All Articles in App Store Apps

Streaming music has gotten pretty popular among iPhone owners and today we’d like to introduce you to one more option, Lala.

Lala gives you the ability to listen to any song for free one time. If you happen to like the song you pay $0.10 for unlimited listening. And at $0.10 per “Web Song” you can pretty much purchase a full album for a single dollar. That may not convince all of you but Lala has one more trick up it’s sleeve — you can upload your entire music library from your computer to the cloud for you to stream back to your iPhone, completely free. Lose you data connection for some reason? No worries as Lala uses caching to save your music. Exactly how much is cached is not known just yet but it’s a nice feature regardless.

This is definitely an app worth taking a closer look at when it hits the App Store. It should be free to download and you can expect to see it available within the next few weeks.

[Via TechCrunch]

The internets are a rocking with posts about the iPhone’s App Store unofficially hitting 100,000 apps, but while we wait for official word from Steve Jobs, the blogsphere is also debating the important of the sheer quantity of those apps, and whether that’s more important that quality.

It isn’t.

Scoble (and others, I think MacBreak Weekly covered this earlier) suggests that the huge number of apps makes for a greater chance each individual user will find that unique assortment that best fills their needs. In other words, while everyone has the same iPhone, they don’t all have the same apps, and those apps essentially create a personalize experience — a different iPhone — for each user.

What’s more, those must-have apps, and the money, effort, and time spent in acquiring, setting up, and becoming proficient in them, creates a cost that prohibits users switching to another platform. To go from iPhone to Android, in Scoble’s example, means you lose Tweetie, Tap Tap Revenge, Photoshop.com, NASDAQ, etc. (Never mind if you’ve bought Navigon or other, high-priced content).

John Gruber, for his part, asks if the App Store is popular because the iPhone is great, or is the iPhone great because the App Store is popular.

The number of apps already in the store — and, even more so, the momentum with which new ones are being added — almost certainly guarantees the continuing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch for the next few years. But Windows is proof that popularity doesn’t guarantee market-leading quality.

But the iPhone isn’t Windows. Neither popularity levels not quantity of software can be used to balance that particular equation.

Unlike the iPhone, Windows has never been a poster-child for great user experience (Windows 7 may alter that, but it’s just going to market now). Fact of the matter is, the iPhone debuted in 2007 without an App Store at all, and sold for the entire first year (until the launch of the iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0) without an App Store. It sold on the strength of its user experience.

It’s that focus on usability that makes the iPhone great, and that in turn makes many of the apps great. Just like with the Mac, Apple has built in core technologies and development tools to handle a lot of the heavy lifting. So, while it still takes the very best developers to make the very best apps, even fair-to-middling developers can make apps that are surprisingly usable.

Those great apps, combined with a large quantity of usable if not inspired apps, is what makes the iPhone so compelling. The App Store itself is proof. Where Palm, Windows Mobile, Nokia, and RIM have had apps — many thousands of them — as well, it took Apple to create a single place, with a single home screen icon, to find and acquire them all. If it was just quantity, Apple would have had a hard time catching up to them.

Metallica and iPhone apps seem to be pretty popular as of late. First they released Live Metallica and now Tap Tap Revenge Metallica has just been released into the App Store. [$4.99 - iTunes Link] For your money you get the following 10 tracks:

• Enter Sandman
• Sad But True
• King Nothing
• All Nightmare Long
• Some Kind of Monster
• Master of Puppets
• Seek and Destroy
• Fuel
• One
• For Whom the Bell Tolls

This Tap Tap game may seem to be no different than the rest but it the first of the series to include battles over Bluetooth. This Bluetooth battle mode allows players to challenge their friends to a point-by-point battle where they can deploy bombs and other special objects to distract the opposition and come out victorious. Tapulous then added another all new fast-paced Arcade Mode where players are challenged with even more bombs and other objects that make the game that much more difficult.

So if you are a Metallica fan and have $4.99 to spend, we highly recommend checking this one out as you will not be disappointed.

[Thanks to Phil for the tip!]

NASA for iPhone [Free - iTunes link] lets you:

enjoy fast, direct access to accurate, up-to-date space mission content from a wide range of U.S. Space Agency sources – all in one easy-to-use mobile platform. [...] Receive and share dynamic NASA mission updates, out-of-this-world images, and intriguing video links. Follow the path and progress of space exploration in real time while tracking the global orbits of your favorite spacecraft, all in the palm of your hand.

Our buddy Bla1ze from CrackBerry.com also tells us:

NASA Ares I-X set for launch tomorrow morning watch it on tv or iPhone users you can check out the Ares I-X via the NASA iPhone app!

[Thanks Bla1ze!]

