The iPhone SDK ecosystem
If there’s one thing we can say about Apple, it’s that the company knows how to launch a product and affect an entire industry. Wether it is in 2001 with the iPod, in 2003 with the iTunes (Music) Store or in 2007 with the iPhone, Apple has been making a big impact in the consumer electronics world these past few days.
Some of my current iPhone apps
The lastest proof of that is the Application Store for the iPhone platform (including iPod Touch). I’ve been buying a lot of stuff in there these past few months, but it’s evident that there’s a lot of quality software in there. I still remember the not so distant days when I was trying to buy Palm OS applications on Handango or worse still, Blackberry apps two years ago.The App Store has really changed everything in that regard. Just take a look at the launch for the Palm Pre— the first thing Palm did was to say there would be an integrated App Store at launch. Google did the same when it launched the Android platform a few months ago.
While there’s a lot of free applications in there, there’s also a ton of paying ones too and their associated success stories we’ve been hearing these past few days (iFart for example). The $0.99 price point is proving to be quite popular and quite a money maker. If you rank #1 in the iTunes Store on any given day, you are probably selling around 15-18K copies of your software per day. If you consider that most of these apps are developed by a single person or a very small team, it doesn’t take a long time to recoup your investment.
If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch (and who doesn’t these days?), check out the “Best iPhone games” according to TouchArcade or maybe even the best iPhone apps ever or, better yet, my list of favorites:
- Crayon Physics Deluxe (amazing physics simulator in a game)
- FieldRunners (desktop tower defense done well)
- Labyrinth (best demo of the iPhone accelerometer I’ve found)
- Now Playing! (movie theater schedules — free)
- Rolando (A PSP-like level of quality in an iPhone game)
- Tweetie (so far, the best Twitter application)
- Things (goes perfectly with the desktop version)
