Staying Afloat In a Sea of iPhone Apps 149
Burnsy writes "During all the hype of Apple celebrating its 1.5 billion iPhone App Store downloads, some good advice on how to be successful and stand out in the App Store came out. One story describes how developers are increasingly coming up with various strategies to make a splash, employing everything from temporary discounts to guerilla marketing tactics. On the other hand, some successful developers, such as the creator of the Flight Control app, which has been the number one selling app in 20 countries, talk about the pitfalls of Apple's approval process for the App Store. They say it can take a developer up to three months to get an application approved and distributed on the App Store and that maybe the iPhone bubble is soon to burst."
A related story at Wired points out that the games category — already crowded with over 13,000 entries — is getting even more competitive as the major game publishers push into the market.
No burst - phase change (Score:5, Insightful)
The App Store has a tremendous number of small apps that are minimally useful.
But it also has a small number off apps with deeper functionality that are really useful - and that subset of apps is growing, and will provide real value. Those apps are much harder to build. Those apps generally require infrastructure and marketing and all the things we traditionally think of with applications - this article hints at that as developers have discovered to sell a product they need, of all things, advertising!
Far from being an app bubble, we are simply seeing a transition into a more mature market with richer products. Because it's so easy and cheap to create apps I'm sure we'll always see a ton of simple apps, but the market will grow on from that base instead of contracting as the term "bubble" would imply. If nothing else, the soon to be flood of augmented reality apps and apps based around custom hardware will ensure that.
Re:No burst - phase change (Score:5, Interesting)
Far from being an app bubble, we are simply seeing a transition into a more mature market with richer products. Because it's so easy and cheap to create apps I'm sure we'll always see a ton of simple apps, but the market will grow on from that base instead of contracting as the term "bubble" would imply.
Quoted for truth.
One could have the exact same argument about the x86 Windows-based market in the 90's. So many applications popped up that the market was flooded; take CD burning applications, for example. Roxio, Nero, Sonic, CloneCD, Power ISO, Ulead... all applications vying for consumer attention that do the exact same thing. In the end, the competition just widens the field, increases choice, and spurs innovation, both in the software and advertising fields.
In the end I expect iPhone apps will be sold primarily by word of mouth.
Re:No burst - phase change (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, no kidding. After all those years of "There are no applications for Macs! Buy a PC!" in the press, now we get "There are too many applications for the iPhone, IS IT DOOMED?????"
Morons.
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And still Mac has only a fraction of software available for Windows.
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Think about how complex the PC and console gaming industry is... game developers rely heavily on reviews published on popular websites and in magazines, along with all of the advertising revenue they spend, and the money they spend to secure shelf space in retail stores, and even TV and radio advertising.
The App Store is just coming out of its infancy, where an app can shoot up in popularity simply by virtue of being the first of its type on the market, and almost all of the marketing was done by Apple. Sma
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Far from being an app bubble, we are simply seeing a transition into a more mature market with richer products. Because it's so easy and cheap to create apps I'm sure we'll always see a ton of simple apps, but the market will grow on from that base instead of contracting as the term "bubble" would imply
How is the phenomenon you're describing different from the internet bubble?
It's exactly the same (Score:2)
How is the phenomenon you're describing different from the internet bubble?
First, to be clear, I'm pretty sure you are talking about the .Com bubble. The internet is as it was, only moreso.
That said, this case is exactly the same as the .Com case - which supports my point.
Are there more, or fewer websites than during the dot-com boom? Is the internet used for more, or fewer things than it was then?
Sure pets.com is dead (thank god I got my sock puppet in time). But I can buy pet food from a number of plac
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You're right, but sadly (as with today's Android/Blackberry Google Voice announcement), almost all of those apps with deeper functionality will come out last for the iPhone until Apple starts to treat app vendors like partners, rather than serfs.
