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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
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.
To develop iPhone apps, you must have the following. 1. Intel based Mac or hackintosh. (there are ways around it but it's easier to stick with x86 macs)
2. Download the free iPhone SDK. This SDK includes Xcode which is the IDE that most mac devs use the iPhone cocoa touch libs and an iPhone simulator app to test certain kinds of apps.
3. Learn Objective-C and Cocoa Touch libraries (plenty of books for this)
4. Pay Apple $99/year to test your apps on an actual device and sell your completed app on the App Store. 5. Profit!
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
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?
I develop iPhone apps full time.
You need a Mac (any Intel mac will do, 2GB of memory), you use objective-C, the emulator and SDK are free to download when you sign up at .
For a Hello World app, you would literally create a project from a template and user Interface Builder (comes with XCode) to add a "Hello World" label.
Of course, real world programming gets more complex but anyone who has programmed for a bit can get used to Objective-C.
Also, any overall comments on unexpected difficulties and/or surprisingly nice aspects are welcome as well. Thanks!
When you want to actually build for a phone or touch, the main thing that can be confusing is the certificates - if you read the docs carefully though you'll be fine, they do a very good job explaining exactly what to do.
The nice aspect (for me) is that unlike any other GUI builder tool I've ever used in an IDE, I actually prefer to use the tool over just coding up the UI directly (though you can still do that too and sometimes that approach is useful). Also the ease with which you can add informative animation to an app (as opposed to just animating something because you can) is pretty nice.
On iTunes U, there's a free iPhone development course from Stanford. You could watch some of those classes to get a feel for what development is like.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You are part of the problem, this is shit, and your deceptive marketing practice is annoying as well.
You won't go far, because you app is complete rubbish.