I’m an iPhone fan; it’s the best phone I’ve owned by some distance, especially now I can access the net at 3G speed. I love the form factor, the gorgeous touch screen and brilliantly simple usability ( even my technophobe better half loves her iPhone!) The unlimited internet access bundled with my O2 tariff just makes the whole experience a triumph.
I used to be a Palm Treo evangelist (until Palm totally screwed up their own company), and loved the 3rd party add-on software that was cheap and incredibly useful, so the new iPhone Appstore is a real bonus for me, and I already have over 20 free and paid-for apps on my phone that I use regularly.
Surfing the interwebs, there are conflicting stories about how much money can be made out of a commercial iPhone app. Some of the more popular apps (usually games!) boast 1M+ downloads (on their sites; Apple disabled the download counter in Appstore for commercial reasons), but the tiered pricing approach makes it difficult to judge who’s succesfully monetised their app and how much they are making, although the fact that Appstore appears to be generating $1m in sales per day is probably enlightening enough on its own!
So, how easy is it to develop an iPhone app, and how much money can you actually make out of it? Matt & I have decided to find out by running an experimental project to design, build & launch a finance-related commercial iPhone app! We’re not planning to do the actual build ourselves, so sourcing a reliable & competitively-priced development resource is part of the challenge. Along the way, we’ll learn quite a bit about designing for m-commerce, and will be regularly posting about our progress (or lack of it!)
And today is the big day, with a Project Kick Off Meeting taking place this afternoon at Fincision’s Bristol office (aka Starbucks @ Aztec West).
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Posting this via my new iPhone which I love. Look forward to your new app. If you want help promoting it let me know.
Spoke to Richard Allum yesterday and lusted after his iPhone. So I went back to the office, called O2 who have brought my upgrade forward and reduced my tariff – happy days. Paid £60 for the 16Gb but it’ll be worth it. iPhone arrives tomorrow (Thurs).
I’d be interested to watch the genesis of this app – keep us posted.
The 3G iphone will hopefully tempt more people to use Macs, for you really need to use a mac to utilise the full potential of it.
I am in the final stages of developing a lifetime cashflow planning programme for the mac (well actually not me but a colleague who is unix programmer). Perhaps further development could include a ‘lite’ version for the iphone which can de downloaded via the Apple application store on itunes
Hi Adrian
I have both Mac and Windows desktop boxes, and a Windows tablet pc (the latter being where I sync my iPhone). I guess both OSes have their plusses and minuses, but overall I would have to dmit that Vista is just a pile of crap compared to Leopard!
That cashflow app sounds interesting – it’s about time App Store got some useful stuff rather than eye candy.
Keep me posted!