Trying to figure out just exactly how to find your Mac UDID so you can get in on an ad-hoc Mac App Store beta? Just like with iPhone and iPad, your Mac has a UDID (technically a Hardware UUID) that developers can use to send you app builds before they become publicly available. Luckily, it’s easy to locate once you know where to look.

1. Click on the Apple logo at the top left of your Mac menu bar
2. Click on About This Mac
3. Click on More Info…
4. Click on System Report
5. Make sure Hardware is selected at the top left
6. The very last entry in the list on the right will be your Hardware UUID

Copy and paste it and mail it off to the developer, then wait for your ad-hoc app to arrive and start beta testing!

Of course, since the Mac App Store isn’t the only way to distribute software on the Mac, developers can also choose to simply send you a non Mac App Store — i.e. regular-style apps. If they’re developing specifically and only for the Mac App Store, however, this might be the way they choose to go. If it is, you’re all set!

• More tips and how-tos
• Mac help and discussion forum

Via: @lucvandal

Fiksu, a mobile marketing firm, released some interesting data on how much money top iPhone app developers are spending on promoting their creations. After looking at the top 200 free iPhone App Store for December, the average cost to get someone to run an app more than three times is $1.81. This is up significantly from $1.41 in November. Fiksu also determined that the App Store saw a little over  6 million daily downloads in December, helped in no small part by the oodles of Christmas sales. In fact,m the last week of December saw advertising budgets (and traffic) double. Fiksu gathered up this information through their marketing platform, which spans over 200 million downloads, and 11 billion in-app actions. App Store rankings freeze between December 25 and 28, which creates a rush to get top position beforehand, so you hold that visibility while folks start downloading apps on their new iPhones. Fiksu CEO Micah Adler said:

“For so many app brands, December is a strategically critical month for app discovery. What we witnessed during the month was a ‘land rush’ in which advertisers earnestly spent marketing dollars in order to achieve ranking before the traditional App Store freeze which then would generate substantial organic downloads through increased visibility.”

Of course, if developers just wrote good apps and dropped us a line, maybe they’d get some free advertising by way of our Daily Apps series. Jussayin’.

iOS and jailbreak developers Steven Troughton-Smith and Nick, who goes by the Twitter handle @TheMudkip, have hacked together a working window manager for Apple TV, paving the way for the possibility of iPhone and iPad app compatibility on the non-touchscreen device.

I rewrote SpringBoard from scratch using only QuartzCore. MobileX isn’t linked against UIKit.

[The control scheme involves] remote events from an iPad. Or a cursor controlled by an apple remote.

It might be a while before we actually see this publicly available but the idea is as exciting now as the original jailbreak apps were back in the early days of iOS, before the introduction of the iOS App Store.

Source: Steve Troughton-Smith, @theMudkip

In the latest iOS 5.1 Beta 2 it looks like Apple has taken steps to start hiding future iPhone, iPad and other iOS device model references from the bloggers and deep code divers who have previously delighted in finding and exposing them.

Mark Gurman of 9to5 Mac first noted the new, obviously obfuscating entries on Twitter, and now it seems that in the USBDeviceConfiguration.plist, Apple has thrown in over 100 entries have been added for everything from iPad10,1 to AppleTV9,2, and so on.

Interesting new move in the cat and mouse game, to say the least.

Source: Mark Gurman

Apple has sent out their customer note to app developers that iTunes Connect, the web-based backend for managing app submission, updating, and reporting, will once again shut down for a week.

iTunes Connect will be temporarily shut down from Thursday, December 22 to Thursday, December 29 for the winter holidays.

During this shutdown, the following functionality will be unavailable:

• Access to iTunes Connect
• The delivery of any apps or updates
• Additionally, the following will be delayed:
• Releases scheduled to appear on the App Store for the first time
• Pricing changes scheduled through the interval pricing system in iTunes Connect

We strongly recommend that you do not schedule pricing changes through the interval pricing system in iTunes Connect that would take effect from December 22 through December 29. Pricing changes scheduled to take effect during this date range will not be reflected in the App Store and the app will become unavailable for purchase.

We also recommend that you do not schedule any apps to go live during the shutdown. Releases scheduled with a sales start date between these dates will not go live until after the shutdown.

Last year this resulted in week-long app sales for users, as developers wanted to lock in deals for the holidays.

Apple has released iTunes 10.5.1 beta 3 to developers which includes stability and performance improvements for iTunes Match. Developers must update to iTunes 10.5.1 beta 3 if they want to continue using the service.

The iTunes beta update comes hot on the heels of Apple deleting developer’s iTunes Match libraries again. All of these things should add up to a launch of iTunes Match sooner rather than later. Apple originally stated a released date of October but that has come and gone.

iTunes Match will eventually cost $24.99 a year  and will allow a subscriber to store all of their music in iCloud; not just music purchased through iTunes.

Source: TUAW

Chris Stevens at Fast Company has written about the harrowing ordeal of being a small time developer in the big time App Store. It’s nothing new, but it’s something that hasn’t been in the headlines for a while.

It’s this label “gold rush” that has been most often applied to the App Store. The potential for success, and risk of failure, is so great that in many ways the App Store has provoked a gold rush among developers. Although the successes are spectacular, the failures are apocalyptic. The mainstream press focuses on the glorious few and gives very little attention to the money being lost on the App Store–a problem compounded by the embarrassed silence of those struggling to turn a profit on their work. In a climate where approximately 540 apps are submitted for review every day, it’s easy to see why the Appillionaires are an exclusive and rare breed.

Knowing to get in on the ground floor was probably the first big gamble. Now it’s trying to get noticed among hundreds of thousands of other apps and dozens of existing, entrenched competitors. Can you just make a better looking Twitter client, a more adorable and addictive casual game, or an easier way to share photos with filters and bank on success, or will there always be the element of a crap shoot?

Years ago we talked about the idea of a premium App Store to encourage big companies and game houses to invest in iOS and get higher prices in return, but what about the small, indie developers, the next great innovators in the making? Could Apple revamp the App Store format to give them a better chance as well?

Source: Fast Company

Apple has announced they will be holding an iOS 5 Tech Talk World Tour for 2011, giving developers an opportunity learn more about iOS 5, iPhone and iPad UI design sessions, adopting iCloud storage and more.

We’re taking iOS 5 on a world tour and we want you to come along for the ride. Learn from Apple experts as you take your apps to the next level with the exciting new technologies in iOS. Space is limited, so register today.

Apple will be holding training sessions for the Tech Talk World Tour in the following cities beginning in November and ending late January of next year.

• Berlin, Germany
• London, UK
• Rome, Italy
• Beijing, China
• Seoul, South Korea
• Sao Paolo, Brazil
• New York City, New York, U.S.
• Seattle, Washington, U.S.
• Austin, Texas, U.S.

We posted some notes and video from the 2009 Tech Tour, and it looks like this will be another great resource of information for iOS developers. Any developers out there planning to attend?

Source: Apple

While the general public gets their first taste of iTunes 10.5 today, Apple isn’t wasting any time moving developers up to iTunes 10.5.1 beta. Like other recent betas, it includes iTunes Match functionality for further testing.

If you’re a registered dev, grab it via the link below:

Source: developer.apple.com

As announced at Apple’s Let’s talk iPhone event, the Gold Master seed of iOS 5 for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch is now available for download. Developers can grab the download via developer.apple.com and start testing their apps out on it to ensure compatibility.

If you’re a registered developer go grab it now. If you notice any changes, drop us a line or let us know in comments!

Anthony Agius of MacTalk recently ran the One More Thing Conference down under and has just put up all the video for those of us who couldn’t be there live.

There are videos from iOS developers such as Matt Comi (The Incident), James Cuda (Procreate), Marc Edwards (Sideways, Consume) and other leading developers, who tell their story of planning, developing and successfully selling their iOS apps. All of them are full time indie iOS developers, who make a living off the App Store. It’s a goldmine of info for those wanting to become indie iOS devs!

Check them out via the link below. And while I can’t put my finger on it, that Marc Edwards chap seems awfully familiar…

[One More Thing]

Marc Edwards (Bjango) – One More Thing Conference 2011 from One More Thing on Vimeo.

Google has filed a request with the United States Patent on Trademark Office (USPTO), asking that 2 of the patents Lodsys is using the troll iOS and Android developers be re-examined.

“We’ve asked the US Patent Office to reexamine two Lodsys patents that we believe should never have been issued,” Google senior vice president and general counsel Kent Walker told Wired.com in a statement. “Developers play a critical part in the Android ecosystem and Google will continue to support them.”

While re-examination could get the patents thrown out, the more common result seems to be a narrowing of focus. Likewise, while the ongoing Lodsys lawsuits could be paused pending the re-examination, there’s no guarantee of that either.

It’s nice to finally see Google take some action, though Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents seems non-plussed:

While I agree with Google’s senior vice president and general counsel Kent Walker that those patents should never have been issued, I don’t consider those reexamination requests — unless they will be accompanied by more forceful and useful measures very soon — a serious commitment to supporting Android app developers against trolls. If this is all that Google does, it’s too little, too late, and calling it “half-hearted” would be an overstatement.

Apple, by contrast, has filed a motion to intervene in the cases. Apple, Google, Microsoft and others are already licensed under an agreement with previous patent holder, Intellectual Ventures. There was a theory that the Intellectual Ventures license might prevent Apple et al from trying to invalidate the patents, so either that’s not the case or Google is going for it anyway.

Meanwhile, the whole situation continues to cost developers time, money, attention, and sanity. (Which is part of why this matters.

[Wired, FOSS Patents]

iCloud.com is now live… if you have an Apple ID that works with iCloud. Here’s the thing — it’s meant for developers right now, and Apple IDs are still fragmented to the extent that for some people, iCloud might not be too useful yet.

For example, you may try to login with your MobileMe ID and be told it hasn’t been migrated to iCloud yet. You might try to login with your iTunes ID and then, once you’re in, be told you need a MobileMe address to access Mail. You can set up a new, free iCloud ID, but then all of the content you have connected to your existing Apple ID(s) won’t be there.

So, yeah, meant for developers. Still, it’s nice to see it up and running, and get a preview of the design (which we’re guessing is a fairly straight front-end port of the SproutCore web app code from Me.com, now running on the all new iCloud backend.)

Current web apps available include Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find my iPhone, and the new Documents, which currently offers Apple’s iWork formats for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. (The last three of which require the new iWork for iOS beta apps, downloadable via Apple’s developer site.)

Gone are iDisk and Gallery. iCloud is no doubt an attempt to abstract away the file system-like behavior for the former, but will a web front end for PhotoStream be made available to replace the latter?

Meanwhile, on iPhone you just get a placeholder card, nicely rendered, and the ability to get more information and a link to the developer beta.

Gallery of screenshots after the break.

As expected Lodsys was but the first highly publicized patent troll to try its hand at getting licensing fees from small, independent iOS developers, and as more come creeping out of the woodwork, some international devs are considering leaving the US App Store to avoid the costs and potential legal nightmares.

Simon Maddox on Twitter:

All my apps removed from US app stores (all platforms). 0.575% of total revenue put in a spare bank account. Screw you, Lodsys.

While leaving the US market now may not prevent claims of past infringement, it certainly shows the increasing frustration experienced by developers whose livelihoods are threatened by an increasingly incomprehensible and irreconcilable system. Basic concepts of patent law, like obviousness and prior art, seem not longer to be consider when patents are granted, only when they’re litigated. Expensively.

Florian Mueller on FOSS Patents:

The patent troll problem gets worse by the day, and it’s turning into a think-global-sue-local business. Today, an Indian company named Kootol distributed a press release announcing that it sent “a notice” to a long list of companies large and small, claiming that they sell products and operate services on which a patent application pending in different jurisdictions around the globe reads.

At what point will Apple (and Google, among others) have to step up and offer support, perhaps even indemnification for code included in their SDK, or bend their billions towards reasonable patent reform in the US, or face the decimation of the app ecosystems that are at the heart of their collective mobile profit centers?

[@simonmaddox via The Guardian, FOSS Patents]

Apple has just released iOS 5 beta 3 (9A5259f) for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV, along with iTunes 10.5 beta 3 for Mac, and Xcode 4.3 Preview 3 for developers.

While in previous years Apple had stuck fairly closely to an every-second-Tuesday beta release schedule, iOS 5 beta 2 hit on a Friday just over two weeks after beta 1, and now beta 3 is on a Monday just under 2 weeks after beta 2. On average, the pacing remains similar, however, and Apple has previously said the release version would come this fall. (Likely September/October to coincide with iPhone 5 and perhaps other new devices.)

Interestingly, they’re once again doing a traditional, tethered release. No signs of them testing the bit-differential/delta file update system yet.

If you’re a paid, registered developer with Apple, go get it. What if any changes have been made in iOS 5… we’ll have to wait and see. As always, we have comments below and a special iOS 5 Forum for your discussion pleasure.

(Reminder: if you’re not a paid developer, stay away. Buying slots can get you scammed, and running beta software on your main device can leave you stranded. Wait for fall.)

