No Comments// Posted in Uncategorized, mobile, technology by joshpc on 09.06.09.

I recently came across a TechCrunch article that shows that the average iPhone user spends about $80 on applications.  I actually find this number a little high from personal experience…  If I look back at the list of iTunes receipts I’ve received it appears that I’ve only spent about 40-50 dollars (Canadian, of course) on applications and I buy a lot of them.  I guess I’m just not that big of a power-user.  However what is not surprising from the article is that people are cheap.  The average price of the purchased applications is just above a dollar while as the median price is $0.99.  For such a “high end” device, the price of its applications are nothing but underwhelming.  There are a few exceptions to the rule such as the Tom tom navigator, but those are few and far apart.

I personally believe that if the average (or even median) price of purchased applications is the rock bottom price of $0.99 that there is little to no value in developing high-quality applications.  The real value in the platform shifts from high quality suites and power-tools to developing small utility applications that perform small tasks very well.  I see it as moving from a John Deere to a awesome hoe.  Sure the new hoe is shiny and does its thing, but the John Deere will give you more in the end run.  As a result of this shift in development, there are a lot of apps on the AppStore (the last numbers show that there are over 65,000 of them…).  Although this model gives small, independent developers a great chance at getting into the market at little to no cost (given the short duration of the development cycles), it’s not that encouraging since sales tend to be low.  By not properly marketing (which costs time and money) it’s very easy for an application to fall into obscurity and never sell.

That being said, I believe that we need a better App Marketplace.  We all hear wild tales of certain extreme successes but we rarely hear of the poor sales numbers of all of the other applications.  I think this is a result of a few factors but mainly due to the price.  Cheaper applications mean shorter development cycles and smaller applications.  This may be more ideal for mobile platforms, but this causes an inundation of applications and makes it more difficult to identify quality applications from the crap applications.  It’d be nice if we had an application marketplace that helped emphasize products that people want to charge for.  We would see more quality products; no one wants to spend $5+ on a lame application that farts.  We would see people investing more thought and time into their applications and not just rush to release an application, hope they get in the top 25 and then work from there.  We would enjoy our phones more (at a small price).

There is a lot of room for improvement in the following areas:

• Allowing developers to charge for more without being penalized.  It appears that sales, and almost only sales, dictates how applications are ranked.  Additional emphasis on alternate rating systems (perhaps different ‘top 25 lists’) is much desired.  The main goal here is to get quality applications across all domains.
• Targeted applications.  Personally, I’m interested in getting high quality applications that fit my specific needs.  It’d be nice if I could subscribe to specific tags and receive notifications (either individual or digest format) about new and hot applications.
• Recommendations.  Recommendations are always good.

The bottom line is, there are a ton of problems with the AppStore (some of which I did not elaborate on such as the rejection length and submission process) but they’re all fixable.  A better AppStore will only result in a more happy and loyal userbase.  Sure all of this is pretty obvious, but we haven’t really seen it happen so…

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