- July 24, 2008
- Posted by: admin
- Categories: Agile Applications, Blog
Apple reported iPhone sales reaching 1 Million this week and users downloaded more than 10 million applications from Apple’s new App Store. Do you see a growing trend of iPhone Applications in US and Europe ?
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I see great prospects in these categories:
1. Applications that are connected to database services such as electronic parts catalog databases or some other knowledge sources in the fields of medicine or law.
2. Applications that bring your information already available in other platforms to mobile devices (From such as SAP, Facebook, Sharepoint. Lotus Notes, any other CRM)
3. Applications that bring people together such as location aided buddy lists, dating, “Smart Mobs” or applications that are targeted to harvest the wisdom of crowds.
4. Games and any sort of other entertainment should always be in any list like this.
I see little or no prospect in applications that are designed for creativity (Graphical design, musical instruments, word processing, or even spread sheets).
I develop for WinMobile, Symbian, PalmOS and most recently iPhone and have been in the mobile market for many years. The short answer to your question is ABSOLUTELY – for several reasons:
1. Most importantly, every iPhone user has (and knows that they have) a data plan. This eliminates the fear of additional charges for downloading software. This has eliminated one of the major hurdles we faced at Handango (overall customer participation) on Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian.
2. Also very important, the store is right at the users’ fingertips. Getting a typical user to purchase software on their desktop and then download to the phone through a USB connection has always been and will always be clunky and eliminate many potential buyers.
3. Apple is handling the transactions. There is no credit card information entered into the phone, which is perceived as less secure than a desktop computer (though in fact the opposite is true). There are no chargebacks to developers, and more importantly there is no risk to developers of customer credit card information being stolen from them, which cannot be overstated in today’s world. Apple’s 30% of the transactions is well warranted, especially on the lower priced software, which would generally cost developers $0.40-$0.50 per transaction plus the monthly fees if they ran it themselves.
4. Location aware products are very popular and even original iPhones can get their approximate location using triangulation of cell towers and WiFi access points. No other platform can claim this functionality on all their devices, so iPhone OS will be a natural place for location based applications to start on or be ported to.
5. The user base will be huge. It’s already good, but with the iPhone 3G at the $199 price point, the price of entry is low enough that it’s getting close to an impulse buy. AT&T and other carriers still have their head in the sand on what they’re charging for the monthly data plans and drastically need to lower those monthly fees to be more appealing to a typical consumer, but they will eventually figure this out, and when they do there will be an even bigger influx of users (possibly as high as 45 million by some estimates) to the OS.
So if you’re a development company or an individual developer, iPhone is a smart platform to develop for. Certainly they have taken most of the hurdles that normally hinder mobile development and made them painless. Objective C must be learned, but there are good tutorials to help and the market should be strong and growing for the next few years at least.
Cheers,
Tim
The truth is, the iPhone 3G launch went over so well that I don’t believe that even Apple predicted it. The launch of Mobileme (The web based service for remotely syncing contacts etc. between iPhone, Mac, and PC,) brought in so much business that the servers are still down 2 weeks later.
Apple simply does not yet have the capacity to deal with the current rate of expansion of their marketshare. They have recently launched so many products that have no comparison available (iPhone 3G, Mac Pro, Mobileme, iTunes store DRM content,) that they are risking setting themselves back by not getting the business framework, service network, ancillary staff, and outsourcing that they need online quicker.
So, YES, iPhone applications are growing. The real question is, does Apple have the ability to survive the growing pains, successfully launch products, and finally take their share of the market?
That remains to be seen, but if Microsoft tries to perpetrate another Windows Vista on the general public, Apple’s attention will be shifted firmly onto desktop products for a while. Keep in mind, HP had a 3-year head start in the MP3 player market, and Apple won. Apple never sold a single song before mid-2003, and beat WalMart and Amazon handily by Jan, 2008. Microsoft is almost certainly on borrowed time.
Links:
* http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/
* http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/07/11/iphone.sales.ap/index.html?imw=Y&i…
* http://www.artistshousemusic.org/news/apple+wins