[developer.apple.com]

Apple has filed a motion to intervene in Lodsys’ lawsuits against 7 iOS developers. These developers are reportedly under NDA as well, so it’s unknown if Apple is also stepping in with legal and financial support for the individuals, but they are clearly taken the suit back to Lodsys:

Apple’s proposed defense against Lodsys’s claims is exclusively related to the assertion that the alleged infringements are covered by an existing license agreement in Apple’s favor (which I’m pretty sure harks back to when Lodsys’s patents belonged to Intellectual Ventures). That is consistent with Apple’s recent letter to Lodsys. Apple does not raise any other affirmative defenses, such as claiming that the patents are invalid or that they don’t read on the accused products. The sued app developers may still raise those defenses (and possibly even more). They will definitely do so if Apple provides them with the necessary funding, and others are already trying to have Lodsys’s patents declared invalid (in other lawsuits). But for Apple’s own proposed participation as an intervenor it makes sense to focus on the theory of exhaustion (meaning that Lodsys can’t get paid twice for a licensed use of the patents in question). In connection with that particular defense theory, Apple has by far the strongest basis for asking to be admitted as an intervenor.

The court may or may not grant the motion, of course, and lots of questions remain about whether or not this strategy — rather than something more encompassing like indemnification — is better overall for developers now and in the future.

Also, one of the developers is on the line for an Android app as well, and it will be interesting to see what, if any, response Google has to the Lodsys suit as well.

For a complete overview, and lots more on the questions still surrounding the issue, hit the link below.

[FOSS Patents]

According to The Loop, Apple has sent a letter to patent holder Lodsys, asking them to stop threatening iOS developers with patent infringement letters.

“Apple is undisputedly licensed to these patents and the App Makers are protected by that license,” wrote Bruce Sewell, Apple Senior Vice President and General Counsel.

Best smiting since Gandalf cast the Balrog’s ruin upon the mountainside?

[The Loop]

UPDATE: Macworld has the full text of Apple’s response letter. Here are some good bits. [Macworld]

Because I believe that your letters are based on a fundamental misapprehension regarding Apple’s license and the way Apple’s products work, I expect that the additional information set out below will be sufficient for you to withdraw your outstanding threats to the App Makers and cease and desist from any further threats to Apple’s customers and partners.

Through its threatened infringement claims against users of Apple’s licensed technology, Lodsys is invoking patent law to control the post-sale use of these licensed products and methods. Because Lodsys’s threats are based on the purchase or use of Apple products and services licensed under the Agreement, and because those Apple products and services, under the reading articulated in your letters, entirely or substantially embody each of Lodsys’s patents, Lodsys’s threatened claims are barred by the doctrines of patent exhaustion and first sale. As the Supreme Court has made clear, “[t]he authorized sale of an article that substantially embodies a patent exhausts the patent holder’s rights and prevents the patent holder from invoking patent law to control postsale use of the article.” Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Elecs., Inc., 553 U.S. 617 (2008).

Therefore, Apple requests that Lodsys immediately withdraw all notice letters sent to Apple App Makers and cease its false assertions that the App Makers’ use of licensed Apple products and services in any way constitute infringement of any Lodsys patent.

UPDATE 2: FOSS Patents weighs in with Florian Mueller’s analysis [FOSS Patents]

I don’t mean to be negative here. I just want to make all app developers fully aware of the issues they may still face. Since Lodsys is already suing a group of large players, which is collectively even more powerful than Apple, it would be irresponsibly optimistic to assume that Apple’s letter all by itself is going to make Lodsys give up. Unless Apple settles the deal with Lodsys (neither the terms of such a deal nor the mere fact might ever be announced — Lodsys might simply never follow up on its original infringement assertions), there will be some next step in this process, and things could still get nasty. So let’s be optimistic today, but let’s also be cautious.

UPDATE 3: Nilay Patel offers his thoughts as well [This is my Next]

The big question now is whether Lodsys is willing to take Apple to court in order to challenge that license interpretation; Lodsys would be fairly foolish to have not considered exactly this situation when they formulated their business plan. We’ll see what happens, but for the moment things have taken a promising turn.

Been missing those iAds on your iPad? Well, maybe if you were a developer you were. If so, Apple has let it be known that your wait is over:

Ad Rich Media Ads. Now Being Served to iPad.

iAd rich media ads are now being served to iPad apps on the U.S. App Store, redefining mobile advertising with rich, immersive ads that take advantage of the 9.7 inch LED-backlit display.

Make the most of this growing opportunity now. Learn how you can join the iAd mobile advertising network and generate more revenue with iAd.

Anyone taking them up on it?

Speaking of John Siracusa, he has an interesting post up on his Fat Bits blog concerning the Apple strategy tax — whether Apple’s increasingly divergent interests, from iTunes to iOS to App Store to iAds, will inevitably lead to compromise, contention, and/or conflict.

Apple’s recent App Store changes, however logical and empirically justifiable they may seem, all point strongly to a company that has started to believe that what’s good for Apple is good for America. And indeed, this may be the only way to reconcile the inherent conflict of interest. The alternative is philosophically and practically untenable. Apple can try to be a good platform owner and ensure that popular apps like Kindle and Netflix thrive on iOS, and it can also try to advance its own competing services, but both efforts cannot succeed to their fullest potential.

So the new 30% subscription policy can increase revenue but drive out companies like Amazon and Netflix, hurting the platform. Having AdMob on iOS it improves the platform but hurts Apple’s own iAds. If they try to dominate everything it stifles competition and Apple risks stagnating and becoming non-competitive (as Microsoft did with Internet Explorer 6.) If they keep their own software and services modest they aren’t producing the best possible products they can and suffer in a similar fashion.

If Apple were only making the platform it wouldn’t be a problem. If they were only doing content it wouldn’t be a problem. If they were only handling content delivery it wouldn’t be a problem. But by trying to do all three successfully, it divides Apple against itself.

What’s the answer? Perhaps Apple shouldn’t have entered into so many businesses, especially the ones increasingly outside their core competence like online ads and subscriptions. But they have entered them, so what now? Can they balance all interests fairly and profitably? Could anyone?

[Ars Technica]

Apple has cut the minimum purchase price for advertisers on its mobile iAd network from $1 million to $500,000 in an effort to appeal to smaller companies and help broaden the mobile advertising platform, according to All Things Digital.

The new entry point is $500,000, a significantly smaller commitment, particularly for smaller brands and agencies that are creating and producing their own iAds.

When Apple introduced iAds last year they thought it would be a huge success despite some believing it would be a flop, and although Apple is claiming over 60 successful iAd campaigns so far they’re also seeing low fill rates and other developer complaints.

Cutting the initial asking price in half should allow more eligible parties to participate in the iAd program, but do you think it will be enough to make iAds a full success for Apple? Let us know in the comments!

[Digital Daily]

While The Daily was first it certainly won’t be last, not with Apple announcing their new subscription service is now available to all publishers.

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.”

This obviously raises a lot of questions. Will Netflix have to — and can they afford to — give Apple 30% of the subscriber revenue? Sure existing subscribers are exempt but if someone downloaded the Netflix app, Apple no longer allows external linking to websites for subscriptions so would Netflix have to offer the same $8 streaming package in-app and split the revenue with Apple? Or is this service meant to be magazine/newspaper specific and not carry over to video services, which would also include Hulu.

Also, will Apple push this same philosophy to all in-app purchases? They might, given it sounds like that’s what caused Sony — and could cause everyone from Amazon to Hulu — some consternation. In-app purchases will be lower friction (since outside linking is no longer allowed) for users and with Apple requiring the same or better offers in-app, high-volume goods like eBooks could see their entire profit margin get shifted to Apple. (i.e. Amazon makes 30% on eBooks, Apple wants 30% on in-app purchases. That’s not tenable.)

Full press release with all the details after the break, and let us know what you think in comments!

[Apple PR]

CUPERTINO, California—February 15, 2011—Apple® today announced a new subscription service available to all publishers of content-based apps on the App Store℠, including magazines, newspapers, video, music, etc. This is the same innovative digital subscription billing service that Apple recently launched with News Corp.’s “The Daily” app.

Subscriptions purchased from within the App Store will be sold using the same App Store billing system that has been used to buy billions of apps and In-App Purchases. Publishers set the price and length of subscription (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly). Then with one-click, customers pick the length of subscription and are automatically charged based on their chosen length of commitment (weekly, monthly, etc.). Customers can review and manage all of their subscriptions from their personal account page, including canceling the automatic renewal of a subscription. Apple processes all payments, keeping the same 30 percent share that it does today for other In-App Purchases.

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.”

Publishers who use Apple’s subscription service in their app can also leverage other methods for acquiring digital subscribers outside of the app. For example, publishers can sell digital subscriptions on their web sites, or can choose to provide free access to existing subscribers. Since Apple is not involved in these transactions, there is no revenue sharing or exchange of customer information with Apple. Publishers must provide their own authentication process inside the app for subscribers that have signed up outside of the app. However, Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app. In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

Protecting customer privacy is a key feature of all App Store transactions. Customers purchasing a subscription through the App Store will be given the option of providing the publisher with their name, email address and zip code when they subscribe. The use of such information will be governed by the publisher’s privacy policy rather than Apple’s. Publishers may seek additional information from App Store customers provided those customers are given a clear choice, and are informed that any additional information will be handled under the publisher’s privacy policy rather than Apple’s.

The revolutionary App Store offers more than 350,000 apps to consumers in 90 countries, with more than 60,000 native iPad™ apps. Customers of the more than 160 million iOS devices around the world can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

Android is already the biggest iPhone competitor and if technology and emerging markets combine to create $100 off-contract Android phones, will Apple need an iPhone nano to keep both user and developer mindshare?

Seth Weintraub at Fortune kicked over this latest Android anthill with an article on how cheaper chipsets and Google strategy could align to make those $100 Android smartphones a reality, shoving the migration from feature phone to smartphone into overdrive. That’s interesting in established markets like US and EU, where the idea of walking into a store, laying down very little cash, and walking out with a “good enough” handset, sans additional contract obligations, is a mainstream dream come true. In emerging markets in Asia and Africa, that’s the gold mine. Forget a PC on every desk and in every home — soon it will be a smartphone in every hand.

Nokia and RIM, falling further behind the smartphone software race to Apple and Google, have increasingly looked to emerging markets for their low-cost Symbian and BlackBerry handsets as a way to leverage old technology until their next-generation Meego and QNX-based handsets are finally ready to market.

Google has already got a next-generation OS, perhaps not as polished or usable as Apple’s iOS, but “good enough” in the classic, market-dominating sense and ready to go on everything from the highest end geek phone to the cheapest budget handset.

Apple has iPhone 4, $650-$750ish off contract, and last year’s iPhone 3GS, $550ish off contract. And that’s it.

Given the heavily subsidized, long term contract market that dominates the US, that’s been translated into $199-$299 for iPhone 4 and $99 for iPhone 3GS. Those prices were low enough to prevent any umbrella — to stop any cheap alternatives from gaining traction. But if Android starts arriving at $100, maybe even $75 off-contract, on good-enough devices? That’s one huge umbrella opening up underneath iPhone. It’s a circus tent.

Jerry Hildenbrand at Android Central points out that while geeks might turn up their noses at cheapy $100 Android handsets the mainstream won’t and the resulting sales will have a profound effect among one incredibly important group — developers. Right now iOS’ mind and marketshare means it still has the best apps and most passionate developers on the planet. If Android sales reach the billion unit level, that might change and Apple could quickly lose their developer advantage to Google.

In the MP3 space, where devices have never been subsidized, Apple quickly followed the original iPod (now iPod classic) up with the iPod Mini (now iPod nano) and even the super-cheap iPod shuffle. For years the iPod nano was the most popular iPod. More importantly for Apple, it prevented competitors from differentiating based on price. Who wanted the “good enough” (or even arguably better spec’ed) competition when you could get the Apple brand and everything that came with it for “cheap enough”?

MG Siegler over at TechCrunch thinks North American carriers may, by hook or by crook, prevent $100 or cheaper handsets from taking off so they don’t threaten the lucrative contract model. Perhaps. For a time. Or they may switch to a non-Net-neutral model where they bill us per byte to access YouTube or Netflix unless we’re on those traditional contracts (or even if we are). Or they may just fork Android, make their own proprietary carrier OS, and only sell first-party phones. The pipes will get paid.

Either way, Apple may have to contend with those $100 handsets the way they contended with Windows in 1990s, and netbooks and cheap MP3 players in the 2000s. None of those are perfect parallels for the smartphone market of the 2010s but together, differentiating on software quality, build quality, and not leaving an umbrella, could they provide a strategy? Could Apple go to an iPhone nano to stop the ultra-cheap Android invasion?

[Fortune, TechCrunch, Android Central]

Apple has released and HTML 5 authoring tool called iAd producer aimed at developers and creative houses that wish to build interactive advertisements for Apple’s iOS based iPhone and iPad platform.

iAd Producer makes it easy for you to design and assemble high-impact, interactive content for iAd. iAd Producer automatically manages the HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript behind your iAd to make creating beautiful, motion-rich iAd content as easy as point and click.

For advanced developers, iAd Producer offers sophisticated JavaScript editing and debugging, along with a powerful extension mechanism that enables them to create and re-use their own page templates and components.

Rumors have persisted that Apple would release some type of HTML 5 authoring tool for a while now, perhaps a replacement for iDVD as part of iLife or an extension to iWork’s pages. While this tool doesn’t address things like iTunes Extras or iTunes LP creation, it at least shows Apple is rolling out next generation web and standards-based production tools. Hopefully more will follow.

