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

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: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: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