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Staying Afloat In a Sea of iPhone Apps

Posted by Soulskill on from the is-there-an-app-for-finding-apps dept.

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.

2 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. No burst - phase change by SuperKendall · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Re:So.... how many of them are worth using? by Anonymous+Monkey · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hay, no talking bad about Linux...er...never mind.

    --
    We are the Borg...