Staying afloat in a sea of iPhone apps
- 15 July, 2009 11:32
The OzWeather iPhone app
Just how lucrative is the iPhone App Store for a business in application development? Is it easy to achieve success or is money on app development better spent elsewhere? The top Australian iPhone app developers speak exclusively to Computerworld about success in the iPhone App store.
Just one year on from launching its App Store, Apple has announced that some 1.5 billion applications have been downloaded worldwide from its site, the largest of its kind.
Since its launch in July last year, the App Store has exploded from an offering of 500 third-party apps, to more than 65,000, and more than 100,000 developers participating in the iPhone Developer Program.
Ranging from free to no more than $10, iPhone owners can download just about any conceivable application, from a moron test to run tracker.
While it's clear that there is strong demand from consumers for applications, just how easy is it to profit as a developer of iPhone apps?
Graham Dawson, creator of the OzWeather application, had already been working on weather related projects on the Web when a colleague suggested he try for the soon to be launched iPhone App store. About three months of hard work later, Dawson had his first application debut in the App Store within a week of its opening.
A year on, OzWeather is now a fixture on bus stop billboards, and the application has been downloaded over 40,000 times. Dawson attributes this success to his early start in the App Store race.
“The App Store is so much more crowded now," Dawson said. "I think there were less than 10,000 applications when OzWeather was launched, so now, obviously, visibility is a lot lower.”
Cairns-based Web developer Travis Yates of Webtopia, developed a Blackjack card counting app as an extension of his much loved hobby. While delighted with the media attention he has received for his popular app, he believes the over-crowding in the App Store since its invention will hurt his future chances of striking it rich.
“It’s really dried up now; there’s just so much competition at the moment with thousands of apps in there, and it’s getting really difficult to get noticed,” Yates said.
Being noticed, however, is something Yates has grown used to, with the gaming authority of the entertainment capital of the world -- Sin City -- noticing his app.
The Nevada Gaming Control Board, which oversees casinos in Las Vegas, plucked Yates’ app out of obscurity and gave him global media attention when the authority issued an alert to the Las Vegas casinos warning of the iPhone app.
Yates first heard of all the fuss when he received an email from a journalist requesting comment. The subsequent media frenzy bagged him $10,000 during the week following the story, but sales have since dwindled.
“The attention was exciting but nerve-wracking," he said. "I was worried about what the casinos thought of it and whether I would be in trouble. It was exciting to see all the publicity making the sales grow, but nervous.”
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Deciding what applications are hot or not is something that keeps iPhone developers up at night. Developers can make a small fortune if their apps are picked up and promoted well in the App Store, while others may never see the light of day.
According to OzWeather's Dawson, Apple's emphasis on promoting cheap, quick-fix, short-term novelty applications in the App Store is affecting developers' ability to produce higher quality applications which focus on usability.
“There is a risk of a kind of a bubble here," said OzWeather's Dawson. "Apple could put more emphasis on applications that cost a bit more other than relying purely on the number of total applications that are downloaded, because that favours the cheapest possible applications, and the most faddish ones then do very well and go to the top.”
Dawson says to achieve success in the App Store, developers need to focus on producing apps which are attention-grabbing, but still useful.
“People have loads of ideas and some of them flop completely, so it’s very important that you have something that’s very suited to being on a mobile device, something that people need to get instant access to and work with quickly,” he said.
While anybody can potentially jump into iPhone app development, Dawson warns that like software development for any other platform, it helps to have a bit more background and grounding in the processes and languages used in development.
“Getting into developing and releasing a program commercially obviously requires a bit of practice and skill," he said. "Whilst there may be some very intelligent people who can jump in and do it, it’s probably unrealistic to be able to expect most people to do that.”
Rob Kingma, director of sales and marketing at ICT Networks, develops security-based iPhone applications for one of the big four banks. He says that while the iPhone apps environment wasn’t initially designed for corporate apps, the marketing components of corporate organisations have seen the value of being able to get their brand within the App Store.
By taking their Internet banking platforms to the iPhone, banks have been able to utilise the functionality that’s provided by the iPhone, especially the GPS locator, which provides banks with the opportunity to offer their customers services such as a mobile branch locator.
“Corporate opportunities within the App Store come from companies being able to provide an additional service or an extension of mobility of their services out to users,” Kingma said.
Regardless of what type of application a developer toils over, games undoubtedly underpin much of the App Store catalogue. Gaming applications hold the largest proportions of sales, and there is no limit to the number of games iPhone buffs might want to play.
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Melbourne-based game developer Firemint has been developing mobile phone games since 2002 and hit success in March this year with the development of Flight Control, a strategic flight simulation game.Developed by Firemint's CEO, Rob Murray, Flight Control has been the number one selling app in 20 countries, and currently sits at number one in Australia. Like Yates, Murray developed his highly successful app as a work of passion.
“I liked the idea of applying a drawing game to something because I like the iPhone’s touch screen interface,” Murray said.
“I examined the market and there wasn’t really much out there in terms of air traffic control. We thought that this game was a winner in the sense that people could really love it and get addicted to it, but we didn’t know how it would go.”
As far as the timing goes, Murray says any success related to time was a fluke, such a fluke in fact, that Murray’s company Firemint was in a scurry to promote its new app once it found out the app had been approved by Apple, and released in the App Store.
The App Store's approval process is a bone of contention amongst local iPhone app developers, whose ultimate goal is to get promoted by Apple in the Top 100. When developers submit apps to Apple for approval, they include a suggested release date. However, if Apple cannot approve the app in time, it can potentially be buried among the just released list.
Yates, whose Blackjack application was promoted by the media attention it received, rather than by Apple, says it’s very hard to know how Apple’s review process for the App Store works, resulting in an element of pure chance or luck in receiving exposure.
“The main frustration is not being aware of the processes and not knowing what you need to do to get your app promoted by Apple," he said. "Different apps take longer to review than others and I’ve had an app that took such a long time to review that in the meantime someone came up with an app similar to mine.”
It can take a developer up to three months to get an application approved and distributed on the App Store, so the strategies they employ to get their apps noticed are vital for success.
“At the moment App Store approvals are backed up in the US because of the pure volume. So being able to actually get a higher level of service from Apple because of a corporate status is one of those strategies,” says ICT Networks’ Kingma about the advantage for developing apps for the corporate sector.
"There are certain sectors of the market where it does make a lot of sense to be seen as part of the iPhone scene,” Kingma said. “There’s no question that the iPhone’s bubble will stay in place for some period of time, but the question is how long it will last.”