[developer.apple.com]

Apple sent out an email to developers today reminding them to get their apps ready for the impending arrival of iOS 4.2:

iOS 4.2 will soon be in the hands of millions of customers around the world. Make sure that your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch apps incorporate all the exciting features in iOS 4.2, including:

Multitasking – Multitasking services allow your apps to perform tasks in the background including playing audio, push notifications, receiving location change events, and more.

Game Center – With the Game Kit API, you can implement Game Center functionality such as submitting and displaying achievements, scores, and leaderboards, and establishing multiplayer games.

AirPrint – iOS 4.2 allows you to easily enable instant wireless printing from your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch apps.

Submit Your Apps Today

Build, test, compile, and submit your apps for review using iOS 4.2 SDK GM seed so they can be ready when iOS 4.2 is available to users around the world.

So any day now, we hope!

iAd has been usable in the United States and United Kingdom since it was deployed, but now developers are beginning to report that they are seeing ad impressions from other countries as well. Part of this could have to do with the fact that the iPad did not have iAd integration as it didn’t run a version of iOS that supported iAd. Seeing as iPad will be receiving iOS 4.2 in the coming weeks as well, perhaps Apple now has reason to roll out iAd to additional countries.

This is great news for developers that implement iAd as it will allow the opportunity for them to have a much wider market for potential ad revenue. Any developers on TiPb implementing iAd? If you have, have you seen impressions from countries other than the US and UK over the past few days?

[ MacRumors]

Right after releasing iOS 4.2 GM, Apple has begun emailing developers and advising them to submit their updates for the iTunes App Store.

iOS 4.2 SDK GM seed and iOS 4.2 GM seed are now available from the iOS Dev Center. Build, test, and compile your apps with these new releases and submit them for review so they can be ready when iOS 4.2 is available to iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users.

Learn how you can add exciting iOS 4.2 features to your apps including the capability to print directly from iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. iPad apps can now take advantage of multitasking, Game Center, iAd, and more.

Hopefully some AirPrint, AirPlay, iOS 4.2 for iPad multitasking goodness is headed our way soon!

Get your apps ready for iOS 4.2, developers! That’s what Apple’s new information page says:

iOS 4.2 is coming this November. With iOS SDK 4.2 beta, you can add exciting, new features to your apps including the capability to print directly from iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. iPad apps can now take advantage of multitasking, Game Center, iAd, and more.

There some additional information about AirPrint as well:

Adding printing support to your app is easy. Simply provide a button for the user to initiate printing, prepare your content in an appropriate format, and then create and send a print job to the iOS print system when the user requests it.

Test with a printer that supports AirPrint

HP ePrint printers are the first to support AirPrint. You can test printing from your app to one of these printers:

• HP Photosmart Premium Fax e-All-in-One Printer series – C410
• HP Photosmart Premium e-All-in-One Printer series – C310
• HP Photosmart Plus e-All-in-One Printer series- B210

Or, test printing with one of these options:

• Print to a Mac running Mac OS X 10.6.5 beta
• Print to the Printer Simulator from iOS 4.2 beta

Getting excited for iOS 4.2 yet? Apple, you tease!

[Apple.com]

Apple has begun seeding iOS 4.1 Gold Master to developers, the final step before the general availability release promised for next week.

In addition to fixes for proximity sensors, Bluetooth, and iPhone 3G performance, it includes Game Center, HD photos, HD YouTube uploads, and TV rentals.

If you’re a developer, head on over to developer.apple.com and start downloading. No doubt the App Store will start taking iOS 4.1 compiled binaries any time now…

[BGR]

You know the drill, if you’re a developer and you want the latest, greatest iOS 4.1 beta 3 for your iPhone or iPod touch, head on over to Apple and get it.

No word yet on what, if any new features it might contain but we’re still guessing we won’t see anything too spectacular until Steve Jobs takes the stage for the annual iPod and iTunes event in September, and shows off iPod touch G4 and the final iOS 4 version.

But if you find anything, let us know in comments.

[developer.apple.com]

We’re one of the lucky devs to score a preview of Xcode 4 back at WWDC 2010? Worry not, Apple has been mailing out news that a new beta is available for one and all… (registered developers that is).

Get a preview of Xcode 4 — the next generation of Apple’s integrated development environment for creating Mac OS X and iOS applications.

With a brand new interface, compiler, debugger and dozens of new features, Xcode 4 is faster, easier to use, and more helpful than ever before. Quite simply, Xcode 4 will help you write better code.

Read about the many new enhancements and download the developer preview to see what’s new in Xcode 4.

It’s under NDA but we’ve heard through the grapevine that it’s a fairly impressive update. Hopefully that translates into better apps for our iPads and iPhones…

Just a quick reminder to developers that the iTunes 9.2 beta released back at WWDC 2010 expires on June 30 (just over 4 days from now, Cupertino time).

So, if you haven’t gotten around to updating with the general availability version released week before last, put it on your todo list.

[Thanks for the tip, anon!]

Apple has, with lightning quickness, posted videos from the WWDC sessions online for developers. And here’s the terrific part — they’ve made them available to ALL registered developers, not just those who bought expensive tickets to the event.

Terrific idea. If you’re a developer who couldn’t attend, you’d be crazy not to jump on this.

[developer.apple.com]

We’ve all heard huge numbers thrown around as measures of iPhone and iPad App Store success — over 200,000 apps and 5 billion downloads being some of the most recent and most impressive. There’s a couple of other numbers that are even more interesting when it comes to iPhone and iPad development: 100, 100 million, and 1 billion.

Roughly 100 million iOS devices have been sold to data and they are all broadly software compatible. There’s some fragmentation to be sure — older devices are slower, there’s no cameras (yet) on the iPod touch and iPad, no GPS in iPod touch, iPad Wi-Fi, and the iPhone 2G. Apple mitigates this somewhat by offering services such as CoreLocation where, if no GPS is found, it gracefully degrades down to cell tower triangulation or Wi-Fi router mapping. Even the iPad with its odd-device-out 1024×768 display will frame iPhone apps or pixel double them, which is awkward but still workable, still compatible. When iPhone 4 ships, it will be precisely double the vertical and horizontal pixel count of previous generations, meaning older apps will simply look the same as they did before (using 4 pixels in the space they used to use 1).

Likewise, most iOS devices tend to get updated to the latest version of the OS, or at least fairly recent versions. While iOS 4 will drop compatibility for iPhone 2G and iPod touch G1, it will also be free for all other devices for the first time, ensuring iPod touch G2 and G3 owners are more likely to update.

Everything isn’t perfect, but for a vast majority of apps it doesn’t need to be. They just work.

The sheer size of that install base is stunning. Code an app once and deploy it to a theoretical 100 million devices — and growing — all with a drop-dead-easy to use icon on the home screen to help them get your apps?

That’s where the 100 comes in. One of the single biggest advantages Apple had going into the App Store was iTunes and the ability to process credit cards and handle transaction at an international scale. There are App Stores now in almost 100 countries (could be 100 or more now, I lost count at 96). Making an app for 100 milion devices — even if they were broadly compatible — wouldn’t be anywhere near as enticing if a developer couldn’t sell them to more than 1 or 2 countries (especially for the many, many developers who live in those unserviced countries). Again, the App Store isn’t literally everywhere, and due to local laws and ratings requirements they can’t sell games in in a couple places, or have other restrictions, but also again, for the majority of apps it’s an unmatched opportunity. When you consider Apple does all the processing and delivery heavy lifting for a 30% cut of paid apps, and 0% of free apps, allowing developers to develop and not spend time on managing that themselves, it’s easy to see why many of them jump at the chance.

1 billion dollars paid out to developers, as mentioned in the comments below, makes manifest the potential market size of those 100 million devices in about 100 countries. At day’s end — and financial year’s end — many developers will go where the money is.

There’s one last set of numbers to touch on as well. The iOS SDK frameworks. They provide an incredibly rich set of functionality developers get “for free” when making apps for the iPhone and they don’t exist (as directly portable options) on other platforms. Accelerate alone offers 2000 hardware-powered math API for games. Never mind CoreAnimation, CoreData, Game Center, the UI elements, and everything else that rounds out the kit. If portability isn’t the prime concern, they greatly enhance ease of development.

Apple isn’t wasting the chance to show that off. They just posted a video showcasing developers for developers [QuickTime link -- tip of the hat to 9to5Mac]

The flip side of that, of course, is the trade off in control made for convenience and opportunity. There are certain apps Apple won’t let into their store, and no guarantee they won’t pull an app (or whole class of them) even after they’re in the store. Having humans review apps makes app review subject to human error. Also, for every hit-it-rich app in the store there will be many, many times more that don’t break even.

For developers writing mainstream apps, nowhere near the edge-cases, it will probably never be an issue. Edge-cases, however, are often where some of the most interesting developments come from. Further, if you do use a lot of those API and you want to move to other or multiple platforms, you’re likely in for a lot of recoding, including a lot from scratch.

Palm, with parties, cross-compilers, and the chance for a nice payday, and Google with factually challenged trash-talk at I/O and a lightning fast JIT (just-in-time compiler) and Flash support, aren’t wasting the chance to show that off either.

It should come as no surprise that both Palm webOS and Google Android want iPhone developers on their platform. Mac developers have long been as passionate about their platform and incredibly talented in the apps they’ve delivered, and a lot of that has transferred over to iOS devices like the iPhone and now iPad.

Whether or not Apple is engaged in a platform war with Palm and Google it’s inarguable that the current generation of users want apps and right now Apple has an advantage in that area. Part of getting people to switch to another platform is making sure the apps they love are on that platform, and that means big name apps and fan favorites alike.

If Google is moving around behind the scenes, approaching core iPhone developers (the ones who make the most iPhone-like apps and enjoy high mind share) and trying to sneak them over to Android, Palm has gone one step further — openly courting them.

In the middle of Apple’s iOS-centric WWDC 2010 no less, Palm held a shindig of their own, a PDK (Plugin Developer Kit) soiree to wine and dine iPhone developers, point out the Pre has pretty much the same guts as the iPhone 3GS, and that a lot of applications can be ported over — especially games. And they made certain to highlight their openness, especially to emulators and cross-compilers. And they offered $1 million dollars in incentives.

Obviously users go where the apps are and developers make apps for where the users are, so the cycle can be vicious or virtuous, and just as obviously Google and Palm would much rather the latter.

Competition is good, different approaches are good, and options for developers are great, but whether or not Google and Palm can convince iPhone developers (and now iOS 4 developers) to become mobile developers is the question.

Apple has sent out a notice to developers advising them that the iTunes App Store has begun accepting iOS 4 binaries for submission and review:

Submit your iOS 4 apps for review so they can be ready for sale when iOS 4 is available to iPhone and iPod touch users. Make sure you have built and tested your applications using iOS 4 and iPhone SDK 4 GM seed, which you can download from the iPhone Dev Center.

Log in to iTunes Connect and upload your iOS 4 applications today.

iOS 4 is scheduled for release on June 21, once again developers aren’t likely to get much sleep, especially if trying to once again implement new features for a device they don’t have and can’t yet test.

(The effort is much appreciated.)

Apple recently released iTunes Connect Mobile [Free - iTunes Link] which allows registered developers to track app sales and trends.  The app is available via the App Store now and is a free download.  For developers, this provides an extremely easy way to not only check sales numbers but to see trends on the go.

Simply log in and you’ll get a nice layout that shows you not only your total sales but a breakdown of sales by application. From what I understand, you can see either daily or weekly totals as of right now. As we are currently working on applications and haven’t released any yet, I don’t see any breakdowns.  Any developers have any feedback on the breakdown or things you’d like to see in an update?

I think another really neat app idea would be if Apple released an app that let regular users see purchased app histories and showed totals of all iPhone/iPad apps they’ve purchased, as well as a monthly breakdown of what they’re buying.  It would be interesting how much users spend on apps in total.  After 3 years of using an iPhone, I’d be nervous to see how much I’ve actually spent on apps.  Hit the break for some screenshots!

Apple has released the 378MB Gold Master (GM) seed for iOS 4 (formerly iPhone OS 4) and it’s now available to developers via developer.apple.com (after you agree to the new terms of use). Apple has also announced that developers can begin submitting iOS 4 compatible apps to the iTunes App Store beginning June 10.

So let’s get going devs, we know you’re going to amaze us!

NOTE: Be sure to grab iTunes 9.2 beta — you can’t activate iOS 4 GM with iTunes 9.1 (download from the same page).

[developer.apple.com]

Since introducing iPhone OS 4 beta, Apple has kept a rigorous every-second-Tuesday update schedule through beta 4… until yesterday. Yesterday, the next Tuesday in line for a release, came and went with nary a beta 5 in sight.

Could be late, or it could be with WWDC 2010 less than a week away Apple is holding off to release the iPhone OS 4 GM (gold master) seed at the show? (Like they did last year for iPhone 3.0).

If you’re stuck waiting, we’ve updated our iPhone OS 4 preview and feature walkthrough, so check that out and let us know what we’re missing, and what you’re still expecting!