Recently, I have been doing some freelance job hunting and I’ve found CraigsMobileList [$0.99 - iTunes link] to be quite helful in sifting through the craigslist search results.

The app also allows you to bookmark searches, post ads, favorite certain results and set filters for your searches. Also, you can keep a recent city search list (helpful if you are looking state-wide results.)

If you’re a “usual” on Craigslist, then this app if for you!

(Card Ninja Forum Review. For more Forum Reviews, see the TiPb iPhone App Store Forum Review Index!)

Card Ninja – just the name conjures up interesting ideas as to what the iPhone (and iPod touch) game might be. As it turns out, the ideas may not be that far from the truth.

Read the rest of this entry »

TechCrunch is reporting that sales of the iPhone app iFog [$0.99 - iTunes link] have shot up following a T-Mobile commercial for the myTouch (their rebranded Google Android Magic, which in no way is meant to glom any mind share from i(Pod) touch), where Saturday Night Live alum, Dana Carvey demonstrates a similar Android app.

Given Apple’s much vaunted 85,000+ apps, it’s interesting to see that iPhone owners will look to the App Store, rather than competing platforms, even when competitors show off apps. Congrats to the developers for the boom-by-proxy.

Maybe Carvey should have shown off Google Voice?

One of TiPb’s favorite iPhone games, indeed the game that cost some of us fingerprints on our index fingers, StoneLoops! of Jurassica has been pulled from the iTunes App Store following a copyright infringement complaint from Luxor-maker MumboJumbo. According to the developers’ blog Casual Games Harmony:

About 3 weeks ago we have learned that MumboJumbo supplied Apple with a formal complaint and a request to remove StoneLoops! from the AppStore. The reason? Infringing Luxor copyright, confusing customers, stealing Luxor’s look & feel and even stealing their source code! This might sound absurd to anyone who knows both games but apparently Apple decided otherwise as we’ve been requested to prepare a formal response, which we did. We described how ungrounded each claim is and supplied various materials to back our claims.

The developers responded, denying all but one complaint (the word Luxor appeared in the text of a quoted review, which they offered to remove). Apple, it seems, removed StoneLoops of Jurassica anyway. This led to the developer further pondering that:

if Apple stands by its decision this will create a dangerous precedence. If you are a developer and have an application in the AppStore you should quickly request Apple to remove the apps of your competition, before someone else requests to remove you! I don’t believe this can get any more absurd, but this is exactly where this reasoning is getting us.

Copyright and infringement is a messy, litigious business, one which Apple puts itself squarely in the middle of by virtue of acting as sole App Store custodian. How can they determine merit all on their own, and avoid action by either affected party regardless of what they decide?

We love StoneLoops! We want it back immediately, but more than that — we need a better way for these disputes to be handled. Is there one?

[via AppAdvice, thanks Tyler!]

With Star Wars: Trench WarsTHQ Wireless is finally giving all of the Star Wars fans what seems to be a quality game based off of the classic films. To us it looks like a nice remake of the classic Star Wars arcade game.

Use the Force to overthrow the evil Galactic Empire as they attempt to destroy the small Rebel base on Yavins jungle moon. As part of the Rebel Alliances Red Squadron you dogfight with TIE Fighters above the Death Stars surface before heading into a trench where you are inundated by cannon fire. Dodge obstacles, and stay out of Darth Vaders sights as he tries to gun you down before you have the chance to fire your proton torpedoes into a thermal exhaust port the size of a womp rat. If successful, a direct hit will cause a chain reaction that destroys the Death Star, thus saving the Rebel base from impending doom.

While no price or exact release date has been given, the game is showing promise. I’ve grown up a fan of the Star Wars films and yes, the last three films were unfortunate but hopefully games like this will make us all feel a little bit better. Maybe?

[Via Touch Arcade]

One of the many, many “great unknowns” of Apple’s iPhone App Store is how the top-grossing list is calculated, specifically whether or not it factors in revenue from in-app purchases. While we could theoretically wait and see if, now that they too can use in-app purchase, a free app makes its way up the list, the folks at Freeverse wanted an answer now. And they think they’ve found it:

Top Grossing Freeverse Apps are Skee-Ball (#17), Flick Fishing (#97), and Top Gun. Now, interestingly, the Top Paid Apps Chart lists Top Gun as #60 and Flick Fishing as #72. How does this happen? The games are priced the same…but Flick Fishing features DLC. This leads us to conclude that the Top Grossing Apps list seems to include In-App Purchases in its calculations.

What if anything does this mean for developers? Will they be able to land on the Top Free and Top Grossing lists at the same time now? And so what if they do?

Interesting times…

[via Daring Fireball]