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.

Comments

No burst - phase change

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:No burst - phase change

[rho]

Yeah, no kidding. After all those years of "There are no applications for Macs! Buy a PC!" in the press, now we get "There are too many applications for the iPhone, IS IT DOOMED?????"

Morons.

as an end user....

[Em Emalb]

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.

approval process blues - developers causing it!

[ardiri]

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.

Re:approval process blues - developers causing it!

[k_187]

For example, look at Nintendo during the NES/SNES eras. Apple should build an automatic scanner for malware and approve apps that are malware free in a matter of hours.

As a counter example, consider Atari before the crash of '83. There's a balance to be had between allowing everything and keeping out crap.

Re:approval process blues - developers causing it!

[Serious Callers Only]

There's a balance to be had between allowing everything and keeping out crap.

Unfortunately Apple's approval process is nowhere near that balance, and is moving further away from it. It doesn't keep out the crap, and cannot, as that's a very subjective judgement call, and not one that Apple tries to make - they ban apps for all sorts of silly reasons, but not because they are rubbish or useless (or we wouldn't have 100 flashlight apps).

Any non-automated approval process just isn't feasible when you have a worldwide store serving millions of people and 100,000 developers. This problem is only going to get worse, until Apple bows the inevitable and stops wasting their employees' and developers' time with this manual approval process.

What they really need to focus on is improving the ways to find the good stuff in their store - at present it's very difficult to discover apps by browsing or searching - there's no 'customers who bought this app also liked' or recommendation lists from other customers, or any sort of extended editors' choice sections within genres, and search throws up all sorts of mismatches and is being actively gamed by developers. They should be focussing on improving their store interface rather than wasting time trying to limit the apps (though a limit of x no of apps per developer would do a lot to help to weed out all the crappy duplicate apps out there).