Apple has released iTunes Connect Developers Guide 5.5, with updated information on the iPad and iTunes connect features. Developers can download it via the iTunes Connect home page. (Here’s the direct PDF link). Updates include:

• iPad screenshots, icon and delivery requirements as well as details on a new status called Missing Screenshot;
• Details on how to enable your app for Game Center and set up your Leaderboard to test using iPhone SDK 4 beta;
• Interval pricing details to help you learn how to schedule price tier changes in advance for your apps and in app purchases;
• Information on the Over the Air download limit;
• Recommended app name character count for optimal display on desktop and device App Stores.

For non developers, we’ll just drool over the impending Game Center integration you’ll all be bringing us later this year…

[iPhone Developer News]

Marco Arment raised a flag on the iPad App Store field today and called foul over Apple using private APIs in their first-party iBooks app.

Private APIs are meant to be exclusive to Apple’s OS and built-in apps (like Safari, Mail, iPod, etc.) because they’re experimental, transitional, or otherwise not something that developers should count on being there in the same form in the next OS update. They’re still works in progress. Public APIs on the other hand are an agreement between Apple and developers that they can be used to build apps safely and confidently because they won’t be changed in a future update (Apple won’t break existing apps).

Up until now, Apple has played by their own rules and all of the apps they’ve not built into the iPhone (Remote, Keynote Remote, MobileMe Gallery, etc.) have been based on public, no private APIs. Reportedly Pages, Keynote, and Numbers were careful to stick to public APIs as well. That’s only fair. If Apple could do things in the App Store that competitors like QuickOffice or Documents to Go couldn’t, developers could rightly call it unfair, and that could lead to trouble.

However, according to Arment and backed up by oldmanuk, iBooks does make use of private APIs for functions like the in-app brightness control, a feature that would get a competitor like Amazon’s Kindle app rejected from the App Store.

Developers are understandably upset about this seeming break in Apple’s policy.

Thing is, Google famously got away with using private API for their Google Mobile App in late 2008 only to have those API made nice and legal in 2009.

So for TiPb’s part, we’re going to wait for the iPhone 4.0 event in 2 days and see if the private vs. public API landscape doesn’t change when the next SDK beta hits the streets.

[Thanks Dev for the tip]

Apple is about to add a third device to their iPhone OS family, the iPad, but so far developers are still limited to 100 UDID “slots” for ad-hoc distribution (aka beta testing), leading Craig Hockenberry of the Icon Factory to wonder on his Furbo.org blog if the “crunch” is coming.

Let’s say you (or your company) has a developer account with Apple, two popular iPhone/iPod touch apps, and are about to release an iPad app. That’s three apps total. But all you get are 100 slots total — not per app, not per-user, not 100 for iPhone and 100 for iPad. Total. So if you have 5 developers in-house and each wants to test on all three iPhone OS devices (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad), that’s 15 slots gone already. If you want to maintain compatibility with older devices like the iPhone 2G or the iPod touch G1, you might need slots for those as well. If anyone has replaced a lost or broken device, or had one swapped out under warranty, that means a new UDID and another slot taken. We could be up to 20 slots gone already.

If you have beta testers, the problem scales. Each device each tester has comes with a UDID and takes a slot. If you want to maximize your beta testers, that could be 3 slots each (one for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad) and perhaps more if they have old iPhones or iPod touches, or if they’re replaced a device. That means 15-20 beta testers can consume every slot you have left. Sure you could stretch that out by only having each tester register 1 device but that adds complexity and still only delays hitting the limit.

Further compounding the problem is that Apple only frees up the UDID slots once a year, so any lost devices, developers who have left the company, or beta testers who have dropped out can equate to wasted slots just sitting there for up to a year.

With the iPad launch, it means any developer whose already maxed out and whose slots don’t free up before April 3 is in a tough spot. They can’t register any new UDIDs, which means they can’t register any iPads to test on. That’s not only bad for them, it’s bad for users who expect well-tested, well-polished apps and games.

Hockenberry thinks there’s a better system for Apple to adopt:

A tweet from Mike Piontek crystalized this thought: the limitation for Ad Hoc provisioning should be based around individuals, not the devices that they own. It makes more sense to regulate Apple IDs rather than UDIDs. I want John Gruber to be able to run my apps on whatever devices he currently owns. I want to put my own name on the provisioning list and enable the five iPhone OS devices sitting on my desk. All that Apple cares about is that are only 98 other people besides Gruber and me.

And he points out it’s not just developers but those same Fortune 100 companies Apple often touts who would benefit:

(I suspect that Enterprise IT has similar problems and would welcome a solution based on employees rather than the hardware they own. I can only imagine the headaches of managing thousands of devices.)

If you’re a developer, let us know if the ad-hoc crunch is a concern and what, if anything, you’re doing to handle the oncoming iPad UDID storm.

It’s no secret that Apple loves secrecy, so it comes as little surprise when Business Week reveals the hoops those lucky developers with early access to iPad hardware have to jump through:

Would-be testers of the tablet-style computer, due to be released Apr. 3, must promise to keep it isolated in a room with blacked-out windows, according to four people familiar with the more than 10-page pact that bars partners from disclosing information about the iPad.

To ensure that it can’t be removed, the iPad must also remain tethered to a fixed object, said the people, who asked not to be named because their plans for the iPad have not been made public. Apple (AAPL) won’t send out an iPad until potential partners send photographic evidence that they’ve complied.

This, of course, after Apple has already unveiled the device in a Steve Jobs keynote event, released 5 beta versions of the iPad SDK, and put the device up for pre-order via apple.com. What exactly are they still hiding? And who are these few, these privileged, these no doubt monitored with a near Sauron-esque eye? Outside of “top developers” who Apple really wants to bring to the iPhone platform, no one is saying.

We know Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal have one under lock and key. Who else could there be? We’re hoping for Hulu, of course! Which other major players would Apple — and would you — like to see on the iPad?

iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch developers: get yourself over to Apple’s developer center, as iPhone SDK 3.2 Beta 4 is ready for you to download, a mere two weeks after Beta three was unleashed for your coding pleasure. As MacRumors and Engadget note, it’s too early to say what magical new capabilities are to be found here – but don’t let that stop you.

TechCrunch is reporting that Apple has started sending developers invitations to take a satisfaction survey with regards to the App Store in general, and the App Store approval process in specific.

Apple asks you to answer with: “Very dissatisfied,” “Somewhat dissatisfied,” “Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,” “Somewhat satisfied,” “Very satisfied,” or “Don’t know.”

They also ask, “What one thing could Apple do to make the iPhone Developer Program better?” and give you a text box to write anything you want. A few months ago they certainly would have gotten some interesting responses there.

Indeed and as we suspected, “wait for developers and bloggers to get really ticked off and then have Phil Schiller email them” wasn’t a scalable solution. TechCrunch speculates that the improvements in the App Store approval process starting 2010 involve more and better trained staff, since approval speed has improved and reportedly even communications between Apple and developers is better.

So, if you’re a developer, what will you be telling Apple? And if you’re not a developer, does it matter to you that Apple is trying to improve their developer relations?

iTunes Connect, the online portal developers use to upload and manage their App Store apps, appears to be down for the moment.

Apple had previously announced that iTunes Connect would be unavailable over the holidays between Dec. 23 and 28, but did someone jump the gun? Hit the eggnog a wee bit early? Could just be a server down — it is the age of the cloud, after all.

Or is it every developer and their team trying to wedge in some last minute app-tivity before the big close? DDoS by holiday?

If you’re a developer and your iTunes is suddenly won’t-Connect, let us know, and let us know when it’s back up. Otherwise, we guess your holidays start early :-/

[Thanks to @dmackdaddy for the tip!]

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Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat!

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You — iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge

Apple has sent out an email to developers that informs them iPhone developer news and announcements are now available via RSS feed.

You can now subscribe to a new RSS feed for iPhone Developer News and Announcements. Stay up to date and receive valuable information on a wide range of topics including:

Tips on submitting apps to the App Store

Current turnaround time for app review

Program updates

Development and testing techniques

If you’re a developer, let us know if you find this helpful. Also, if iPhone 3.2 beta news pops up the feed, let us know and we’ll cancel the “missing” posters we’ve had printed up…

TiPb had a chance to talk to some developers who attended Apple’s recent iPhone Tech Talk World Tour (San Jose, Seattle, New York, Toronto, Paris, London, Hamburg, Bejing, and Tokyo), where they promised expert advice at cities near developers. So how has it gone? The T-Shirt’s given away say it all they “came, saw, and coded”.

There were different tracks for developers to choose from, and one of the complaints we heard was that the devs wished it had been longer so they could have attended them all. Still, we have some notes they were willing to share, after the break!

(And if you think this is just for geeks… well it is, but it explains some of why the iPhone does what it does, and what developers could do to ease some of our frustrations).

WebKit

• One dev who was new to Apple technologies found WebKit and their specific CSS (-webkit-gradient, -webkit-mask, webkit-box-reflect) to be “astoundingly powerful”. (If you run WebKit or Safari, check out the http://westciv.tools.gradients demo.
• Apple stressed the advantages of using WebKit and embedded WebView. The AppStore app is an example of a native app with a WebKit UI made by Apple.
• A button made in CSS is much lighter than an image file and also scales elegantly (resolution independent).
• Even a JPG that’s only 50k in size will take up 10 times more memory when it’s decompressed and rendered in a UI.
• WebKit interfaces can be updated outside of the App Store approval process, so no resubmission just to change UI elements.
• Client-side database storage API in HTML 5 saves state locally and reloads the next time you view the page. (Again, http://webkit.org/demos/sticky-notes/ demo.)

App Performance

• Apple believes every developer should be obsessed about performance.
• For the end user experience, every fraction of a second is important. They want to load and go, not invest time in waiting for an app to load.
• iPhone uses 12MB for graphics, 32MB for kernel, 12MB for daemons, 4MB for phone, so for iPhone 2G and 3G, half the memory is gone before any 3rd party app even loads.
• There’s no swap file, so the size of binaries matter since they’ll be loaded into memory.
• When a low-memory situation occurs, there’s a warning. On second warning, background apps are killed, on third warning (95%), front-facing app is killed. (Think Safari disappearing and getting dumped back onto the home screen).
• Apple stressed that developers need to handle these warnings elegantly and free up memory as/when appropriate.
• A user should never be warned about memory or asked what to do (hello AnDROID!).
• Where a developer stores cache is important. If a developer stores cache in a location that iTunes backs up, it creates slow iTunes backups for users. They should cache in temporary areas instead.
• The iPhone uses a single core processor, but can handle multiple threads. In the future these devices may be multi-core so starting now and building them for that future is a good idea.
• Apple believes that great apps come from developers who pay attention to details beyond just what’s necessary to get the job done.

What About Those Rejections?

• The most common reason for a rejection, according to Apple, was when an app crashed on launch.
• Developers tended to know that if an API was private, they shouldn’t try to make an app that depended on it since it would likely get rejected.
• No specific rejections were brought up or addressed.
• One dev we spoke to liked the App Store and Apple as “gatekeeper” because it created greater end-user trust — people were more likely to trust that App Store apps would work and not mess up their phone or do anything criminal.
• Another dev, when asked about iPhone development vs. another platform, liked that Apple handled all the transactions and getting all the apps in front of all the users, which would be a huge chore and expense otherwise.
• Yet another dev just thought the size and reach of the App Store made it the best place to develop at the moment.

All in all it sounds like developers enjoyed the free event, and the free coffee, pastry, and t-shirts. Hopefully Apple will continue to provide them next year, and going forward.

If you attended an iPhone Tech Talk World Tour session and have any additional notes for us, please send them our way!

UPDATE: Stephen Rayner Jr. let us know he’s putting his lengthy, detailed notes from the Toronto Tech Talk online via blog.nuthatch.com.

Tim Cook (in)famously said other platforms and devices are still struggling to catch up with the original 2007 iPhone 2G, and while TiPb wouldn’t go that far (the App Store didn’t show up until the iPhone 3G in 2008), strictly in terms of user experience and functionality, he may have had a point.

First up, Jamie Zawinski (jwz) has abandoned the Palm Pre and gone all in on iPhone, despite Apple being worse than Palm when it comes to developer relations and closed ecosystems. Why? “Because it just [redacted] works.” He highlights Mac sync, but especially performance as key. Long delays in being able to use the Pre calendar, phone, and camera apps are especially irksome.

I don’t expect the performance of this phone to be even remotely suitable for every day use for at least a year. I figure it’s going to either take a substantial amount of work on the lower levels of the OS, or they’re going to have to throw Moore’s law and new hardware at it…

Next up, Steven Frank, who abandoned the iPhone after the Google Voice incident, and returned to it when he couldn’t find happiness with another device, nails why that’s still the case some 2 years later:

It’s not just that the iPhone has fancy woo-woo transitions and purty graphics; it runs all the way down the software stack. For example, when I tap on something, I don’t have to hover for five seconds wondering “now did it get that tap, or do I have to do it again?” This is something other platforms are still struggling with. When we say you have a bad experience, this is the sort of thing we mean. It has little to do with features, and everything to do with core functionality.

Lastly, Daniel Pasco offers a theory as to why — Apple spent years and a fortune figuring out the iPhone:

Because of that effort, since the iPhone was released, everyone else has been struggling to play catch up, and no one has really come close. Apple raised the bar higher than anyone else had before, and by the time the competition realized how much of an effort would be required to seriously compete, the public had already turned to them to see how they would meet Apple’s threat.

