Deciding what applications are hot or not is something that keeps iPhone developers up at night. Developers can make a small fortune if their apps are picked up and promoted well in the App Store, while others may never see the light of day.
According to OzWeather's Dawson, Apple's emphasis on promoting cheap, quick-fix, short-term novelty applications in the App Store is affecting developers' ability to produce higher quality applications which focus on usability.
“There is a risk of a kind of a bubble here," said OzWeather's Dawson. "Apple could put more emphasis on applications that cost a bit more other than relying purely on the number of total applications that are downloaded, because that favours the cheapest possible applications, and the most faddish ones then do very well and go to the top.”
Dawson says to achieve success in the App Store, developers need to focus on producing apps which are attention-grabbing, but still useful.
“People have loads of ideas and some of them flop completely, so it’s very important that you have something that’s very suited to being on a mobile device, something that people need to get instant access to and work with quickly,” he said.
While anybody can potentially jump into iPhone app development, Dawson warns that like software development for any other platform, it helps to have a bit more background and grounding in the processes and languages used in development.
“Getting into developing and releasing a program commercially obviously requires a bit of practice and skill," he said. "Whilst there may be some very intelligent people who can jump in and do it, it’s probably unrealistic to be able to expect most people to do that.”
Rob Kingma, director of sales and marketing at ICT Networks, develops security-based iPhone applications for one of the big four banks. He says that while the iPhone apps environment wasn’t initially designed for corporate apps, the marketing components of corporate organisations have seen the value of being able to get their brand within the App Store.
By taking their Internet banking platforms to the iPhone, banks have been able to utilise the functionality that’s provided by the iPhone, especially the GPS locator, which provides banks with the opportunity to offer their customers services such as a mobile branch locator.
“Corporate opportunities within the App Store come from companies being able to provide an additional service or an extension of mobility of their services out to users,” Kingma said.
Regardless of what type of application a developer toils over, games undoubtedly underpin much of the App Store catalogue. Gaming applications hold the largest proportions of sales, and there is no limit to the number of games iPhone buffs might want to play.