All Articles Tagged app store

Time.com begs the question as to whether consumers would be, and should be, willing to pay for App Store apps:

So why can’t all iPhone apps be free? Well, quite simply, because people are still willing to pay for them.

Er… No. All apps can’t be free because all developers don’t get free housing, food, and a healthy cash allowance for themselves and their families to live off of while they develop all these fantastical free apps.

It’s the same reason why the Time.com writer probably doesn’t work for free, even though the web page containing the article has advertising on it.

There will, no doubt, be tons of apps offered for free. We’ve already heard about Apple’s iTunes remote as well as free apps from Ebay and AOL AIM from the looks of the recent Guided Tour video. These will all be released because their business model supports releasing them for free. Their companies feel that they will either be able to generate sufficient revenue from other sources (like advertising, or paid pro versions) or are willing to eat the cost as part of their marketing (hoping it will serve as a loss-leader to drive the products or services that really pay their bills).

Personally, I’d love apps to be free. I’d love gas to be free. I’d love a new Mac Pro to be free. But it’s really economics 101 at work here, isn’t it?

I’m sure I’ll find a free app or several that’ll be useful, just as I’m sure I’ll find some commercial apps I feel are worth paying $9.99 (or whatever) for. And if I don’t think a particular app is worth paying for, I just won’t buy it. Simple as that.

What about you? Do you think there will be some apps worth paying for?

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The App Store will officially launch alongside the iPhone 3G on July 11th, but what’s going to be available? We’ve seen the highlights. Super Monkey Ball. Ebay. Twitteriffic. Loopt. But a handful of Apps do not a Store make. Apple will need some volume and to get it… they’ve imposed a deadline!

Yup, of the fraction of developers who’ve been accepted into the program, only those who have their final release uploaded to Apple’s servers by 12PM PDT on July 7th will be eligible for App Store launch. (And even then, there’s no apparent guarantee Apple will approve you in time for that most auspicious of occasions.)

Quality apps will certainly be vital to the App Store’s success, but is Apple cutting things (and developers) too close?

Who am I kidding, while this may inconvenience journalists overeager for early reviews, as long as consumers can hit the icon and get their monkey ball on, all will be right in App land. Right?

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It’s not an unfamiliar story in web-commerce. Have an Amazon Associate account, a Google Adsense account, or other types of referral or revenue-sharing arrangements with the Big Boys, and if you want a check (or sometimes even a direct deposit), you have to wait until you have a minimum amount of money built up (often around $100). Why? To minimize the overhead for processing and cutting checks, and the banking fees involved.

Now TUAW reports that Apple is RUMORED to be setting their minimum transaction fee to $250. Since developers get 70% of the sale price, this means they have to sell $375.14 worth of their App before Apple sends them their $250 cut. That’s 376 $1 Apps, 38 $10 Apps, 4 $100 Apps, etc.

TUAW thinks, while this is good for Apple, it’s bad from the indie developers’ point of view, and will make the barrier of entry too high for some.

I’m not so sure. Any developer expecting to earn decent money off the App Store will either be pricing themselves high enough to do so at lower volumes, or going for high enough volume of sales at a lower price that, either way, they’ll be blowing past the minimum.

If a developer isn’t doing it for money, well then they’ll be giving it away for free or won’t really care if it takes them longer to get to the minimum processing level.

One of the worst things, not just from Apple but from a consumer’s point of view, is for the App Store to get flooded with a bunch of cr@pware that makes sorting a pain and buying a chore. This raises the bar just enough to make sure there’s a certain level of seriousness in both development AND business plans.

(Freeware cr@pware may likely be avoided by restricting access to the App Store entirely…)

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Accidentally fall asleep when developers went over 190832 apps during the keynote? Numb your mind and index finger by maddeningly refreshing your browser? Miss all the apps that were showcased in the iPhone? Fear not, TiPb will give you a quick nitty gritty update on the lot.

