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Staying Afloat In a Sea of iPhone Apps
Burnsy writes "During all the hype of Apple celebrating its 1.5 billion iPhone App Store downloads, some good advice on how to be successful and stand out in the App Store came out. One story describes how developers are increasingly coming up with various strategies to make a splash, employing everything from temporary discounts to guerilla marketing tactics. On the other hand, some successful developers, such as the creator of the Flight Control app, which has been the number one selling app in 20 countries, talk about the pitfalls of Apple's approval process for the App Store. They say it can take a developer up to three months to get an application approved and distributed on the App Store and that maybe the iPhone bubble is soon to burst."
A related story at Wired points out that the games category — already crowded with over 13,000 entries — is getting even more competitive as the major game publishers push into the market.
The App Store has a tremendous number of small apps that are minimally useful.
But it also has a small number off apps with deeper functionality that are really useful - and that subset of apps is growing, and will provide real value. Those apps are much harder to build. Those apps generally require infrastructure and marketing and all the things we traditionally think of with applications - this article hints at that as developers have discovered to sell a product they need, of all things, advertising!
Far from being an app bubble, we are simply seeing a transition into a more mature market with richer products. Because it's so easy and cheap to create apps I'm sure we'll always see a ton of simple apps, but the market will grow on from that base instead of contracting as the term "bubble" would imply. If nothing else, the soon to be flood of augmented reality apps and apps based around custom hardware will ensure that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
300 notepad applications, only a couple are going to be worth installing, never mind paying for. The same will be true of any category.
Deleted
There's an app for that !
Squirrel!
It's both incredibly awesome and incredibly frustrating at the same time. I love that I can think of something and sure enough, there's an app for it. But at the same time, sometimes there's 50 apps doing basically the same thing and it's hard to weed the chaff from the grain.
I don't think the bubble will burst, but it will level off some.
There's only so many people world wide willing to plunk down money on an iphone, but the people that have, it's not like they're gonna stop buying/downloading apps.
Sent from your iPad.
as an iphone developer (http://www.mobile1up.com/) - one who has been there from quite early on, i have started to notice how long it takes to get approved. in the early days, it was 3-4 days for a new version or update; now, i have two applications waiting in the approval process, it has been over two weeks! is apple employing enough people? i think so. the issue is that you get morons who think they need to release a "special" version of their application 100 times; take, for example, there was a weather application posted recently - one for each city in the united states.. come on; how much wasted time is there for apple to approve all 100 of these apps - when they could have approved one. with the introduction of "nude or raunchy" content; submissions have increased exponentially; now you dont get a fart app - you get a fart app with a hot girl in it.
I've released a few apps on the app store, and have met with some success with them. However, the single most frustrating thing is the approval process for getting an app released in the first place, and publishing updates on a continuing basis.
I recently updated one of my apps, and it took Apple 16 days to review the executable and publish it. I then updated my other app, and it took 14 days.
Seriously? 2 weeks? There is nothing more frustrating than to have users contacting me saying "when will feature xyz arrive?" and my response have to be along the lines of "I've submitted it to apple 2 weeks ago. They'll approve it when they approve it. There is nothing I can do to speed it up.
[Shameless Plug]:
For any who are interested, here are the apps I've written:
Velocity
Points
Yeah, it's too bad that it's harder to find good apps in the App Store when there are 50,000 than when there were 5,000.
But that only means you now have to work for your supper, like any one else who publishes anything from books to music to movies to software.
The same goes for those who complain that if they charge $50 for their app no one buys it.
Wow, welcome to the world of microeconomics and price theory. And, again, promotion.
Here's a clue: you don't have to use the app store as the only or even primary venue for promotion and discovery of your app. Yes, it's harder now than it was, but that's life in a competitive market place. The barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been for such an awesome platform, but that doesn't mean that becoming a success is any easier (nor should it be, if economic theory even kind of works as we understand it to) than it ever has been.
Frakin' cry babies. Suck it up, wipe off your crocodile tears, and make something awesome.
If you have anything legitimate to cry about it is Apple's dystopian app approval process.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
The Apple monopoly on The App Store is anti-competitive.
