Digital Talent Agency

Apple hits 1 billion iPhone apps

CNN summarizing a solid amount of iPhone information.  Here are some highlights:

"With about 30-35 million iPhone and iPod touch devices in the market, that suggests the average person has downloaded about 30 apps. That’s a lot! Most mobile users download zero apps on their phones."

"Last summer, Apple sold one million 3G iPhones worldwide across 21 countries in the first 3 days on sale. During that same time, iPhone users made 10 million app downloads from the then newly launched iTunes App Store."

Here's the complete article.

iPhone Development in the NY Times

"There are now more than 25,000 programs, or applications, in the iPhone App Store, many of them written by people like Mr. Nicholas whose modern Horatio Alger dreams revolve around a SIM card. But the chances of hitting the iPhone jackpot keep getting slimmer: the Apple store is already crowded with look-alike games and kitschy applications, and fresh inventory keeps arriving daily. Many of the simple but clever concepts that sell briskly — applications, for instance, that make the iPhone screen look like a frothing pint of beer or a koi pond — are already taken.

The rush to stake a claim on the iPhone is a lot like what happened in Silicon Valley in the early dot-com era, said Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who oversees the iFund, a $100 million investment pot reserved for iPhone applications.

The mobile frenzy hasn’t gone unnoticed by other major cellphone and software companies. Last week, Research in Motion opened an application store for the BlackBerry. Google recently began selling applications based on Android, its operating system for cellphones. Nokia is in the early stages of opening a store for its handsets, and Microsoft is creating a store for phones running Windows Mobile."

Here's the complete article.

Even more important than the above article comes from the NY Times technology section: "Will the iPhone 3.0 Fuel a Second Gold Rush?"

"Apple’s new version of phone software, expected to be released publicly this summer, will allow developers to employ several new ways to monetize content and build new business models beyond mobile advertisements and charging a flat fee per download. In particular, developers will be able to sell subscriptions and allow users to make individual purchases from within the application itself.

Those changes might only benefit professional developers and larger gaming companies like Sega and Electronic Arts with the resources to deliver extras worth paying for, like secret gaming levels and expansion packs, warns Erica Sadun who has authored several books about coding for the iPhone, including one on the newest software changes.

“Right now, it’s pretty hard to make back your development cost at a $1 per application,” she said. “You have to sell quite a few applications to do that.” With the changes, she said, developers can still entice iPhone owners with a lower upfront price and introduce upgrades and offers within the application that will generate additional revenue over time."

Complete article here.

iPhone Application Insights

"Now that there are some 10,000 applications available at the App Store, it makes it much harder for new apps to be discovered, some developers say. Brandon Bogle, an engineer and a co-founder of the Blimp Pilots — an ad hoc group of iPhone-app creators, who are otherwise employed as game developers — said its hit app Koi Pond, which sold 600,000 copies, was simply in the right place at the right time. "We were lucky enough to get in on day one, when people could find us. There are so many good apps for the iPhone, the problem is that now it's so hard for them to rise to the surface." Bogle said he and his partners had no desire to quit their day jobs."

Insights on iPhone Apps, Pricing, Marketing, Adoption, and related here.

Here are to top downloaded paid and free applications on iPhone for 2008.  See the complete
list here.