Spending 2.5 years in secret, and who knowns how many of those billions, and then unleashing the iPhone 2G multi-touch user interface changed the game in 2007, and more — it forced competitors to play catchup in public. Sure, many have the iPhone now to copy, but Apple has the momentum to keep innovating.

The question is, can incredibly rich companies like Microsoft, and amazingly innovative ones like Palm — or Google which is both — bridge that gap at the core functionality and user experience level?

[via Daring Fireball]

Dan Moren of Macworld has an interesting post up about this year’s C4 Independent Developers Conference, and how the indie devs seem to have cooled towards iPhone development and turned their attention back to the Mac. Why? Not the technology, of course. They’re up on the handset and almost everyone had at least one. No, it was dissatisfaction with the state of how Apple runs the iTunes App Store, of course.

Lack of control over elements like release times was cited as one issue. Profitability, another:

The problem is that the prices in the App Store, which tend towards the lower end, make it harder to recoup the investment put into developing the program in the first place. Sure, there have been over two billion downloads from the App Store, but remember there’s more than 85,000 apps available. Even if your 99 cent application gets downloaded 10,000 times, after Apple’s 30 percent cut that’s just $7,000 in revenue—not profit, mind you, just revenue—and if you spent the last six months of your life working on that application, you better hope you’re still working a day job if you want to cover living expenses.

Rather than abandoning the platform, however, some devs had suggestions for how Apple could help make things better, including upgrade pricing (to avoid Tweetiegate situations), creating a mechanism for demos, and something we’ve heard before from Craig Hockenberry — having a higher-priced developer account option that comes with a better service level from Apple ($999 platinum account, for example, in addition to the current $99 version).

With the current volume market, Apple may not care since they’ll make their 30% off Apps and CrApps alike. But here’s hoping their pride wins out, and Apple decides they don’t merely want the most successful App Store, but the very best one as well — for users and developers.

Apple has begun emailing registered developers with the following:

As a developer actively working with iPhone OS 3.0 beta, we would like your help in testing the Apple Push Notification service. We have selected a pre-release version of the Associated Press app for iPhone OS 3.0 to create a high-volume test environment for our servers.

Great move on Apple’s part, provided they recruit enough developers to really test the scaling of their iPhone 3.0 Push Notification system. After last year’s disastrous MobileMe launch, Apple needs to make sure their infrastructure is as bullet-proof as possible before they pull the push lever… even if they are planning some limited multitasking as well…

Full text after the break:

Help test the Apple Push Notification service

Dear [redacted],

As a developer actively working with iPhone OS 3.0 beta, we would like your help in testing the Apple Push Notification service. We have selected a pre-release version of the Associated Press app for iPhone OS 3.0 to create a high-volume test environment for our servers.

To participate, we ask that you follow these steps:

1. Download the pre-release version of the Associated Press app for iPhone OS 3.0 from the iTunes Store via your desktop by entering this unique redemption code in the ‘Redeem’ section of iTunes, found under the ‘Quick Links’ section: [redacted] This unique redemption code and the functionality of the application will expire in seven days.

2. Install the application on a development device running iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5 by synching it to iTunes. Make sure to accept notifications when prompted after installation. This application can only be installed on devices running iPhone OS 3.0 beta 5.

3. When you first run the app, choose U.S. English as your region when prompted. The U.S. English region will receive alerts, the Canadian English region will not. For purposes of the test, AP will be sending a high-volume of real news alerts.

4. If you do not receive notifications from the app within 48 hours after installation, let us know.

We appreciate your assistance,

iPhone Developer Program

Ars Technica reports, with some very nice commentary and screen caps from Equivalence (iTunes link) for iPhone, that:

One of the most requested features from developers, automated crash reports, can now be submitted by users via iTunes 8.2. Developers can access the reports via iTunes Connect.

No code is ever perfect, but anything that helps developers make their apps more solid for more users is certainly appreciated.

Apple has gone out of their way to point out the cons of multi-tasking background applications — a claimed 80% reduction in battery life while on standby with a single 3rd party IM client enabled. Push Notification, likewise, has been promoted by Apple as providing a single point of coordination for 3rd party alerts routed through servers on Apple’s end.

But unlike the code-once, release-done model of background processing for a single app, Push Notification requires developers to create a server system on their end as well, one that’s constantly and reliably available to send alerts to Apple, and scales to an iPhone and iPod touch user base already exceeding 30 million units.

Ars Technica‘s Erica Sadun goes into detail on the process and problems:

Consider an application with just 10,000 users. It might service a million uses per day, assuming update checks every 15 minutes. More time-critical uses might demand checks every few minutes or even several times a minute. As the computational burden builds, so do the hosting costs. While cloud computing provides an excellent match to these kinds of needs, that kind of solution comes with a real price in development, maintenance, and day-to-day operations.

For more on additional issues, like security, and whether or not small developers will even be able to afford to implement Push Notification, check out the rest of the article.

Any developers out there avoiding Push Notification for just those reasons? What could Apple do to help you out? Offer a hosting system for small developers on Apple’s end?

Apple has just let developers know that they can start testing the upcoming Push Notification Service starting today!

Start testing your applications using the Apple Push Notification service today. Log in to the iPhone Dev Center and review the Apple Push Notification Programming Guide and Getting Started video. Team Agents can log in to the iPhone Developer Program Portal and proceed to the App ID section to create the components necessary to enable and test applications using the Apple Push Notification service.

So, what Apps do we want to see getting pushy? Twitter clients? Instant messengers? Fart Apps? Let us — and your favorite developers! — know.

Following hot on the heels of last Tuesday’s monster iPhone OS 3.0 announcement, Apple wants developers to know that there’s never been a better time to develop for the iPhone:

With a rich set of over 1,000 new APIs, iPhone SDK for iPhone OS 3.0 beta provides you with an amazing range of technologies to enhance the functionality of your iPhone and iPod touch applications. New APIs also provide support for applications to communicate with hardware accessories attached to iPhone or iPod touch.

Any devs previously sitting on the fence finally decide 3.0 is finally enough to push you over?

The Situation: Developers who signed up for Apple’s iPhone SDK Beta and iTunes Connect program last year are coming up on their 1 year renewal deadline.

The Problem: Apple has no mechanism in place to handle such renewals.

The solution: Er… there is none — yet. But in the meantime, Ars Technica‘s Erica Sadun reports:

Apple has now e-mailed iPhone developers to extend their memberships until July 11, 2009. A short-term solution to the problem is good, but it shows that Apple is still working out the longer-term details.

Here’s hoping them details get worked out soon rather than later.

Almost a year ago, Apple held their iPhone SDK Roadmap Event and unleashed the App Store concept on the world. Developers signed up for iTunes Connect contracts, and now their first year is almost up and they need to renew.

One problem: Apple doesn’t yet have a renewal process in place.

Wha-wha-wha-what? Erica Sadun over at Ars Technica (following an article in Apple Insider) looked into it and found the right side of the Apple didn’t seem to know from the left:

When we explained that we were looking both to renew ADC memberships and to update iTunes Connect contracts, the representative instructed us to send a query to devcontracts@apple.com. [...] We did in fact contact the iTunes Connect e-mail address, who wrote back to us saying, “Please refer to the Contact Us links at the bottom of iTunes Connect. devprograms should be able to assist you.” Apparently 1 Infinite Loop does not just refer to a corporate street address.

Yikes! Hopefully — for the sake of developers and those of us who want to continue seeing apps in the App Store — Apple will sort this right quick.

Any developers manage to get a better answer from Apple?

No sooner did Apple flip the switch on Pull My Finger but 14 fart-themed apps have hit the App Store and according to Macrumors, leader of the app pack, iFart Mobile, generated $9198 in one day. I need to quit this blog and go make iDoody, or something (don’t tell Dieter!).

Daring Fireball weighs in on the use of private API’s, disagreeing not only with the practice of using them, but with the people who use and tell others hot to use them. A risky practice to be certain, and one that does endanger the user experience, but I like to think (or hope) developers are adults who will make their own informed decisions and take personal responsibility for those decisions, not try to lay blame on code samples or books.

Lastly, we have a rant sent in from PHARTGAMES developer Perry Hart who’s more than a littler frustrated with the continued delays and absolute opacity of Apple’s approval process:

I submitted ZombieMangle over a week ago now, Which was what i though would be a perfect time to release just before christmas. However, A few days after submission apple sends me an email stating that they require “Unexpected Additional Time For Review” with no reason whatsoever for the delay. So I do a search for any other developers who have received this email, and it appears there’s ALOT of them. What this email basically means is that your application has joined a queue which never gets looked at and your app wont be approved, or rejected depending on apples discression for months. One developer has been on the queue for three months, and received absolutely no information about what was wrong.

Emails to support were ignored, phone calls to support were outsourced and scripted, and complaints in the official forums have gotten boiler plate from the mods. Hart’s conclusion:

I think it’s time that all developers and potential developers know that they are working with amateurs.

Did Apple underestimate just how popular the App Store would be? Were they unprepared? And is their newness to the market — the newness OF the market — overwhelming them a degree such that they simply cannot cope? Or is this just Apple being Apple again, saying nothing and leaving people to increasingly frustrated assumptions?

Toby Vincent of SmudgeApps wrote in to let us know that along with general App Store distribution and the 100-device Ad Hoc method universities and beta testers have been using, Apple has just opened the door to a new system:

Apple has finally started allowing us to issue free promotional copies of their iPhone applications. Devs can issue 50 promotional codes for their application. The codes allow the recipient to download a full copy of the application for free. Codes can only be presently used in the U.S. iTunes Stores by using the “Redeem” link in the App Store.

This would allow developers to, among other things, get their apps more easily into the hands of reviewers, or give them away as part of a promotional/marketing initiative.

Vincent was kind enough to send along a promo code for their flagship App, Jam! Unfortunately, as a — I guess undeserving? — Canadian, I was barred from downloading it. Ah well, my loss will be the gain of one of our US based writers for now…

So, while this still keeps apps for the most part still locked into the App Store, does it give developers a little more wiggle room in their iTunes straight jackets? What else does Apple need to do to really help expose the now 10,000 strong catalog to end users?

First up, with the previous rejection of Gmail client MailWrangler, Engadget says another app which also dares to “duplicate features” found in a Dock App (Apple’s own MobileMail) has actually been accepted into the App Store. Did BdEmailer slip through the cracks? Or is this a sign of inconsistency on Apple’s part? Hot on the heels of the controversy surrounding Google’s Advance Voice Search using non-public API’s, developer confidence in the approval process might drop even further…

…Though Ars’ own Erica Sadun reveals the story of one developer who, after initially having their App rejected by Apple, tried and tried again, and without making a single change to the app, had it approved the second time around. Embarrassing for Apple, if the policies really are that inconsistent.

Speaking of embarrassing, Wired reveals that one developer actually got Amazon’s mechanical turk involved in paying for reviews. Users who get $4 — $2 to “buy” the app, and $2 in bonus for leaving a 5-star review.

Lastly, Erica Sadun is back to remind us that, with the release of iPhone OS 2.2, the NDA is now lifted regarding that firmware, and the public dumping can begin! Any guesses as to what goodies will be found?

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This week: we can’t stop talking about the App Store and what it means for developers. We recorded before 2.2 came out, but expect it to be the topic du jour next week for iPhone Live!

We have our final entry to the App Pack Contest! It’s the Mobi Cradle — everybody likes having a backup cradle. To qualify this week, you just need to do one of two things:

1. Register in our forums
2. If you’re already registered, sign a friend up! Just head to your “User Control Panel” by hitting this link. You’ll find a link at the top with your “referral link.” Send that to a friend and when they use it to register, you’ll be entered to win. You can enter up to FIVE times by referring FIVE friends!

As a reminder, here’s everything you’ll get if you win!

• Blueant Z9i Bluetooth Headset
• Griffin PowerDuo
• V-Moda Vibe Duo Headphones
• Belkin Sport Armband Plus with FastFit for iPhone 3G
• Seidio Innotraveler Car Kit
• Case-Mate The Hipster for iPhone 3G
• Mobi Cradle

News

• App Pack Contest
• Mobi Products Cradle
• Round Robin
• Reliability & Marketshare
• Papermaster Drama
• iPhone almost ran Linux
• Tethering at $30
• Google Voice Search is Awesome
• Gaming
• App Market Crash Coming? (See especially this). Joel Spolsky article discussed in the podcast.

How To

iPhone as Mouse and iPhone and numberpad

Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast.

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You — iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
via Sneakmove iPhone Ringtone Challenge
• Relaxation Spa Treatment by Dan the Automator via Wired 12.11: Sample the Future
• Wataridori 2 by Cornelius via Wired 12.11: Sample the Future
• DC 3000 by Thievery Corporation via Wired 12.11: Sample the Future

Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad of Tapbots are the breakout designers and engineers behind Weightbot (iTunes link), one of the most original user experiences released on the iPhone App Store to date. Continuing the iPhone blog’s behind-the-scenes look at iPhone application development, Mark and Paul were kind enough to take time and discuss their ideas on interface and interactivity, and how what more we might expect from Apple’s next generation mobile platform.

TiPb: How was approaching the iPhone interface for this App different than how you would have approached an interface for another platform?