No Effect (Score:2)
You're right, but sadly (as with today's Android/Blackberry Google Voice announcement), almost all of those apps with deeper functionality will come out last for the iPhone
Since there's already an iPhone Google Voice App too [9to5mac.com] I predict it will have exactly zero effect on phone and/or app sales - and that we'll see ten more Google Voice apps on the iPhone before the year is out.
The iPhone market is simply too large and lucrative at this point to be anything but the primary development target, and that will on
Actual iPhone Developer Response only please (Score:2)
Also, any overall comments on unexpected difficulties and/or surprisingly nice aspects are welcome as well. Thanks!
Re:Actual iPhone Developer Response only please (Score:4, Interesting)
2. Download the free iPhone SDK. This SDK includes Xcode which is the IDE that most mac devs use the iPhone cocoa touch libs and an iPhone simulator app to test certain kinds of apps.
3. Learn Objective-C and Cocoa Touch libraries (plenty of books for this)
4. Pay Apple $99/year to test your apps on an actual device and sell your completed app on the App Store. 5. Profit!
Re:Actual iPhone Developer Response only please (Score:4, Informative)
What is involved in developing an application for the iPhone? Even just a simple Hello World app. What OS, programming language, IDE, emulator etc must you use to do the actual development?
I develop iPhone apps full time.
You need a Mac (any Intel mac will do, 2GB of memory), you use objective-C, the emulator and SDK are free to download when you sign up at . [apple.com]
For a Hello World app, you would literally create a project from a template and user Interface Builder (comes with XCode) to add a "Hello World" label.
Of course, real world programming gets more complex but anyone who has programmed for a bit can get used to Objective-C.
Also, any overall comments on unexpected difficulties and/or surprisingly nice aspects are welcome as well. Thanks!
When you want to actually build for a phone or touch, the main thing that can be confusing is the certificates - if you read the docs carefully though you'll be fine, they do a very good job explaining exactly what to do.
The nice aspect (for me) is that unlike any other GUI builder tool I've ever used in an IDE, I actually prefer to use the tool over just coding up the UI directly (though you can still do that too and sometimes that approach is useful). Also the ease with which you can add informative animation to an app (as opposed to just animating something because you can) is pretty nice.
On iTunes U, there's a free iPhone development course from Stanford. You could watch some of those classes to get a feel for what development is like.
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iFitness is a perfect example. That took a ton of work and research to build and provides good information, which is valuable and useful. 4.5 * apps are very rare and that's how it's done. There are roughly one bazillion apps that simply repackage google maps.
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In a broader sense, yes, most of the time. But not so much in this case.
The market for the apps is tiny, and very nearly 100% of the market can find your app and acquire it in seconds.
With that kind of market, with that kind of convenience, all you really need is word of mouth. And not much of it.
The best way to make an app popular is not to advertise it, but to make it so good that iPh?o(ne|d)
Word of mouth only goes so far (Score:3, Interesting)
and very nearly 100% of the market can find your app and acquire it in seconds.
Yes they can acquire it in seconds, a powerful force. That makes the job of advertising easier because you are that much closer to being able to obtain an app quickly when you hear about it.
But I very much disagree that they can *find* your app in seconds, because there are so many apps - they must generally know about your app or be searching on a keyword (which have been heavily salted by other apps trying to dry eyeballs) to
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You know what's really annoying me about the app store is these companies that make the stupid mmo games, and to a lesser degree, the ebook peoples.
In the first example, the mmo games, one company will churn out say 10-20 (I'm not exaggerating) variants of it, and stick it into all sorts of categories other than RPG. So when you go to find an actual RPG, or a strategy game, or whatever, you end up having to dig through the whole mess of them. and since there's easily a 6-10 of these develope
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Quoted for bullshit. There is ZERO incentive to create better quality apps and it will never happen unless Apple changes its marketing strategy.
Counterpoint: TomTom. Counterpoint: Various topo maps (one of which I just bought for $10).