Others who want to run similar stores should be able to do so without favoritism to Apple's store.
Any EU antitrust authorities reading this message.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
From what I have heard from the few people who made apps they made about $2/hour when you take into account how many hours they spent on it. Yes they still have the potential to be discovered and pull an iShooter which also seemed like a forgotten app but then made a strong comeback but it is like lottery odds for that to happen for most of the apps. A lot of the 3D games are semi-financed by tie-ins to movies so it is already very hard to compete in that arena. How are you going to beat $1-5/app high quality 3D games developed by huge teams of developers and graphics artists when you don't get money from movie producers for making it.
There are winners but I have yet to hear of the multi-million dollar app. Even the winners like iMoron and iFart seem to have only brought in a few hundred thousand dollars after Apple's 30% take. If you take a Software Eng salary at about $85k (national average), these people are kidding themselves if they think they will keep making similar money making iPhone apps in the long term.
I feel sad for the people who quit their day jobs thinking they will make yet another blockbuster app. They monetary hype never existed. It is tournament economics. My guess is most people just do it for the fun of it and to say they have done it. Sort of like open source software.
My advice, jailbreak your phone. Apple touts the sheer number of apps as something wonderful but I don't need 5 different apps that can make my iPhone into a flashlight.
Jailbreaking my iPhone in the first hour yielded me apps from Cydia that allow me to record video, tether my iPhone and most importantly blacklist callers and SMS. Just this morning I successfully got Perl 5.10 running on it.
Point is, just don't look to the App Store if you want something useful.
Shameless plug for any iPhone Devs before I start; if you need any graphics/icons doing go to my site, Graphics Forge So I do icons and graphics for the iPhone quite a bit, and what I see is a lot of devs that wouldn't normally be "in business" trying their hand at iPhone work. And sadly whilst there are some real geniuses, at least 75% of the new guys are hopeless dreamers that have no clue what they want (either from the app or from me, their designer) and seemingly put little to no thought into their app or why it might sell, do no marketing at all apart from a tiny site and the AppStore, then wonder why it flops miserably and leaves them out of pocket once they've paid me, the music guy, and sometimes the web-guy as well. It's shame, but over time it is stabilising. yes we still get new devs, but hey tend to be filtered out by the growing number of god developers that are coming in with experience of how it works and the knowledge to make it go. Thankfully most of these devs are also small-time or single-man companies, so they still need my services. If the AppStore became the sole domain of Sega, EA et al, i'd be stuffed.
I know that links are the basis for the internet, but come on...
I'm pretty sure the FLOSS community will continue to develop what is worth, and for free
Game market will always be game market, but almost anything else that is worth a penny, will be developed open source for iphone too.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
why do I have to pay 99/year to tinker with the SDK and install apps on only my phone. wtf apple! what is the great threat of me installing an app that on my personal phone?
and you people are surprised?
Yesterday, I found out that the headphones for the iPhone have a button and a speaker, so I went to the world wide web and looked for some apps that used this multi-button but couldn't find a single case of an app that takes advantage of this button. I'm not sure if the resources needed to use it are in the SDK, but it would be interesting to see what some of these developers could come up with if they had access to this neat little feature.
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
One thing I'm really sorry about apple app store is their sad classification system, when they actually work on that part, it will be trivial to find what you're looking for, for now, it's just a matter of patience and hope
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Make your app run on Symbian and possibly J2ME too, and gain up to 5000% from the approx. 2% global market share of the iPhone. :)
(No, iPhone fans, I am not playing this down. I respect the iPhone for what it is. It's just that its global market share is really tiny. I wish your hopes all the best. But with statements like "Java is dead", and being the only phone to not have it, Jobs is not making many friends. ^^)
Sure it may be outside of the box of what you expected as an answer. But it's not a bad idea isn't it?
I also strongly recommend an outside-of-Apple site of your own, where you can lead people to completely circumvent them passing by other products. Put it up high in Google etc. instead, and create some "word-of-mouth" in some target group forums. Where people really would be interested in it, and not even see it as advertisement, because it just fits with what they want to know about. :)
If you do all this, the whole iPhone store could collapse, and you would have a big chance of floating on the top.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Weeding the chaff from the grain. No.