Mark: It was really different coming from a web design background. 320×460 isn’t a lot of space to work with and then you have to factor in the huge difference in input devices. A person’s finger is a lot less accurate than a mouse cursor. At the same time, I wasn’t designing a website so I was freed from a lot of rules and conventions I’ve been following over the past 8 years. So my initial approach was pretty simple. If Weightbot was an actual physical device, how could I make it usable and fun at the same time?

Paul: The thing I found challenging about dealing with the iPhone interface is that users want a silky smooth and yet the iPhone and iPod touch are both very slow compared to any modern Mac. I spent a lot of time juggling things around in order to get a consistent 60 fps for all the various animations within Weightbot. Coming from our current Multi Gigahertz, Multi Gigabyte and Multi Core world where for the most part you don’t have to worry about performance to a platform like the iPhone where every cycle and byte counts is a big change.

TiPb: Weightbot’s interface is obviously both creative and innovative. Is the robot theme something that came to expressly for that app, or does it exemplify a personal style of interaction that you can see pushing further in future with different types of Apps.

Mark: The whole robot theme sort of just fell into place. That happens a lot with the work I do. I can’t always sit down with a piece of paper and try to think up a whole concept from scratch. I prefer to just dive into the work and then see what ideas pop up from it.

Paul came to me one day telling me he wanted to test the iPhone market and was going to start off simple with a weight tracking app. He asked if I was interested in helping out and didn’t want to spend more than a week or two on it. I think the original plan was to use all of the standard UI elements provided in the SDK, but I thought I’d let my imagination run a little and then see what Paul would think. My initial sketch was simple. It was just the shape of the iphone with the lcd as seen on the app today. One thing popped into mind at that point. It was Eve from Wall-e. Everything just fell into place from there. Weightbot was inspired by Eve, and the Tapbots idea was based on the whole concept of different utility robots in Wall-e. That was such a great movie. When I was in high school, my dream was to become a 3d modeler for Pixar. Obviously, my career went off on a tangent (along with this interview).

So now that you know the story of where Tapbots and Weightbot came from, obviously you can expect there to be more robot applications in the future.

TiPb: Given the stylization, was it difficult to balance form and function, and make sure the interface didn’t take over or drown out the underlying App?

Mark: Over the years, my web design philosophy has matured. I used to be all about the flash, bang, whiz type of websites, but one day I just realized that people just want to use the site or get the information they need. That’s not to say flashy sites don’t have their place. I’ve just changed my philosophy on it. So my take on all UI design is function first, and then wrap a solid, usable design around it. The same approach was taken with Weightbot. I pictured a user balancing on his/her scale, and easily being able to enter weight data into the app with one hand and without needing too much precision or concentration.

The Wii fit is probably the best example of simplicity because it weighs you and stores your weight data automatically. It’s also somewhat fun to do. The big flaw with it is you have to turn on your TV and Wii just to do it and that can get tedious if you do it everyday. I know because I have one and hardly ever turn it on anymore. So Weightbot needed to be very simple, fun enough to be motivational, and not feel like a chore to use. I’d like to think we did a pretty decent job on it.

TiPb: Did developing an interface for the iPhone change the way you may approach future interfaces on other platforms? Did you learn anything special from developing for the iPhone?

Mark: New experiences always help shape the way you think about other things. I’ve definitely learned a lot from the experience and I’m sure it will influence my work on the web. Maybe not from a visual standpoint, but definitely from a user experience point of view.

TiPb: You use touch and accelerometer based interactions in your Apps. Are developers fully tapping the potential of iPhone interactivity yet? What more, if anything, could Apple surface to help developers create even better user interactions?

Mark: Some developers are doing really cool stuff with it. The multi-touch screen, accelerometer, and even the mic are all input devices for the iPhone. Developers should use them to their app’s advantage. Our main purpose for using them was to simplify the interface. Imagine having a “graph” button in Weightbot to switch to the graph. The button would have to be small so it doesn’t make the interface busy, but then the user has to look for the button. Using the accelerometer was a no brainer. It keeps our interface clean and it’s very intuitive.

Google Earth makes really good use of the accelerometer and multi-touch controls. I think games are also pushing how users can interact with the iPhone. I think the possibilities are almost limitless so we will be seeing a lot of great solutions in the future.

Paul: I don’t think most developers fully tapping the iPhone at all. It’ll probably be another year before we see a large number of apps that really push the iPhone. Unfortunately in the current iPhone SDK there’s very little defined support for detecting things like two finger swipes or shaking the iPhone. You pretty much have to depend on accessing the accelerometer and Event code at fairly low levels. Once Apple provides some higher level support for these features you are going to see more and more developers using them in innovative ways.

TiPb: What worked out especially well for you with Weightbot? Any favorite features or elements that you’re especially happy with?

Mark: I’m happy most with the pure simplicity of it. Part of me wants to say this is the final version. But we get a lot of feature requests and Weightbot is nothing without people using it. So we will do our best to make our users happy without sacrificing on the initial vision of Weightbot.

Paul: I really like the Date Slider screen, maybe its because I spent an obscene amount of time tuning it, but I really enjoy the effect of flicking the Slider and hearing it tick as it switches dates.

Mark, Paul, we sincerely appreciate your taking the time to share with us and our readers!

Tapbots is Mark and Paul’s website, and their premiere application, Weightbot, is available via the iTunes App Store.

James Thomson is the acclaimed developer behind DragThing for Mac OS X and PCalc RPN Calculator for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Following up on his recent blog postings about the challenges involved navigating the still-nascent App Store business model for developers, and TiPb’s own look at whether or not there’s a “long tail” potential for the market, James was gracious enough to sit down (virtually) and share his thoughts with us about the issues facing 3rd party iPhone developers going forward.

TiPb: James, you recently blogged about PCalc in the context of a “postmortem”. What was the reaction like to that article, and did it bring about any changes in your current thinking or how you plan to proceed with PCalc going forward?

James Thomson: Reaction was interesting. Many iPhone developers contacted me privately, and via the blog, to say they had encountered similar problems with sales after the recent changes to the App Store.
Some pointed out the “Availability Trick” to change the App Store release date for your software when you do an update, to make it sort higher up in the listings. I talked about that a bit in a follow-up post here. It’s unclear whether it really is a trick, or just what you are supposed to do, but it does seem to work.

I’ve also tried a few other suggestions, like renaming the app to “PCalc RPN Calculator” to make sure it appears during searches for the word “calculator” which it didn’t before. So far, there has been a relatively small boost to sales, but I’m not sure how much of that is due to my changes, and how much is just down to the overall publicity that the article generated.

I’m working on a small 1.1.1 update at the moment to fix a few things, and I’ll likely add some more layouts and themes. The real question is what will happen to sales then. If they remain flat, with all the other changes, then I’m going to have to try some more traditional marketing beyond the Google AdWords adverts we are already running. To a certain extent, the blog itself /is/ a form of marketing – I don’t think I can really deny that, given it is raising the profile of our software.

Read the rest of the interview after the jump…

TiPb has been looking at the App Store and whether or not there is a “long tail” for developer income. Do you think there is currently a long-term business model for developers of niche-apps?

I think it’s a much harder market than it was back in July. It’s well publicised that the store is pretty crowded now, and it’s getting increasingly harder to find things.

I think that when the App Store launched, the initial sales numbers were so high, that many developers – myself included – ended up with cartoon dollar signs for eyes, multiplying the first few months of sales figures out to a whole year. Now that there are many thousands more applications on the store, I don’t think we’re ever going to get back to those early days.

I think it’s certainly possible to have a big “hit” application that breaks the top 50 and stays there for a while, generating significant income, but I don’t think the store is geared towards more substantial applications that will be updated over a long time. Our sales are still non-zero however, so perhaps the level of the tail is just lower than expected.

Also, to be honest, this isn’t happening in a vacuum – the state of the global economy isn’t really helping matters. A lot of the software on the store isn’t essential – PCalc excluded of course – so people might think twice before purchasing if they are worried about their savings. How much of that is a factor, I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it helps sales.

Since Apple and the App Store is the only way for developers to make their Apps available, does this shift some of the promotional responsibility to Apple? I.e., does Apple have some duty to promote Apps and provide as much visibility as possible, or do iPhone developers, like traditional devs, have to take on the marketing aspect for themselves?

I think Apple does bear some responsibility, at least in so far as making the store as easy to use as possible and helping customers find what they want. And more importantly, highlighting the best examples the store has to offer. If thousands of people are buying something, but it has a lot of one star reviews, why should that be more “popular” in the listings than something that has all five star reviews, but only a handful of people have found it?

I’d like it if a new iPhone user was looking for a more advanced calculator, they could quickly see that PCalc has 70-odd five star reviews and a very loyal group of customers. How you would represent that on the phone, I don’t know. But Apple has lots of very talented user interface designers who could come up with something

Of course developers need to do some marketing themselves. But Apple gets 30% of the sales, so I don’t think they are completely off the hook.

PCalc is a $9.99 App, which many have said seems to be the “sweet spot” for paid apps at the moment. However, we see some vendors switching from paid to free and back, or running short-term “sales” to either benefit from volume pricing or drive up their popularity before switching back. Is this a reality in the current App Store model, and is it something developers now all have to consider, both for their Apps and competing apps?

That’s a really good question, I don’t honestly know. Of course, you’ll always get people who say that if your software was just that little bit cheaper, they’d buy it on the spot. How accurate that is, I’m not sure. If PCalc was $4.99, would I sell more than twice as many copies? If it was 99c, would I sell more than ten times?

It’s a little tempting to just try it, and get some empirical data, but if you reduce the price and find that it doesn’t actually help sales that much long term, then you’re just losing out. And if the market tends towards lower and lower pricing, then I think the quality of software on the store will suffer.

I priced PCalc at what I thought was a fair price for what I’ve made, I can’t really do much more than that. As it was there on day one, we didn’t know what the prices of our competitors were going to be, so we tried not to worry about it too much. As it is, there are calculators on the store from free up to twice the price.

I do think it’s equally hard for customers to know whether something that’s priced at $9.99 is ten times better than something that’s 99c…

What steps could Apple take, short term or long term, to help developers gain greater visibility in the App Store?

Short term, I’d add more categories, perhaps add another level below each of the main categories. Put all the calculators in one place so you only need to look at 20 things in a given section, rather than 2000. Perhaps some filtering options, so you don’t see apps with lots of very low ratings. Even just a sorting option to sort by rating would help.

Long term, I think there needs to be a way of presenting what the “best” apps are on the store rather than just those that sell the most copies. I want to see apps ranked by quality, perhaps some combination of sales and rating, maybe with an editorial component. I don’t think Apple has the time to do that right now, given that an app still takes a week or so to show up on the store after submission, but I hope they are thinking about it.

Some way to support limited trial versions in the store would also be very useful for customers. The Xbox Live Arcade store on the Xbox 360 has the right model for this – everything on it is a demo version that can be converted to a full version within the app itself.

The iTunes model for music doesn’t work as well for selling software.

Last question: does “backspace” belong on a virtualized Calculator? (That’s a cheap shot at Apple channeling my counterpart at Crackberry.com… )

Wow, I never even noticed that the Apple calculator doesn’t have one. Yes, it certainly does

James, thanks for your time and generosity in sharing your insights with us and our readers!

Dragthings.com is James Thomson’s website and blog, and his highly-regarded calculator application for the iPhone and iPod Touch, PCalc is available from the iTunes App Store.

On Monday, TiPb Senior Editor Dieter Bohn debuted his new bi-weekly feature, TiPb of the Avalanche, by asking about the iPhone App Store and the “Long Tail” business model.

Looks like he’s not alone. PCalc developer James Thomson (via Daring Fireball) recounted his struggles with Apple’s new policy of listing Apps by original release dates, ignoring update dates, and forcing older Apps to the frozen hinterlands of the last few pages in a list growing well past 5500. Under the old model:

Sales started to slow down over time, but with each of the 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 updates they went back up into the stratosphere as PCalc moved to the front page of the Utilities section again.

And now?

As it stands, the App Store is too crowded to find anything if you don’t know exactly what you are looking for by name.

So while, according to Apple Insider, the App Store may still be climbing faster than iTunes Music did, GigaOm is pishing the posh on the iPhone bump in general.

During Apple’s Q4 conference call, Steve Jobs said that the App Store would reach 200 million downloads today spanning over 5500 Apps in 62 countries. How will Apple’s (continuing?) tweaks on App Store organization help or hinder developers moving forward? And will they, as Dieter is suggesting, have to start putting as much time, money, and effort into marketing as they do coding? Or are there no easy answers?

No, it’s not Deja Vu. No one has reset the Matrix (we think…) It’s just another Apple follow-along. To paraphrase Bertrand Serlet: Waterloo, start your photocopiers!

Not content with merely iCloning the iPhone look with the Bold or touchscreen with the Storm, during the Blackberry Developer Conference today, RIM basically repeated Apple’s iPhone SDK Roadmap Event announcements from back in March, note for note.

App Store? Check. Push Notification Service? Gotcha. Integrated Development Environment? Why not! iFund? App-solutely!

Scott Forstall, was that just the sound of you flinging your iPhone 4G through the screen of your 30″ DisplayPort Cinema Display? I think it was.

Check out the live blog now at Crackberry.com, and if you miss it, they’re sure to have all the news and roundups shortly thereafter.