There are good apps. There are more coming all the time. Apple's "marketing" has nothing to do with anything. It's all about app marketing.
As things stand, 3.0 and 3GS are irrelevant bullshit because you don't need either one to run the #1 smash hit app, Moron Test.
Som
So.... how many of them are worth using? (Score:4, Interesting)
300 notepad applications, only a couple are going to be worth installing, never mind paying for. The same will be true of any category.
Re:So.... how many of them are worth using? (Score:5, Funny)
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or J2ME or even Symbian. At least, there is free market I would say. There is no "app store" to say "duplicates functionality". It is USER who says "bleh, this sux" and presses C button on its icon to uninstall application. No harm done...
Apps like Profimail and Opera Mini proves that if you code a really good application, you stay on guys device and in case of Profimail, guy even pays for it. I picked these 2 because they are coded in J2ME instead of "native" Symbian C. You can`t believe how hard it is to
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Wouldn't he be talking about VI and Emacs then?
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What's a notepad application ?
Is it a note taking application ? .. a basic text editor ? ..An editor with support for programming languages or html ? ... or a rich text format editor ?.. Will it operate in a gui, or command line ? .. sure there is going to be some duplication of efforts, especially when there is a potential income to be had.. but the better ones will survive and the not so good will die out.
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This is why there are so many apps in the app store:
link to app store: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?id=298004712 [apple.com]
This guy, Kahlid Shaikh has 94 pages of apps, all of them complete rubbish. That is over 1488 absolute rubbish apps. He has a couple of people in Pakistan who push new ones out every day, they either display an rss feed, or a simple picture.
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Staying Afloat ? (Score:5, Funny)
There's an app for that !
as an end user.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's both incredibly awesome and incredibly frustrating at the same time. I love that I can think of something and sure enough, there's an app for it. But at the same time, sometimes there's 50 apps doing basically the same thing and it's hard to weed the chaff from the grain.
I don't think the bubble will burst, but it will level off some.
There's only so many people world wide willing to plunk down money on an iphone, but the people that have, it's not like they're gonna stop buying/downloading apps.
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Sort of like Windows?
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I think it means that Apple is going to have to develop a more sophisticated interface for browsing the App Store. With 65,000 apps available, you just know that most of that has to be shovelware.
approval process blues - developers causing it! (Score:5, Insightful)
as an iphone developer (http://www.mobile1up.com/) - one who has been there from quite early on, i have started to notice how long it takes to get approved. in the early days, it was 3-4 days for a new version or update; now, i have two applications waiting in the approval process, it has been over two weeks! is apple employing enough people? i think so. the issue is that you get morons who think they need to release a "special" version of their application 100 times; take, for example, there was a weather application posted recently - one for each city in the united states.. come on; how much wasted time is there for apple to approve all 100 of these apps - when they could have approved one. with the introduction of "nude or raunchy" content; submissions have increased exponentially; now you dont get a fart app - you get a fart app with a hot girl in it.
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Something must be done! Now what's this hot girl farting app you speak of? I'll pay $50 for one!
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Two Girls, One Cup of Refried Bean Dip
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For example, look at Nintendo during the NES/SNES eras. Apple should build an automatic scanner for malware and approve apps that are malware free in a matter of hours.
As a counter example, consider Atari before the crash of '83. There's a balance to be had between allowing everything and keeping out crap.
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There's a balance to be had between allowing everything and keeping out crap.
Unfortunately Apple's approval process is nowhere near that balance, and is moving further away from it. It doesn't keep out the crap, and cannot, as that's a very subjective judgement call, and not one that Apple tries to make - they ban apps for all sorts of silly reasons, but not because they are rubbish or useless (or we wouldn't have 100 flashlight apps).
Any non-automated approval process just isn't feasible when you have a worldwide store serving millions of people and 100,000 developers. This problem
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(though a limit of x no of apps per developer would do a lot to help to weed out all the crappy duplicate apps out there).