Increasingly the App Store will become more like Amazon, with it's billions of items for sale. It will contain references from one product to another, it will contain suggestions based on the user's preferences and purchase history, but overall the App Store will cease to be the only way people market their apps.
Remember all the other ways there are to make sure people are aware of your iphone app. The larger developers, and the larger clients (like Barnes and Noble and State Farm) already know this and market their apps through their traditional channels-- television ads, posters in stores. Everyone is going to have to do this, and the little guy is going to have to get on board.
I think you'll see consortiums of iPhone app developers forming, pooling their marketing muscle, joining together to make "labels" of like-minded people or tools of the same ilk.
But eventually, just getting your app into the Top 25 and having a 99-cent sale isn't going to cut it. There will simply be too many apps for that kind of ploy to work. And thank god for that-- I'm a consumer; I don't want the App Store to have a limited number of apps in it. For one thing, who's going to pick and choose what apps are good enough? Apple? They have a hard enough time just enforcing their current rules without making subjective quality judgements. Best to let the market decide, I think, even if that means the deepest marketing pockets will get the most attention. There will always be "underground" places where little-known apps are talked about, and there will be people who seek them out. This is how the jailbreaking communities survive-- both for iPhone and stuff like the Wii or Xbox.
Why not just get it over with a change the site to Apple Fanboi site?
What is involved in developing an application for the iPhone? Even just a simple Hello World app. What OS, programming language, IDE, emulator etc must you use to do the actual development?
Also, any overall comments on unexpected difficulties and/or surprisingly nice aspects are welcome as well. Thanks!
There is really a plethora of apps out there. http://www.iphoneappreviews.net/ helps sort through the mess.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Parent points out very valid concerns about expense to create an application.
:)
Having built applications for a variety of platforms from WinCE to J2ME (yeah, I thought that would be a winner) and now iPhone, I've never assumed much success. I'm a single developer with probably limited talents compared to others and I tend to do niche applications.
I think back many years ago my WinCE application for managing a RPG session (yes, I still like pencil and paper RPG's) made me about $1k USD. Enough to buy PDA's but wouldn't quite my day job.
That being said, I still love doing it because "I" can create something "I" think is cool and don't need a team of developers to make my vision come to life. I think hand-held applications are a difficult place to make a living for a small developer unless you get some buzz from an external force (Apple or some viral factor like iFart). You need to do it because you enjoy it and, hey, maybe something great will happen. Don't be delusional that you've got the next big thing that will sell itself without any help.
I won't bother to plug my application since I'm probably one of a small number who cares about Game Mastering tools
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
This is competition, not being anti-competitive. Every company that sells trademarked or patented products has a product "monopoly". Do you also bitch & moan that you can't play Wii games on your XBox?
When, and only when, Apple obtains a market monopoly can you have some cheese to go with that whine.
As a customer of these apps, I DON'T CARE how long the approval process takes, I might even LIKE it.
I *love* the fact that apple is looking at what is being written into these apps!! I don't want harmful or risky stuff to get on my phone, and if something bad happens, I want them to have the ability to do something about it.
If the approval process takes a long time, maybe it will also make people think carefully before they send send an update to apple.
I especially think that apple should slow down developers that are sending out apps just to get to the top of the "recent apps" lists.
Btw, shit floats...
Is "no" the answer to this question?
and very nearly 100% of the market can find your app and acquire it in seconds.
Yes they can acquire it in seconds, a powerful force. That makes the job of advertising easier because you are that much closer to being able to obtain an app quickly when you hear about it.
But I very much disagree that they can *find* your app in seconds, because there are so many apps - they must generally know about your app or be searching on a keyword (which have been heavily salted by other apps trying to dry eyeballs) to find it.
The market for the apps is tiny...With that kind of market, with that kind of convenience, all you really need is word of mouth. And not much of it.
I disagree on tiny. I don't think a market reaching 20 million + users is tiny at all. Word of mouth will get you subsets but not nearly as much as informing people the product exists in a targeted way.
