The research firm IDC predicts that by the end of 2010, the iPhone and iTouch will about 300,000 apps available for download. Certainly not a crazy prediction considering how many apps come out on a daily basis.
Our question is this: How many apps will be out by then that are worth a damn? Now that is a much better question.
With AT&T’s exclusivity running out on the iPhone, it seemed to most that Verizon would be the next to get it. Not so, says industry analyst Dough Reid.
Reid told The Street “Apple wants to move away from exclusivity; T-Mobile would achieve this for Apple in the U.S.”
While T-Mobile is a much smaller company, they do have the same GSM network as AT&T. This means that Apple wouldn’t have to manufacture a whole new device in order to work. This could be the deal breaker for Verizon.
But, we don’t know that this would happen. AT&T has some 71 million customers and T-Mobile has about half of that. The solution could be to offer the iPhone to both companies and then let users select which one they’d like to use.
Stay tuned on this one.
Appleinsider.com is told that Apple is coming out with a new “Concierge” app for the iPhone that would allow customers to make an appointment with a retail store right on the phone.
Yayyy. Thank god for this. It is so incredibly difficult to pick up a phone and actually call someone.
Here is an entertaining list of what not to do when constructing your iPhone app. It makes sense and they give examples for each:
Be Slow and Stingy: Wired Product Reviews (2.5 stars, 3,724 ratings) gets high marks for good reviews and video when users can find them, but the app gets slammed by users for poor loading times and a dearth of new content. Crashes and reviews not loading properly are frequent complaints from users. In our own experience, we have tried loading reviews in some of the product categories in this app and given up.
Don’t Pay Attention to the Competition: Sports Illustrated quietly came into the app store a couple of months ago with its news and sports scores app (2.5 stars, 867 ratings). Many of the users who actually did discover that their favorite sports brand was here were sorely disappointed by poor updating and buggy behavior. While some users simply like having access to the magazine’s great writing and imagery, the majority of reviewers say they are let down. The big problem for SI is that their main competition, ESPN, has hands down some of the most popular applications across the App Store.
Overpromise, Under-deliver: CBS promises “personalized TV” in its TV.com streaming media applications (2.5 stars, 7,929 ratings) and instead gives most users TV the way we remember it in 1957. With only a handful of shows available in full episodes, a weird collection of brands (CBS, CNet, CW, Showtime) and a lot of promotional trailers. Without clear utility or a reliable and rich content experience, this is a tube TV still waiting to warm up.
Keep Making It Worse: The jury is still out on whether the magazine branded shopping apps we have seen in recent months really are getting traction with users. Many suffer from tepid and few reviews. Lucky At Your Service (2 stars, 1,228 ratings) got slammed by some reviewers who actually like the early iterations of the app and then felt betrayed by cluttered and buggy updates. Complaints about crashes and slow downloads abound, and the reviews have not rebounded even as the app reaches Version 3.0.
Here is a good article from ZDNet.com on their top business apps for the iPhone.
Just two short years after the release of the iPhone, Nokia is suing Apple claiming that the iPhone uses 10 of their patents. They say that 40 other companies are using their technology and paying for it, and that Apple should have to as well.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that Nokia could get some 1-2% of Apple’s iPhone profits, which could amount to about $400 million. And that doesn’t include future revenue from the phone.
Apple recently announced that the company’s net income rose 47% in its most recent quarter as more and more people drop their fears of Mac computers and the iPhone continues to prove that there is no equal on the market.
As Apple rolled out another faster iPhone over the summer and dropped the price of the previous generation to $99, sales soared and 7.4 million units were moved from July to September. Wow.
“Apple is the undisputed growth name in tech,” said Brian Marshall, an analyst with Broadpoint AmTech Inc. in San Francisco. “Apple continues to gain [market] share across its major product lines.”
Imagine the spike in sales when Apple eventually releases itself from the exclusive contract with AT&T. We will buy Apple stock when that deal is announced. It’s pretty much the only reason that people who don’t have an iPhone won’t get one.
If you are into jailbreaking iPhones, you will be disappointed. Apparently, the newest shipments of iPhone 3GS’s are not vulnerable to the 24kpwn exploit, which means you’ll need to find another way to hack it.
Here is an image of the new version number:
Without any help from Apple, Adobe has developed iPhone tools that allows Flash developers to come up with native Flash applications for the iPhone.
Adobe announced on Monday that their next version of Flash Professional will feature an option for developers to export their Flash code in a format that will allow it to run as a native application on the iPhone. Neat!
“We believe these apps are good for Apple and good for the iPhone,” Adrian Ludwig, a product marketing manager with Adobe’s Flash Platform group, told reporters on Monday. “We have no reason to believe that Apple won’t love this.”
Adobe would love to offer the Flash Player for iPhone, but says they would need more help from Apple to do so. Why wouldn’t Apple want Flash for the iPhone??
More from PCWorld.com:
It’s not the Flash Player for the iPhone that many are hoping for, and the applications won’t be able to browse the Web in the way that programs running in Flash Player can. But it does mean that Flash developers won’t have to rewrite their applications from scratch for the iPhone, which should expand the pool of applications for Apple’s device.
The Dallas Business Journal reports that Apple could double the sales of its iPhone if it dumped the exclusivity contract with AT&T. This projection comes from Kathryn Huberty, an analyst at Morgan Stanley.
“We expect Apple to broaden iPhone carrier distribution over the next two years and believe this opportunity is under-appreciated by the investment community,” said Huberty.
The DBJ goes on to say that according to Huberty,
…Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) still has exclusive deals in six markets that made up 70 percent of iPhone sales in the second quarter. Making the devices available to other carriers in those markets would bump market share to 10 percent from its current level of 4 percent…
We all know what this report is really saying… wake up Apple! Make a deal with Verizon so you can sell more phones.
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