I'm not sure it would. I recall that Nintendo tried to pull that with the NES (only two games per developer per year), and all that ended up happening was either A) companies would have subcompanies that they stated weren't actually related to the main one, or people made and released "illegal" karts that were the X in 1s.
Of course, the App store won't suffer from the latter case (unless you're releasing to the jailbroken scene), but the first point could make things messy, as then Apple would have to try t
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It would prevent developers flooding the market with shoddy apps (I was thinking more like a limit of 10 per year or something) because it would impose a financial penalty for doing so. They wouldn't have to do anything save put a limit per developer account - if people choose to pay $99 again they're obviously serious about making money (and thus pleasing customers) and not just flooding the store with stuff that won't sell in the vague hope that some idiot will buy it.
Large companies are not the problem h
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The other reasons included competition and advertising for video game syst
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Yes, because an automatic malware scanner is possible to build. Oh wait, no, that would involve solving the halting problem.
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Are you telling there is no heuristics, code analytics, power analysis going on while application gets to the app store?
Apple also analyses the application in Sony way. Does it compete or would dare to compete with their iTMS? Would it take away people from iPhone services? Did Developer bitch about Apple or harmed Apple somehow in the past? iPhone developer scene publicly is just 5-10 heroic guys telling their mind and the rest are anonymous cowards for a good reason. Of course, those 5-10 guys are so adva
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Apple should build an automatic scanner for malware and approve apps that are malware free in a matter of hours.
How do you plan to scan an app for malware without either A. solving the halting problem [wikipedia.org] or B. wasting battery power on a more robust sandbox?
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Can you watch progress or know who actually approves your app? I mean, what if some MS certified idiot who somehow got the job at Apple doesn`t approve your application for no reason rather than not understanding what the heck it is or misunderstand?
For example, is there an interface saying "APP-291 rejected, reason 10023" or you just upload it and pray?
Trust me, if I was a Developer, I would always keep a Nokia 5800 (touch based Symbian) release maintained just in case. I understand there is no reason to s
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pretty much just upload and pray
after about a week (sometimes several months) you get a rejection email
that _will_ have a reason, but the reason may be factually incorrect.
I had an app rejected multiple times for 'having it's own javascript interpreter'
that just wasn't true
It took 7 months to get the app approved. Most of that was just waiting for apple to respond after a period of 'extended review'
Another app of mine has been sitting waiting to be approved/rejected for about two months.
Previously it was re
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I would love to pick your brain about developing an app, as a developer myself, I am looking to be able to do a few different things with my treo, if not my iphone, and I am wondering about finding someone like yourself, where I could ask very specific questions which only mobile developers would be able to answer!
Have any links or websites, I could send you emails to?
Thnk of it as free advertising as well!
: )
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It is backlog related to the iPhone 3.0 OS release. A lot of existing applications have been submitted with fixes/enhancements related to 3.0. Also Apple has a larger test suite to run against the application submitted, validating 3.0 and 2.x compatibility, etc.
As a guess... I give it another month or so for things to calm down.
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Frustrating For Developers (Score:4, Informative)
I recently updated one of my apps, and it took Apple 16 days to review the executable and publish it. I then updated my other app, and it took 14 days.
Seriously? 2 weeks? There is nothing more frustrating than to have users contacting me saying "when will feature xyz arrive?" and my response have to be along the lines of "I've submitted it to apple 2 weeks ago. They'll approve it when they approve it. There is nothing I can do to speed it up.
[Shameless Plug]:
For any who are interested, here are the apps I've written:
Velocity [apple.com]
Points [apple.com]
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We just got our first app approved, and it took 14 days. But hey, at least it wasn't rejected for some trivial reason like I've read happens to quite a few developers. It does appear somewhat of a black whole where you just wait and wait after rushing and staying up nights to finish - feels very anticlimactic once it's finally approved because you've waited so long. I'm not looking forward to pushing the next update and telling users to "just wait". Shameless plug: XPilot [7b5labs.com]
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You might want to put at least a short description of what those apps are and what they do. This is slashdot, where people don't even RTFA.
