iPhone Development: Where is all the $$$

Hey guys,

So this is the first post we are doing that is more about developers than about developing. The Guardian put up a great article today talking about the app store, developers and what is driving sales. The app store has most certainly solidified itself, at least for the time being, as the most dominant mobile application distribution system; but what does the future of the “App Economy” look like?

The App Store is really unique in the tech world. There has never been anything that allows consumers and developers to have “instant” (sort of for developers) access to such a wide spread digital software storefront. The idea of a piece of software being an impulse buy didn’t really exist before the App Store, and it is interesting to study the evolution of the apps as well as the evolution of sales. Currently the big winner in app categories is games, little games especially. Got five minutes before that meeting? Pull out PapiJump or maybe Paper Toss. But these are fleeting. As the App Store gets older, apps will need to evolve in order to keep consumers spending.

A great example of that is a sponsor of our site. Right Signature allows users to send documents to people when a signature is required. This was all done through a web interface until they made their iPhone app. Now lawyers, business owners, anyone can be on the go and sign and return paperwork from anywhere. It is incredible how much time this saves compared to the traditional method of getting people to sign documents. Instead of Print, Mail, Sign, Mail Back; it is Email, Sign.

This is a great example of the internet integration that is going to be vital to most apps coming out. While the iPhone is a pretty incredible device it could never do any high level video processing or other processor intensive task. Thankfully, the internet allows the iPhone to act as a little window into whatever  you would like. You can use your servers to do all the processing and send the result back to the user. Imagine it like sending an SAT test to a tutor online and just getting back the answers. There was a lot of work involved in getting the answers, but in reality all the answers is not very much data.

This is one of the real problems with many new iPhone developers. New developers will get their Objective C down perfectly and suddenly realize that their needs to be a large web based aspect to their app in order to achieve the functionality they are looking for. Most of these “web based aspects” will be simple things, like a high score board for instance. However with a well structures web/iphone architecture you could have a large amount of your app be pulled from the web, allowing you to change your app without putting out a new release on the app store. This kind of approach I think should be utilized more for even small things in apps. If the background to a game or the logo of a game changed throughout the course of a year because the images were updated online, this would add some nice personality to some apps that you think have become stagnant. While this does alienate some of the iPod Touch users, a developer could ensure a complete app packadged up requiring no internet yet still incorperate this technique.

Coming up here on iCodeBlog we will be making a full app through several screencasts that we will put in the app store. Right now we are thinking of a small game, but we will make sure to include at lease one web based service within the app. Anyways, make sure to check out the Guardian Article. Great stuff. Thanks for reading and happy coding!