The best way to make an app popular is not to advertise it, but to make it so good that iPh?o(ne|d) users will recommend it to their iPh?o(ne|d) user friends.
You should do that anyway, or why bother? But that is only a precondition to marketing being successful, not an end in itself. That is only taking things half way, or really not even that much.
If your app really stands out as being good, people will find it without spending a dime on advertising.
That is often true now but I am mostly talking about the future state, where I simply do not see that holding - and even an app that does get that word of mouth, will be far more successful the more groups it gets mouths in. Advertising is still important, though you can obviously have some success without it.
You yourself said you have 30+ apps. Do you really tell people about all 30, all the time?
As for advertising, the only question of course, is where to advertise... and that is a very domain dependent answer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do they?
We aren't talking competition of the handset, we are talking competition of the store associated with a specific handset, in this case, Apple's. It's much like the printer ink-monopoly some printer makers try to enforce through patents or proprietary chips: Sure, anyone can make a printer, but if only 1 vendor get to choose whose inks get to be sold, that's anti-competitive.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Upgrades: currently there is no upgrade revenue...
Actually that is no longer true with the in-store purchase option. If you wish to be paid for updates, that's now an option as long as you run them through that mechanism (though that' only data updates, you can still write code that the data updates enable latent features).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How is the phenomenon you're describing different from the internet bubble?
First, to be clear, I'm pretty sure you are talking about the .Com bubble. The internet is as it was, only moreso.
That said, this case is exactly the same as the .Com case - which supports my point.
Are there more, or fewer websites than during the dot-com boom? Is the internet used for more, or fewer things than it was then?
Sure pets.com is dead (thank god I got my sock puppet in time). But I can buy pet food from a number of places on the internet now if I want. I can look up more things on the internet than ever before, and have so many options for social broadcasting it makes the head swim.
Some of the simple iPhone apps around now will die off, that is part of a natural cycle. But the base will continue to expand with replacement small apps, just as a coral reef builds on the bones of the predecessors - any app that is remotely useful will see applications to address it, and if some die off all the better for the ones remaining. Ten apps enter, three apps leave - or something along those lines.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You're right, but sadly (as with today's Android/Blackberry Google Voice announcement), almost all of those apps with deeper functionality will come out last for the iPhone
Since there's already an iPhone Google Voice App too I predict it will have exactly zero effect on phone and/or app sales - and that we'll see ten more Google Voice apps on the iPhone before the year is out.
The iPhone market is simply too large and lucrative at this point to be anything but the primary development target, and that will only be truer in the next few years.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the phone had a real preemptive time sharing OS and an appropriately restricted API (enforced time/space/cpu quota, only screen, touch, and sound access) then it would be a trivial exercise to know a prog was 'safe'. At the moment they have a broad API and Apple's idea of safe and your might well not be the same (location data anyone? what exactly is the app going to do with the network access it's asking for...).
i have never seen an iphone so i dont even know if it comes with a browser or not. but assuming that iphone comes with a browser and people can go to different websites the question i have is -> can browser based content compete with native iphone apps ? how does apple intend to keep people developing native iphone apps as opposed to apps that can be run from browser ?
I'm pretty sure the FLOSS community will continue to develop what is worth, and for free
How? The most popular copyleft software license, the GNU General Public License, is incompatible with the iPhone SDK license. Are you talking about MIT/BSD style permissive licensing of free software instead of copyleft?
What a fantastic idea...
But is a Symbian, Blackberry or G1 fast enough to run my physics based 3d games at better than a 30 fps frame rate? Yea I though so...
BTW, my games also require access to a accelerometer.
Let me get started right away porting my stuff over to java!
Got Code?
The only way to find right app is by getting better recommendations. http://www.appsd.com shows related apps for any iphone application. Although its not perfect its a good start.
Never seen a female developer.
The fiance of friend of mine is a total hottie and she owns and runs a whole development shop. She can move aside a programmer when the job isn't being done up to her alarmingly high specs and get it done herself in half the time. Think, "Geek Bond Girl". Then get out more before assuming you know what reality looks like. With a bit of exploring, one learns that most fictional accounts of the world aren't half as astonishing as the real thing.
-FL