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Points [apple.com] is an acupuncture reference library, intended for students studying for boards, and for the experienced practitioner wishing for a quick review.
Re:Frustrating For Developers (Score:5, Informative)
Might I recommend that if you wish to provide a link to an iPhone app, don't link directly to iTunes. Not everyone has iTunes installed on every machine? (Last I checked there was no Linux version.) Instead provide a link to your app via AppBeacon [appbeacon.com].
For instance: Velocity [appbeacon.com]
They mirror the info iTunes provides, also providing a iTunes link. But that way I can review your app on my linux box and buy it directly, or buy it later on my mac laptop. (No, I don't work for AppBeacon, just a satisfied netizen.)
Re:Frustrating For Developers (Score:5, Funny)
But then... how would you live?
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But then... how would you live?
Quietly.
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Are you comfortable with public posting like that? It is not like you spread FUD or Spam of course but if you think about it, you don`t see or know who that "Apple guy" doing the approval is. What if he reads slashdot and say "Oh are you bitching? You will see what approval process is." and make you wait 5 weeks instead of 2?
I always admired the patience of developers, especially open source/freeware ones but app store really carries to some amazing degree.
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FlickTunes (website) [sogeekysoftware.com]
And yes, I did preview, just didn't test my own link. Doh.
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Yeah, unlike every other software out there, which takes months to be approved. Unless you are releasing it yourself. You are living in a dream world my friend, living in a dream world.
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Yeah, unlike every other software out there, which takes months to be approved. Unless you are releasing it yourself. You are living in a dream world my friend, living in a dream world.
I've written code for both large corporate (> 50,000 employees) environments and very small companies. I've never had to sit around and wait for 2 weeks for something I wrote to be approved, with no feedback or interaction in the approval process.
Perhaps I am living the dream, after all?
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There is no other platform (except perhaps consoles) where software has to be "approved" by another company. Comparing Apple's slow mandatory permission requirement, to a company's own internal approval process, is highly misleading. If any other hardware company did this, there'd be an uproar here on Slashdot, but because it's Apple, the RDF kicks into play.
When I publish an application for a phone such as my Motorola V980, I don't need to pay Motorola a penny, nor do I need a permission slip from them. It
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You can apparently also do this after the app has been released, but I haven't tried it.
Regarding your second point - yes, it is very hard for small entries to be noticed.
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If it never showed on the first page it is because you did not set the release date forward to the date apple approved it.
So many little, crying babies... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, it's too bad that it's harder to find good apps in the App Store when there are 50,000 than when there were 5,000.
But that only means you now have to work for your supper, like any one else who publishes anything from books to music to movies to software.
The same goes for those who complain that if they charge $50 for their app no one buys it.
Wow, welcome to the world of microeconomics and price theory. And, again, promotion.
Here's a clue: you don't have to use the app store as the only or even primary venue for promotion and discovery of your app. Yes, it's harder now than it was, but that's life in a competitive market place. The barriers to entry are lower than they've ever been for such an awesome platform, but that doesn't mean that becoming a success is any easier (nor should it be, if economic theory even kind of works as we understand it to) than it ever has been.
Frakin' cry babies. Suck it up, wipe off your crocodile tears, and make something awesome.
If you have anything legitimate to cry about it is Apple's dystopian app approval process.
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Yeah, it's too bad that it's harder to find good apps in the App Store when there are 50,000 than when there were 5,000. But that only means you now have to work for your supper, like any one else who publishes anything from books to music to movies to software.
Still, I think Apple could do better organizing the apps. For one thing, their categories are too vague. For example, the IM clients are all in "social networking" along with tons of other crap.
Since Apple is keeping tight control of distribution, I think they're somewhat obligated to make it easier for people to find what they're looking for, for the sake of both developers and customers.
