available. You can program an app to run on a fully-powerful platform, and game developers are going to go nuts. Did you see Spore? That space shoot-'em-up? The Sega game? Holy crap! It's like the Wii Remote.

Microsoft is taking a cut of the software on the Windows Media Phones only because they only have software. Except for their mice and keyboards, their ventures into hardware kind of suck, so far. Windows CE, Windows Mobile, etc., has been a gigantic money-loser to this day, and the iPhone blew past them in less than a year on the market.

Yes, you'll have to sell through iTunes, the second-largest seller of music in the US, and the one that works easiest with the dominant player on the market anyway. If you are a freeware developer, you pay NOTHING. If you want to charge for your software, you control the pricing, and Apple takes 30%, with which they pay for a huge server farm, credit-card charges, bandwidth, marketing -- you're in the most popular e-store already, and you'll be listed prominently, and if your app gets Apple publicity, that's better than most could ever afford. Does Apple make money on its 99c tracks? A penny or two, is the most common response. They will take a cut on software, but so do theatrical agents, and a good one is worth his weight in gold, because they keep your money flow going. In fact, software developers now have roughly the same terms as the record labels. Not bad, I say.

Value to the consumer to being able to buy an app from the iPhone, and to be pretty sure someone has gone through it enough that there's no virus or malware or incompetence there? Priceless.

Will other platforms catch up to them eventually? Yeah, probably. That's called competition. But they'll be, as was made clear today, a very moving target.