[Introducing TiPb of the Iceberg, our new, bi-weekly column from TiPb Senior Editor, and all-around Smartphone Expert, Dieter Bohn.]

The recent news that development house Tap Tap Tap is breaking up has me thinking about the App Store and developers again. Partially it’s because Tap Tap Tap has previously been mentioned here at TiPb as an example of developers raking in the cash and as an example of developers being open about how much they’re making and what they think of the industry. The break-up is interesting for a few reasons in this context.

After the break, some ruminations and thoughts on the State of the Apps from this layman’s point of view. Warning: as you can see from the title, this post includes hackneyed references to the Long Tail

Firstly, the details of the breakup include a new way for developers to make money off of applications — by selling them completely. Tap Tap Tap’s “Where To?” app is now on the market for a buyer, having made around $200,000 up to this point. I’m doubting that we’ll hear what the final selling price is, but I have a hunch that it’s not going to be sky high. The reason for that, though, is wrapped up in the Long Tail.

The standard business model when people talk about the Long Tail goes like this: niche software products (or blog posts, or what-have-you) never really go away, instead they generate a small amount of revenue for a long time after their initial sales surge. Taken together, this ‘long tail’ of sales can add up to real money — eBay makes more money selling millions of niche products than they do selling big ticket items, for example. You see this in other mobile ecosystems — There are plenty of software shops on Windows Mobile that push out all sorts of apps year after year. And, of course, the movie, music, and publishing industry rakes in untold millions in practically passive income every year based on their huge back catalogs of DVDs, CDs, and Books.

So the idea applied to the App Store would go thusly: Instead of developing one or two blockbuster apps that make beaucoup bucks, we may see these developers feeling pressure to keep creating new applications for that initial sales bump and a diversified Long Tail strategy of revenue instead of focusing on a single app and trying to keep it in the Top 50.

image by JSK

Setting aside the question of whether or not producing and maintaining lots of niche apps is even feasible for a single developer or a small software house, there are three ways that I can see the Long Tail theory applied to the App store. One is pessimistic, the other two a bit more hopeful:

1. The Long Tail doesn’t apply to the App Store because it’s just such a gigantic freaking money maker. It’s an order of magnitude larger than any mobile software economy we’ve seen before and it therefore needs an entire rethinking of how to make money with mobile apps. In essence, the right side of the tail for even a single moderately popular app is large enough to support a developer.

While I do think that the App Store is qualitatively different than other mobile app ecosystems, I’m not sure that I think it’s as crazy good as the 1st possibility there. Even if it were, it’s a little to optimistic for a business plan, so let’s look at the latter two.

2. The Long Tail works — niche apps are able to maintain enough publicity on their own merits within the App Store over the long run to collectively make enough money to support a developer.

Right now I’d like to think this is the safe bet — if you don’t think you have a blockbuster on your hands, develop as many apps as you can reasonably maintain and hope they add up to a living. However, I suspect the situation might be turn out to be like the third possibility:

3. The Long Tail doesn’t apply because once an app falls off the Top 50, its sales plummet. In essence, the right side of the tail is so small that no amount of niche apps added together will ever be able to support a living wage. The only safe strategy is to make an application popular enough to stay high up in the sales charts (and provide enough marketing to keep it there) or find ways other than the App Store to drive sales.

Here’s the nut of what I’m saying: My hunch is that it may be tougher for applications to develop a “long tail” on the iPhone than it is for other platforms. The reason I think this is that it looks like the real driver of sales on the App Store are the top lists. As John Casasanta previously noted:

It’s worth pointing out that our sales have dropped significantly over the past few days. We were teetering around the 50th rank for Where To but then slipped under it. It seems that once you drop past that, you’re on a free-fall since the App Store on the iPhone only shows 50 in its top list, compared to 100 in iTunes on the computer. [...] I’m willing to bet that it’s a quick ride into oblivion once you fall off the Top 100 chart and I’m really hoping we don’t get to find that out anytime soon for Where To.

The idea here is this: if your app can’t keep itself in the top rankings, it’s going to quickly become lost in the sea of applications in the App Store. Unless you have a very unique niche (or several of them), it will also be difficult to find via search. Unless you’re able to effectively market it via means other than the App Store, it simply may as well not even exist there. The effective long tail for an App with no visibility approaches zero, in other words.

It’s not the fault of any particular app if it can’t keep itself in the top 50 long-term. There are going to be too many apps and too many newly popular apps for a top list strategy to be viable for any but the most popular programs. Keeping any given application in the Top 50 long-term would likely require a mammoth marketing effort.

As Ars Technica points out in regard to the Tap Tap Tap situation, there does seem to be a genuine concern that the marketing of an app is as important, if not more important, than the design of the app itself. That’s definitely a concern I would share were I looking to make a living developing iPhone apps.

It might be possible (or even necessary) that some sort of structural change to the App Store could help non-top-list apps maintain a revenue stream long-term. I can’t say exactly what that change would be, to be honest, but I suspect it would need to involve a more robust and sortable reviewing system to help the cream rise to the top of categories and searches.

In the meantime, it would behoove most developers to consider what their marketing strategy for their application is going to be long term. Even great apps like Where To? are not likely to get a ton of visibility in the App Store over the long haul (again, through no fault of the app itself), so making apps like it part of a diversified long tail strategy is going to require some serious thought.

We’ve already called the iPhone app development a goldrush and even suggested that it’s a living. That last part may be a little more difficult than it has looked for the past couple months. Apple does have an obligation to help make quality apps more discoverable in the App Store, but not the sole obligation. As with any industry, iPhone Apps (at least the ones that aren’t in the top 50) aren’t going to sell themselves.

Updated: Now available via the iTunes App Store

Want to get attention for your App? Innovative and drop dead gorgeous UI is one heckuva way to do it. Enter Weightbot from Tapbots. Killer mascot, even more interesting user experience. These are the kinds of high-polish Apps we’ve been waiting for (no pun intended!)

Anyone else pushing the iPhone envelope? Please let us know!

Thanks to Mark for sending this in!

No sooner did Apple drop the iPhone SDK Non-Disclosure Agreement (fondly referred to as the [Redacted] NDA among aficionados, as it forbade developers discussing the topic even among themselves), then the floodgates of knowledge burst open. Cases in point:

According to TUAW, iPhone coder extraordinaire Erica Sadun’s The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook is already available in PDF form from informIT (along with code samples!):

If you’re getting started with iPhone programming, this book brings together tested, ready-to-use code for hundreds of the challenges you’re most likely to encounter. Use this fully documented, easy-to-customize code to get productive fast—and focus your time on the specifics of your application, not boilerplate tasks.

Meanwhile, Mike Clark writes in to let us know that Pragmatic Programmers is now offering a set of screencasts targeted specifically at iPhone developers:

There’s also a free (no account required) 20-minute “Getting Started with Xcode and Interface Builder” screencast [where Bill Dudney] shows you how to build the simplest of iPhone apps (a Hello World app). More important, he shows you how it works—from the main functions triggering Nib files being loaded, to wiring up interface controls, and all the way through a button push running code that you write.

Of course, Apple itself is going on a World Tour and is revving up the iPhone Developer University Program.

Seriously. Has there ever been a better time to develop for the iPhone?

We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

Updated for clarity: This means that released firmware, like 1.x up to 2.1 is no longer covered by NDA, but un-released firmware, including the current iPhone 2.2 Beta 1, is still under NDA. Okay to talk about what was and what is, but not what will be, b’okay?

Hey, maybe the full on Dieter-rant from the last Phone different podcast finally got to them?

While issues of clarity in the rejection progress and app demo/refund handling remain, this will certainly go a long way towards not only easing the burden on developers, but restoring some of the lost luster (and ill will) Apple has garnered from the developer and blogging community as of late.

What do you think? First step? Giant leap? Or drop in the bucket?

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, in an attempt to get to the bottom of the PodcasterGate’s latest controversy, namely Apple reportedly slapping “NDA” (Non-Disclosure Agreement) on the rejection notices and discussion there off, confidentially polled developers and came to the following conclusion:

My conclusion is that as [redacted] up as this entire situation is, both with the App Store rejections for “duplication of functionality” and NDA frustrations, it does not seem as though Apple has changed its policy regarding whether rejection notices are confidential.

Indeed, some Mac (but not iPhone) developers reported all their communications from Apple, going way back, bore non-disclosure language. This latest wrinkle does indeed appear to be inconsistent legal notices from different Apple developer reps, rather than any substantive change in response to PodcasterGate.

Still, resentment levels among iPhone developers are still soaring, and due to the NDA, the public displeasure ain’t nothing compared to what’s building internally.

Start alienating your developer base and there’s two ways to handle it: the right way, and the current Apple way. Delicious Monster’s Wil Shipley offers up what should be required reading for both Apple PR and App Store staff, on how to go about the right way: let the market decide. Apple, much to their discredit on this one, has chosen pretty much the exact opposite. Macrumors reports:

Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings: THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE

That’s right. Apple’s answer to upset developers? Shut them up. It’s the business equivalent of not only Apple putting their heads in the sand, but yanking the developers heads down with them. iSigh.

And if developers choose to use (or abuse) the Ad Hoc distribution method to provision 100 specific licenses at a time as a way of circumventing the App Store? Well, Podcaster got away with it for a while (read: 13,000 whiles!) but TUAW now says Apple has turned off the spigot on that one as well. Podcaster: no more licenses for you!

NetNewsWire’s Brent Simmons says this behavior is beneath the Apple he knows and loves. John Gruber, by way of linking to Simmons’ article, says the situation is beginning to give him “the Fear”. We know how, and what, both of them feel.

Hey, Eddy Cue: Didn’t Apple put you in charge of the App Store? You did great on iTunes and are fixing the MobileMe. Can’t you put foot to trouser seat on this fiasco before it drives all the best developers (and customers!) to You Know Where?

Today is “A Day”, the day T-Mobile announces Google’s Android mobile platform (see our brand new little sibling site, AndroidCentral, for all the details and coverage) to an anxiously anticipating world. Well… mostly anxiously anticipating.

Turns out some people aren’t as interested. Is it because Google’s latest forays into content, including YouTube and Wikipedia rival Knol, and platforms, including Android and Firefox rival Chrome (and gLinux OS on the horizon?), make them think “don’t be evil” is just a sinister plan to catch the world — and our privacy — off guard and unaware? Nope. We tend to like and trust Google. What then?

Same reason some people are less than thrilled with Windows Mobile. See, while supporting multiple hardware and handsets is “choice” for the consumer, that translates into “headache” for the developer. Make a game for the iPhone, and it plays the same on every iPhone 2G, iPhone 3G, and iPhone Touch on the planet. Make a game for a multi-device OS, and suddenly you have to worry: some don’t have keyboards, some have full Querty, some have T9, some don’t have touchscreens, some don’t have d-pads, some have 320×240, some have 480×800. Infinite combinations leads to infinite complication, and that’s before you even worry about bug fixing. And for some developers, including Steve Demeter who just cleared $250K from the iTunes App Store for his game, Trism, that’s a deal breaker:

“Do I want to be spending 6 months to write the game, and another 6 months making it compatible? If I had Trism available for Android, and there are 50 Android devices and every time one of them crashes (the users) contact me, do I want that?”

Sure, some developers won’t care. Freedom alone will make the effort worthwhile to them. But these are the developers already coding for Windows Mobile (or LinMo). But for others? The App Store, with all its problems (and they’re still many), maintains a value prop that’s going to be incredibly tough to beat.

Daring Fireball points to this Twitter from Raven Zachary as a reason why developers will put up with Apple’s capricious and communication-challenged App Store:

Trism, the $5 gravity/tilt-assisted iPhone puzzle game by Steve Demeter, has made $250,000 since July 11.

We’re pointing to DF because they’re right.

And for more on the other side of the App Store debate, check out the latest episode of MacBreak Weekly from TWiT, where Scott and Alex take complaining developers to task, pointing to PodcasterGate as something that could threaten Apple’s revenue stream if Amazon or another major company sited it as precedence for releasing their own music catcher Apps, bypassing iTunes, instigating Apple shareholder lawsuits, and other corporate level intrigue.

Agree or disagree, all sides of the issue are definitely upping the debate. (And Trism may just have given one side 250K more arguments in their favor…)

Panic makes killer Mac apps. I use Coda daily, and Cabal Sasser designs UI the way they’re meant to be designed. Likewise, Steven Frank’s recent blog post on the double-edged sword that is Apple’s App Store is one of the best descriptions I’ve seen on the subject from a developers point of view:

I’ve been trying to reconcile the App Store with my beliefs on “how things should be” ever since the SDK was announced. After all this time, I still can’t make it all line up. I can’t question that it’s probably the best mobile application distribution method yet created, but every time I use it, a little piece of my soul dies. And we don’t even have anything for sale on there yet.

The App Store is definitely a Hobson’s choice when it comes to virtue and compromise. Sorta like being let loose in the fields of plenty after being bound and gagged and given a swift kick in the tenders.

If you’re a developer, how’s your soul holding up?

The iPhone App Store Avalanche continues, with seemingly dozens of new Apps popping up every day (though no word yet on NetShare or Box Office!), but as busy as things look out front, they’re just as busy behind the scenes.