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Yeah, they should have a 1000 different categories.
There is always a compromise, and that sounds like a good category for IM clients, it is exactly what they are.
tournament economics (Score:1, Insightful)
From what I have heard from the few people who made apps they made about $2/hour when you take into account how many hours they spent on it. Yes they still have the potential to be discovered and pull an iShooter which also seemed like a forgotten app but then made a strong comeback but it is like lottery odds for that to happen for most of the apps. A lot of the 3D games are semi-financed by tie-ins to movies so it is already very hard to compete in that arena. How are you going to beat $1-5/app high qua
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Personally I've had better luck with free apps.
Flash Banner [appbeacon.com] Took 2 hours to write, and has made over $200 though ads. (That's money transferred to me, not pending earnings)
Not much mind you, but still a decent return. (Minus the $99 dev fee of course)
There's a fair number of useless apps (Score:5, Informative)
Jailbreaking my iPhone in the first hour yielded me apps from Cydia that allow me to record video, tether my iPhone and most importantly blacklist callers and SMS. Just this morning I successfully got Perl 5.10 running on it.
Point is, just don't look to the App Store if you want something useful.
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Consider me old fashioned or some sort of militant person. I still keep staying away from iPhone since a device requires to be hacked to gather full functionality doesn`t make sense to me.
I keep my love-hate relationship with Nokia and Symbian instead while using some really good J2ME apps. Being an OS X user myself and knowing what can it actually do really bugs me more about iPhone. I was also heart broken when Apple decided to make some FUD about J2ME instead of simply saying "No, we don`t include it.".
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How did you manage that? When I plugged my iPhone into my Windows box, it appeared as a read-only camera. Same thing with my Linux box.
As far as I know, if you want to put anything onto an iPhone, you have to be using iTunes, and one is subject to its limitations. Same goes for bookmarks - everybody talks about sorting bookmarks - ehhh.. only if you sync them with Safari. Otherwise, you can sort SOME bookmarks, so long as they aren't the preloaded forced-upon-you bookmarks like "Google" "Yahoo" and "iPh
Graphics Designer's point of view (Score:1, Interesting)
Simplest solution: Market expansion! (Score:2)
Make your app run on Symbian and possibly J2ME too, and gain up to 5000% from the approx. 2% global market share of the iPhone. :)
(No, iPhone fans, I am not playing this down. I respect the iPhone for what it is. It's just that its global market share is really tiny. I wish your hopes all the best. But with statements like "Java is dead", and being the only phone to not have it, Jobs is not making many friends. ^^)
Sure it may be outside of the box of what you expected as an answer. But it's not a bad idea i
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Java is alive and well on phones. The AmazeGPS app I started 3 hours ago should be coming up any time now on my LG phone... hopefully the bluetooth (for the GPS Puck) isn't bugging out necessitating me to restart it ...
what a fantastic idea (Score:2)
What a fantastic idea...
But is a Symbian, Blackberry or G1 fast enough to run my physics based 3d games at better than a 30 fps frame rate? Yea I though so...
BTW, my games also require access to a accelerometer.
Let me get started right away porting my stuff over to java!
App Store promotion isn't the solution (Score:2)
Increasingly the App Store will become more like Amazon, with it's billions of items for sale. It will contain references from one product to another, it will contain suggestions based on the user's preferences and purchase history, but overall the App Store will cease to be the only way people market their apps.
Remember all the other ways there are to make sure people are aware of your iphone app. The larger developers, and the larger clients (like Barnes and Noble and State Farm) already know this and mar
Craig Hockenberry: Year 2 (Score:2, Informative)
Upgrades (Score:2)
Upgrades: currently there is no upgrade revenue...
Actually that is no longer true with the in-store purchase option. If you wish to be paid for updates, that's now an option as long as you run them through that mechanism (though that' only data updates, you can still write code that the data updates enable latent features).
