It's just over 18 months since the iPhone 3G appeared and the whole App store phenomenon happened. According to statistics site gigaom.com, 28,000 developers have written 133,979 applications which take on average under 5 days to be approved. And users have downloaded over 3 billion apps for the 3G, the 3GS and the Ipod Touch. There are just under 60 million App Store users, approx 60% with iPhones and 40% iPod Touches.
I believe the success can be attributed to these factors
- Great technology and frameworks. The iPhone is not rendered obsolete within 3-6 months as many other smartphones are by the constant arrival of new models with different features. Even when a new iPhone comes out it's backwards compatible.
- Low barrier to entry. Just buy a Mac computer and $99 a year to get your apps onto the iPhone.
- Strict control over the software allowed on the iPhone.
Point three is important. Only developers with a Mac running Leopard or Snow Leopard can create apps for the App Store. Apple have specifically excluded other types of application development systems or language interpreters such as Flash. If Flash existed on the iPhone, it's likely that the income from Apps would fall substantially. Why pay for a Tower Defense game when there are twenty Free Flash ones?
The next version of Flash will generate an Xcode project that compiles and runs on the iPhone so this will potentially make tens of thousands of Apps available. However Flash is single threaded and it remains to be seem how efficient the translation is. It will most certainly have an impact though.
The alternative to the iPhone is of course the Android family of phones. These have the benefit that they will sell in much greater quantities than the iPhone but apps for their App Store have to be able to run on different configurations. This was also a major problem for J2ME mobile phone platform.
iPod Touch and iPad
An iPod Touch is an iPhone without the phone but it has Wifi access so you can browse the web and install Apps. An iPad is basically a large iPod Touch that you can buy with an optional 3G contract. All use the iPhone operating system so if written carefully, applications that run on one will run on the others. Given the much bigger screen area on an iPad compared to the iPod Touch/iPhone, you can take advantage of it to get much more.
The iPad also runs about twice as fast as an iPhone so that will make a difference. Existing iPhone Apps can run in a doubled up size window but I expect a lot of updates of those to detect and run full screen on the iPad once it's launched and the 3.2 SDK is released.
On the next page What do I need to Start Developing for iPhone/iPad?