• eBay – A fairly basic eBay app that didn’t really showcase any advancements from the basic web app. Sure it was nice and integrated but really, isn’t an eBay webapp good enough? Certainly, they could have gotten someone better to demo their app.
• Loopt – A location-based social networking application. Now this is kind of cool, it displays your friend’s location on a map and works with other platforms. Basically, I imagine it to be similar to Boost Mobile’s Where You At?
• TypePad – A mobile blogging app that is pretty straightforward. The interface looked similar to the iPhone’s E-mail client and well, at least you can add photos via camera or photo roll
• Mobile News Network – Basically enables viewing videos and pictures of news stories from various sources. It also allows you to directly report the news if you have a first hand account of something
• Band – This is a fun app, basically a collection of virtual instruments: piano, drums, bass, 12-bar blues ‘instrument’. I’ve seen iterations of ‘Band’ in the jailbreaking scene and it makes for good fun
• MLB.com – This app is nice! It gives iPhone users direct access to video highlights right after they happen! It also displays a live detailed scoreboard for quick updates on baseball games.
• Modality – A medical application used to easily learn names of body parts, etc. Mildly useful for me, incredibly useful for doctors I presume
• MIMvista – Another medical application that takes advantage of the iPhone’s screen to zoom in, out, and scroll around. Basically, an interactive way to view medical imagery?

Whew, that was a lot of Apps to go through. It goes to show the versatility of third party applications and how far it can push the iPhone into becoming a true ’smartphone’. Best of all, many of those apps were priced as FREE. Now hopefully we can get to play with these apps ourselves instead of watching them on a 60 foot screen.

Honestly, its like one of those TV cop shows where the tip lines are finally thrown wide open and everyone and their alien-proof tinfoil hat starts flooding with the calls…

First up is Engadget bringing word that the Australian NDA box and the Gizmodo iPhone (Red) and related images mentioned previously are, to quote Elaine from Seinfeld: “Fake, fake, fake… fake…“

Next up both DaringFireball and the Macalope heckle the comedy stylings of the CNN/Dow Jones-come-lately Apple pundits and their… er… seeming total lack of anything approximating industry-required knowledge:

Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple’s standoff with Adobe that’s kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos. Apple has said that Adobe’s flash media player, which is on hundreds of other phones, doesn’t perform up to Apple’s standards for the iPhone.

Confusing NAND flash-memory storage with Adobe Flash video, eh? Gruber hits with some “flash bulb” mockage, while the ‘lope gets closer to my heart with some Barry Allen and Gordon style “Flash” comic reference. Luckily, no one went with the sleazier, if more obvious, trench-coat and goulashes-style “Flasher”…

Lastly, Apple Inside claims Apple is pushing developers to charge for what the developers want to offer as free applications, if not now than sometime in the future. Some suggest this is an effort by Apple to cover the bandwidth and transaction costs of the App Store. I don’t buy it. They give away tons of free, bandwidth intensive content on iTunes already like HD video podcasts.

The rumor seems to say Apple is pushing for dual versions, limited-functionality free versions as demos, with full versions as commercial — paid for — apps.

Uh… That’s pretty much the share-ware model already…

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) is running some screen shots of what may well be our first glimpse of the iPhone’s App Store.

Pretty much what you’d expect if you combined the Wi-Fi Music Store with apps, the shots came TUAW’s way via a tipster. Seems said tipster claims that, after repeatedly stabbing away at the App Store button (does that mean he was running the SDK beta??) and failing to connect, lo and behold he got through.

UPDATE: iPhone l33t hax0r Erica Sadun went poking around the storeBag.xml from Apple’s public iTunes server and found the following:

There appears to be a new service, labeled “p2-panda” [note: p2 might stand for "purple", the iPhone code name] that offers access to the same functionality that Cory reported on last night. Specifically, the panda calls include StoreFront listings, Genres, Top Fifty listings, and Updates. If nothing else, this independently confirms functionality seen from those screen shots.

Be sure to check out her complete post for more geeky goodness!