Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
We just got our first app approved, and it took 14 days. But hey, at least it wasn't rejected for some trivial reason like I've read happens to quite a few developers. It does appear somewhat of a black whole where you just wait and wait after rushing and staying up nights to finish - feels very anticlimactic once it's finally approved because you've waited so long. I'm not looking forward to pushing the next update and telling users to "just wait". Shameless plug: XPilot
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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.
Except we don't - that's a straw man.
All I see hear is the same pro-Apple bias in the press, claiming that the Iphone is wonderful for having lots of apps, even when there are plenty of other phones, with plenty of apps, and more importantly, you don't need a permission slip from Apple in order to publish an application.
And even if it was true - after all those years of "It doesn't matter that there are no applications for Macs!" in the press, now we get "There are [allegedly] lots more applications for the iPhone, it must be the best phone ever, so we'll ignore all other phones!"
Morons.
As for trouble staying afloat, my suggestion would be to just post a story about it. Whilst an article about an application for any other platform would be rightly ignored as spam, so long as you add "On Your Iphone", it instantly becomes front page Slashdot news - even the BBC will give you free advertising.