So what’s going on? Business. It’s booming. (At least if your customers aren’t getting error codes -4 or 5002 when trying to access iTunes!) Apple began to report download stats to developers, and some developers have begun to share those stats with the blogsphere.

What do they say? Read on to find out!

Eliza Block, developer of the popular $5.99 2across is hitting $2000 a day — and growing — and she was only at #39! Meanwhile, the free game Tap Tap Revenge has already surpassed to 1 million download mark, with 2.5 million in indie song downloads to go with it, which made developer John Casasanta, who also announced $9,547 and $349 for Where To and Tipulator, think there may be some future in iPhone Apps. (Though there’s no word yet on how that $999 “I Am Rich” (Cr)App is doing..)

Others, while not sharing numbers, aren’t so shy about sharing expectations. Sega thinks they’ll hit 1 million with Super Monkey Ball. At $9.99 a pop, that’s almost $10 million. For a mobile game. That’s enough to get developers Other Ocean talking about creating a specialized iPhone division to crank out more cash… er… games.

All the competition has gotten some apps to lower their price, a prime example being Cro Mag Rally going from $9.99 to $5.99.

On the flip side, some free apps have switched to paid apps, taking advantage of what seems to be a flaw in the system that keeps their free popularity stat in the App Store when they switch, leading to an instant spotlight in the top paid apps list. Looking at you, Unit Converter… For users, TiPb Forum moderator Bad Ash recommends — and I heartily agree — that “it’s good idea to stock up on all the free apps while they are ‘free’ “.

Of course, all’s not rosy in App Store land, as developers are still bound by the [redacted] NDA, which many feel is simply a hinderance to quality apps in a post beta world, and others think may just be protecting Apple from competitors peeking into their tech. Likewise, Apple traditionally acts like its under a permanent NDA all its own, with developers constantly in the dark about when their apps — and updates to apps — may (or may not) appear in the App Store.

With the App Store, along with Mobile Me, recently being re-organized under VP of Internet Services, Eddy Cue, who will report directly to Steve Jobs, hopefully some of the old iTunes Store quality will rub off on it.

During Apple’s Q3 Conference Call on Monday, Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook reported that, like the iTunes Store, App Store is not meant to generate revenue but to drive iPhone and iPod Touch sales. They’ve added 400 Apps to the 500 available at launch, bringing the total (at call time) to 900, though the percentage of FREE (as in beer, not speech) Apps has fallen from 25% (~125 at launch) to 20% (~180 now). Under $10 Apps remained constant at 90%. Seems like that’s the current magic ceiling for many developers. And with over 25 million downloads and counting, they may be right.

What else is going on in App Land? Read on to find out!

With new Apps hitting the store at an ever-increasing rate, be sure to check out Brian’s ongoing iPhone App Avalanche watch list, and for feed-reading demons, Pinch Media is providing both New iPhone Apps and New FREE iPhone Apps lists via RSS.

Dieter mentioned how well received the iPhone SDK/App Store offering has been by some developers, including those coming from other handset backgrounds such as RIM and their Java environment. Exposure developer Fraser Speirs goes so far as to say the iPhone will be Apple’s mainstream platform by 2012. Gleeful over the 1,000,000 iPhone 3G sales opening weekend, he says:

[M]y iPhone app, Exposure, has picked up on average 3,200 new users per day since the App Store opened. Exposure already has twice as many users as FlickrExport for Aperture.

Developer Ilium, who we previously mentioned had mixed feelings over the silence surrounding how long it would take Apple to approve Apps for the Store, finally saw their eWallet app appear (look for a TiPb review shortly). 1Password developers Agile Web Solutions, however, are still waiting.

NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons, meanwhile, vented to Wired about the secrecy and slowness surrounding the SDK and App Store approval process, including 4 updates to his App Store app having been uploaded but not yet made available to end users.

The platform is wonderful. It’s like what we’re already used to — Cocoa on Macs — but smaller and more streamlined, and, well, tons of fun to work on. The secrecy makes it difficult. For Mac programming, there are all kinds of resources — mailing lists, bits of code posted on the web, wikis, other developers — to help out. It makes a difference. For iPhone programming, no. We’re not supposed to discuss actually programming on the iPhone with anybody — even though that would raise the quality of the apps. The secrecy and locked-down approach also made getting beta testers on board pretty difficult. I bricked one of my co-worker’s phones in the attempt. (He got it un-bricked a day later. Temporary brickage.)

Martin Gordon has experienced this first hand, with his Flickr based App getting rejected by Apple not once but twice. First time it took two weeks for Apple to notify him it was rejected for failure to provide log-out or account changing functionality. Second time was for a free demo version of his app, with Apple advising that while “Free” and “Lite” versions were fine, no mention of demo or beta, or reduced functionality that references features available only in a “full” version, were allowed:

In spite of the lightning fast turnaround time, I am still just as angry about this rejection than the last one since there was no prior warning (in program agreements or otherwise) that demo versions would not be allowed. It’s hard to believe that Apple isn’t aware that people are crying out for demos and trials; going as far as explicitly prohibiting them (while letting all other sorts of crap through) is nothing short of infuriating.

When asked via Twitter about the free vs. paid version of his own app, Twitterrific, developer Craig Chokeberry revealed:

Both versions are fully functional. The one with ads actually has more functionality [...] Nope. Themes are not functions. [...] We spent a fair amount of time negotiating these points with Apple. They want don’t demos in the store. A good thing, IMHO.

Though his frustration at the SDK NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement — which among other things prevents developers from discussing App development even with each other) is pretty clear (warning: explicit language).

So, Apple is poised to revolutionize mobile applications with their iPhone SDK development and App Store deployment model, but (again!) their Kremlin-eque secrecy is causing headaches for developers and users alike. Is the influx of new Apps still drowning Apple’s processing and support capabilities? Are they stretched too thin to whip up a developers-only discussion area, even in the secure developer.apple.com site? And even if both of those things are true, could they not have Scott Foretall, or even someone in PR, post something to let devs know Apple hears their pain points and will eventually, in some way, address them?

Or is this all just mountain out of molehill stuff, and the same types of growth problems any widespread launch of a new platform will encounter?

Are you a developer? A user? What do you think?

A few posts back we got into a few App Store early growing pains/gripes, including that some less-scrupulous — or more marketing-savvy, depending on your point of view — developers were prepending spaces and symbols to their App names in order to get them to sort higher in the alphabetical listings. Well according to MacUser (via Ars), seems like Apple called shenanigans on that one and has put an end to the practice.

Visiting the App Store now, I see that Jirbo’s titles, as well as quite a few others, still have a space in front of them, but are simply alphabetized by the following letter.

Nicely done. Would that all App Store problems were so easily solved…

We likewise mentioned that one of the big problems with the App Store, given its locked-down distribution method and gagging NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) was that it effectively prevented developers from doing proper betas, collecting crash or other bug data, and testing fixes. That is if, unlike Iliumsoft, you can even get your App into the Store!:

Wow. If you think waiting for eWallet is painful out there, try being in here. We were really fired up for the big launch and now we’re just pulling our hair out wondering what is happening (and if you’ve seen pictures of me, additional hair removal is a serious problem in my case.) We were told that the app would appear by the 11th, talked to “thrice-removed from the actual AppStore” support personnel, emailed every person we can think of, and stared endlessly at the status screen willing it to change. Still, nothing.

Twitteriffic‘s Craig Hockenberry (unsurprisingly via Twitter) posts that the length of time it takes Apple to push out updated Apps can lead to buggy versions still being downloaded even after they’re fixed:

A few minutes ago, the first line of the Fit description was “* THIS VERSION OF FIT HAS SHIPPED WITH A CRASHING BUG *” The next line was: “We have uploaded a fix in version 1.01, but Apple has not deployed the update to the App Store at this time.”

What’s more, the Review feature in iTunes for the App Store has become a vehicle for more than just reviews, with some apps getting literally flamed for dozens of posts (e.g. BoxOffice getting blasted in post after post by irate Canadians for only providing US Zipcode support, nothing international). Others just get nonsense. Again, via Hockenberry:

Another fine review: “Make sure you have this app when you’re digging your bomb shelter or spying on your neighbors’ subversive activities.” This is a real shame: it could be a wonderful way to collect ideas and feedback. Instead, it’s just frustrating. One can only hope that someone at Apple eventually figures out that software is not music. I’ve never had an MP3 crash or lack features. Flagging the reviews as inappropriate seems to have no effect.

Some developers have gone so far as to suggest a mass boycott from App Store (reportedly they can withdraw and terminate the distribution agreement at any time) as a way to get Apple’s attention. (Because, of course, Steve Jobs has always been easily swayed, right?)

Especially if, according to Tech Crunch, for-pay apps are increasing in popularity on the App Store. We hands out our money, we wants our awesome user experience.

Hopefully Apple will respond quickly and improve the system for both users and developers alike. Proper beta and QA, never mind a system for demos, would go a long way towards making better Apps all around.

The App Store went live last week (what day exactly depends on whether you snuck in to iTunes 7.7 and snooped around on your own, or waited for the official links to surface), tying in to the iPhone 3G and 2.0 software launches. How’d it do? According to Steve Jobs:

“The App Store is a grand slam, with a staggering 10 million applications downloaded in just three days. Developers have created some extraordinary applications, and the App Store can wirelessly deliver them to every iPhone and iPod touch user instantly.”

Probably why Apple has finally started putting a dent in its backlog of developer acceptances, eh? But is all happy in App Land? Nope. Find out why after the break…

Never mind the almost spam-like proliferation of ebooks-as-apps (public domain, yet packaged and charged for). There are complaints from both Daring Fireball and TUAW that some developers are engaged in App naming shenanigans, putting spaces or symbols at the beginning to sort higher:

On Twitter, Tim Wood points out that the problem is endemic to alphabetical sorting — if Apple merely disallows spaces and punctuation, the scammers will just switch to “AAAA Solitaire” to get to the top. Dave Dribin points out that Amazon avoids this by not even offering alphabetical sorting as an option. Apple should let you choose between popularity, release date (newest on top), and user ratings.

They suggest negative reviews by way of retaliation. I suggest feedback to Apple.

UPDATE: More gripes today, this one from developer Erica Sadun about how iTunes is imporperly managing App syncing — backing up entire apps (even graphic and sound chunky games) every time, greatly increasing the length of cycle:

I don’t know about you, but those new longer iPhone syncs are just killing me. Once an App has been backed up, I don’t see why Apple doesn’t just back up the Documents and Library data rather than backing up entire applications every single time the iPhone connects.

Me neither. Backing up changed states would be far more efficient. If backups take too long for a mobile device, people will start skipping them, defeating the purpose. Imagine if it treated +300MB movie files this way?

There have also been widespread reports of App’s being buggy and causing crashes, though some developers are pushing back at this, telling TUAW that Apple may have rushed 2.0 out the door before it was as stable as it needed to be:

Anonymous developer sources are reporting that they’ve been poring over crash logs and discovering that the reported crash has nothing to do with their application. There’s a growing consensus that Apple has released a highly unstable “final” version of the 2.0 firmware. So, maybe it’s more of a shame that Apple, who laid the groundwork for a multitude of useful and exciting applications, rushed development and failed to build a better foundation.

Some 8 betas since introduction, could the deadlines really have been tight enough on either side to lead to a poor Gold Master?

UPDATE 2: Apple Design Award winner Craig Hockenberry of Twitterrific fame chimes in on just how hard it is to debug iPhone apps, and why, which may explain some of the problems:

The big problem here is that the only way to install software on an iPhone or iPod touch is with the App Store. There are also no provisions for beta testing. Without the ability to sign code, there is no way for a user to get code onto a device: most users fall into this category. The only way to “test” a fix is to release the changes to tens of thousands of users. It’s the developer equivalent of playing Russian roulette.

Arguably the “killer feature” of iPhone 2.0, we’ve certainly not heard the end of this.

It’s not an unfamiliar story in web-commerce. Have an Amazon Associate account, a Google Adsense account, or other types of referral or revenue-sharing arrangements with the Big Boys, and if you want a check (or sometimes even a direct deposit), you have to wait until you have a minimum amount of money built up (often around $100). Why? To minimize the overhead for processing and cutting checks, and the banking fees involved.

Now TUAW reports that Apple is RUMORED to be setting their minimum transaction fee to $250. Since developers get 70% of the sale price, this means they have to sell $375.14 worth of their App before Apple sends them their $250 cut. That’s 376 $1 Apps, 38 $10 Apps, 4 $100 Apps, etc.

TUAW thinks, while this is good for Apple, it’s bad from the indie developers’ point of view, and will make the barrier of entry too high for some.

I’m not so sure. Any developer expecting to earn decent money off the App Store will either be pricing themselves high enough to do so at lower volumes, or going for high enough volume of sales at a lower price that, either way, they’ll be blowing past the minimum.

If a developer isn’t doing it for money, well then they’ll be giving it away for free or won’t really care if it takes them longer to get to the minimum processing level.

One of the worst things, not just from Apple but from a consumer’s point of view, is for the App Store to get flooded with a bunch of cr@pware that makes sorting a pain and buying a chore. This raises the bar just enough to make sure there’s a certain level of seriousness in both development AND business plans.

(Freeware cr@pware may likely be avoided by restricting access to the App Store entirely…)

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