Apres Apple, Le Deluge
by Ewan Spence
Russell Beattie has asked if the deluge of applications into Apple’s iPhone store is going to cause a drop in quality, and I tend to agree with him. Not because the really good applications won’t be submitted, but because of a land-rush of developers that are going to be swarming towards the iPhone platform to try and get a foothold in the early software market. If they can capture attention then it’s likely that they can build on that and develop some solid applications.
But to do that, you need volume to be noticed, partly because of the volume of applications that are being approved for the store (some 65 per day) means it is going to be hard to get noticed, and that means you’ll need more needles in the rapidly growing haystack.
The big winner of course is Apple, with each of these developers paying their $100 for the tools to code on the platform. Far from me to suggest that Apple is getting rich on the dreams of others, but that’s a lot of $100, even if you make the far fetched assumption that each developer gains enough sales to make it back (and if they do, well Apple will have their cut of the sales as well to continue to earn for them).
So will Apple do whatever it takes to keep pushing the App Store, and keep the good apps and success stories to the front of the store like the Casino owners in Vegas handing pictures of Ten Million dollar cheques to the Strip’s constant flow of tourists? I think so. Will they address the problem of more and more ‘basic’ applications in the database? I very much doubt that. Beyond the occasional deletion for ‘triviality purposes’ to keep everyone on their toes they’d rather have the volume to shout about, and the success stories to promote, and let people’s “I can beat the odds” bring them towards one of the smaller platforms in today’s current market.
PS… in that post’s comments, someone has pointed out an HTML version of the store if you want to go exploring from your browser. http://app-store.appspot.com/ could be useful for some of you…
