Happy 2nd Birthday iTunes App Store!
2 years ago today Apple launched the iTunes App Store and it's safe to say the mobile world hasn't been the same since.
1 year ago the iTunes App Store had 1+ billion downloads and 56,000+ apps, added turn-by-turn navigation, in-app purchases, and other new features.
Today there's 5+ billion downloads and 225,000+ apps (including over 8500+ ipad apps), along with $1 billion paid out to developers, iAds, and multitask, among other things.
And it shows no sign of slowing down.
There are still issues with the app approval process to be sure, and Apple has wedged HTML5 every so slightly into the app spotlight. Never mind every competing OS, manufacturer, and carrier is falling all over themselves (and each other) to launch and grow app stores of their own -- and some like Google's and Palm's are showing ever increasing and innovating results.
Overall, however, with the gateway device that is the iPod touch, the mobile mainstream converger that is the iPhone, and the bigger world that is the iPad, if anything it's getting faster.
What will we see next, iOS apps on a new Apple TV? Replacing Dashboard and Front Row on the Mac? And what will Apple bring next March is iOS 5?
Jeff Scott from 148apps thinks iOS could hit 35 billion downloads next year. That sounds crazy, but 5 billion sounded crazy just a couple years ago. (And if it's true, I think we're going to need a bigger cake.)
So happy birthday iTunes App Store, congratulations on 2 great years. We can't wait to see what you've got in store for us next.
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler. Follow him on Twitter @reneritchie
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People should remember that the business environment for 3rd party apps and 3rd party developers was basically withering on the vine and dying prior to the app store phenomenon. It was downright ugly.
It's gotten so much better today, so much more meritocratic, so much more money, that I don't think we remember how bad it was prior to the app store model.
Users and developers have nothing to complain about. They won. The only losers are the carriers, who thought they rented phones, not sold, to customers and thought they owned every bit of data that went in and out of the phones.
@Shrike
Developers won? Not so fast
http://tinyurl.com/26q39u8
@Jimbo
Did you actually read that? I guess you also voted for Obama because an article on the Internet told you to.
@Jimbo
Tomi T Ahonen is your typical snake oil salesman, ie, consultant, trying to sell himself. He's chosen his vector and will sell it to the utmost until it stops making him money. He thinks SMS and MMS services would be the better way to go, but that's just stupid Highlanderism. One chooses the field in which to play, no need to be exclusive about it.
In the grand scheme of things, developers won. The app store field is as close to a meritocracy as one can get, where the little guy can compete with the big boys on mostly the quality of their application. He or she is given the chance to compete. He or she is given the chance to fail. Most of them do, but that's normal life.
Comparatively in the non App store world, especially in pre-iPhone app store, developers had to navigate a wild jungle (carrier deals, multiple devices, multiple platforms, multiple development environments, poor tools, cut throat publishers, marketing and advertising sinkholes; hell, J2ME!) if they wanted to sell an app or service. The barrier to even compete was ridiculous, temperamental, and basically ugly for developers to play in. Developers just don't like that part of the business. Thus, the mobile app business was withering pre App store models.
@Chris
+1 for the zing!
Meritocracy? Tell me, how is that Google Voice App approval coming along? Podcatchers? Heck, the best political cartoon apps also float to the top -- unless of course they make fun of public figures, in which case they are banned, but they will not get banned until after you develop them.
Given a chance to compete? When you do not know if you have a chance to compete until after you have spent your money, that again favors the big guy, who can absorb unknown risk quantities much better than the small guy.
But you do not have to get that abstract to kill your "Little guy competing with the big guy?" screed. When the little guy gets his (tasteless) iWobble app banned but Hooters and Playboy get their (equally tasteless) apps approved immediately, that is what we call the exact opposite of a level playing field.
And it is of course completely unsurprising that responses are all ad hominem ("snake oil salesman", Chris' irrelevant Obama mumblings), rather than even the barest introspective glance at the numbers.
The App Store is many things -- hugely successful for Apple, convenient, and a step better than old BREW stores -- but lucrative for the vast majority of developers, or fair to any of them, it ain't.
Glad i came across this blog.Added "Happy 2nd Birthday iTunes App Store! | TiPb" to my bookmark!
Yes, meritocracy in the grand scheme of things. Compare it to the past where developers had to do business deals with carriers and publishers. Where their cut was 50% or less. Compare today's app economics with the past where developers had to deal with multiple business models from multiple carriers. Compare today's development tools to past development tools. There has been nothing but win for developers.
If you are looking for the sure thing, you aren't going to find it. 90% of business ventures fail. That's all Ahonen's "analysis" told you. He knows it too and is simply being disenginuous with the analysis. In any business venture, you have a better than 90% of going bellyup.
The difference with the app store model is the barriers of entry. It is dead simple to get on such that a person can get in on it with their spare time. Said person is given a reasonable playing against the competition.
Ahonen is promoting that an SMS based business venture is money better invested. Sure, but that isn't a small guy business. The barrier of entry is fairly large and your every day developer basically has no chance. Most wouldn't even know how to start. On top of that, there are obvious things that are suitable to going one way or the other.
Ahonen was even suggesting that it was better to do Tetris as a cloud web app than a stand alone application! Yeah, I'll take him seriously when he stops self promoting.
Hello people,
AppStore change the way we use mobile phones. It is not a phone anymore. It is a true mobile computing...
Speaking of birthdays, there is an app on AppStore: eAnniversary.
eAnniversary will let you track: birthdays and anniversaries, with features to remember you and congratulate the other part.
Social networking is also present. Now you can share birthdays and anniversaries with your friends and family in Twitter and Facebook.
You may also update your Google calendar with eAnniversary data, and a lot more features! Check on:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/eanniversary/id366474659?mt=8
Best regards,