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Unfortunately, that's a hack, and a kludgy one at best. I don't wat to start having apps update by an entire version number while pretending to be the last version -- would you want Office 2007 downloading a "patch" that's actually the full binary of Office 2010, laying dormant on your hard drive until you pay to unlock it?
Hockenberry is right on just about every point and Apple would do well take that criticism to heart if they want to keep WebOS' inevitable growth coming out of Windows Mobile defectors in
approval process (Score:2)
As a customer of these apps, I DON'T CARE how long the approval process takes, I might even LIKE it.
I *love* the fact that apple is looking at what is being written into these apps!! I don't want harmful or risky stuff to get on my phone, and if something bad happens, I want them to have the ability to do something about it.
If the approval process takes a long time, maybe it will also make people think carefully before they send send an update to apple.
I especially think that apple should slow down develop
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Others can and do run similar stores... See the nokia store, RIM's store and the Android store.
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But RIM BlackBerry developers are not required to use RIM's store to distribute their apps. They can (and do) distribute them directly.
And 3rd parties (i.e. Mobihand/Crackberry) have created their own app stores too, which are probably more usable than RIM's implementation.
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Quite, which is just more evidence that apple is not being anticompetitive.
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No it's not at all. You have the choice of who to buy ink from. This may involve some prerequisites, like owning the right printer to take the ink.
Similarly, I can buy a car bonnet if I have a bump from any car maker, but that doesn't mean that a porshe one is going to fit on my Skoda.
None of these are monopolies, there's lots of people out there competing, and the fact that some of them are on certain types of phones makes no difference to that.
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That's the Apple business model. They're not about letting others play as a means to control user experience. If M$ built a winPhone many companies could sell apps through several channels. The trade off would be that M$ couldn't guarantee/control what happened on those sites. If you want a gimped system that "just works", go with Apple. It you're feeling lucky there's everyone else.
Personally, i like the M$ model of letting others play. Windows created shit tons of jobs despite the quirkiness of thei
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you're a dumbass (Score:2)
This is competition, not being anti-competitive. Every company that sells trademarked or patented products has a product "monopoly". Do you also bitch & moan that you can't play Wii games on your XBox?
When, and only when, Apple obtains a market monopoly can you have some cheese to go with that whine.
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They're okay - the rules apply to companies that have a monopoly in the market, not to niche players like Apple.
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I'm pretty sure the FLOSS community will continue to develop what is worth, and for free
I highly doubt that, apart from jailbroken iPhones. Windows CE has approximately zero free software after more than 10 years. I use zero free software applications from the App Store. I use a couple of gratis applications, but those are add-supported and the source is neither available nor open.
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What kind of free software (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the FLOSS community will continue to develop what is worth, and for free
How? The most popular copyleft software license, the GNU General Public License, is incompatible with the iPhone SDK license. Are you talking about MIT/BSD style permissive licensing of free software instead of copyleft?
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Apparently plainly self-promoting is now considering trolling. Oh well.
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I think we have about 1200 apps sitting in the review queue.
Use the submit form on the website and put in there attention T. J. Brumfield and I'll look for it.
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You are part of the problem, this is shit, and your deceptive marketing practice is annoying as well.
You won't go far, because you app is complete rubbish.
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Why would you mention other people apps, which have nothing to do with your own, in your description?? It is to turn up in as many searches as possible. This is deceptive marketing.
We are nasty because we are sick of people using these techniques, dodgy advertising and lying to people.
Maybe in white middle class suburbs that's true (Score:2)
Never seen a female developer.
The fiance of friend of mine is a total hottie and she owns and runs a whole development shop. She can move aside a programmer when the job isn't being done up to her alarmingly high specs and get it done herself in half the time. Think, "Geek Bond Girl". Then get out more before assuming you know what reality looks like. With a bit of exploring, one learns that most fictional accounts of the world aren't half as astonishing as the real thing.
-FL