The iPhone Development Blog - News and views for iPhone™ & iPod Touch™ App Developers

One Juicer is an online application by Two Toasters LLC that enables you to keep an eye out for competing iPhone apps on the App Store. You specify some keywords, provide your e-mail, and you’ll be notified when apps matching those keywords come on to the store.

For example, if you have a “guitar” application, just use the keyword “guitar” and you’ll be notified when any guitar related apps are released. This might seem a little late in the whole process if you need to respond to the competition, but it’s the best you can currently do without constant Googling and monitoring of Twitter for competitors.

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Route-Me is a new, open source map library for the iPhone, built using Objective C and using the fast CoreAnimation framework. It’s licensed under the new BSD license so you can use it for both commercial and non-commercial uses as long as you include the copyright notice and disclaimer in the documentation for your product (and in the source code if you distribute that).

Currently, OpenStreetMap, Microsoft Virtual Earth and CloudMade are the supported map sources. On the documentation front, there’s an “embedding guide” to get you up to speed with using Route-Me in your own applications.

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In this latest episode of Mobile Orchard’s iPhone Developer podcast, we interview Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire for the iPhone and Mac.

Brent talks about adapting a desktop app’s UI for iPhone, has advice for indies making a living selling iPhone apps, describes how he successfully split MarsEdit from NetNewsWire, gives some examples of cool iPhone apps, describes his “anti-packrat” compulsion, and chats about the complexity of syncing iPhone and desktop apps.

You can listen using the Flash player above, download the MP3, or subscribe to the iPhone Developer Podcast using the instructions at the bottom of this post.

For easy scanning of the interview, the following indexes shows what was covered and when:

• 0:25 - Adapting the desktop NetNewsWire UI for iPhone
• 1:45 - Determining what to cut out of the UI
• 2:50 - Dave Winer on UI: “bring your user along”
• 5:50 - “Whenver you have a preference it means you punted”
• 6:00 - Advice for indies: making a living selling iPhone apps
• 7:30 - When one product grows another: spinning out MarsEdit
• 8:55 - MarsEdit split: no user outrage: pricing and upgrade strategy
• 10:20 - Other cool iPhone apps: Things & Weightbot
• 12:30 - Being an “anti-packrat”
• 14:00 - The pleasure of deleting code
• 14:50 - Sync: desktop-to-iPhone and back

Keep up to date with our iPhone developers’ podcast

Subscribe to our iPhone Development Podcast in one of two great ways:

1. Use the podcast’s feed with the feed app of your choice: http://podcast.mobileorchard.com/feed/podcast/
2. Subscribe using iTunes by clicking here.

We hope you enjoy the podcast, and if you have any suggestions of who we should interview (or want to be interviewed yourself), use our Contact page or leave a comment against this post. Thanks for listening!

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Infomedia is the developer of iFart Mobile, an iPhone app that you can use to make farting noises. In just over a week of sales, iFart has done very well, going from #70 within the Entertainment section to becoming the 4th most popular app overall! Two days ago, Joel Comm (a popular Internet marketing expert in his own right) of Infomedia shared the sales figures for iFart along with the rankings. Then today he followed up with extra figures for today and yesterday.

Focusing solely on the ranking within the Entertainment category (see the blog posts above for more detailed info), the results are:

Currently the border in rankings necessary to reach 1000 sales per day is between 76th and 39th overall in the App Store going off of Joel’s extended numbers so, roughly but considering the distribution, apps at #50 or above are probably selling 1000 units per day or more.

As an aside: As a 99 cent app and after Apple’s 30% commission, this means iFart has raked in $13,205 for Infomedia over 9 days.

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If you’re one of those developers who logs in to iTunes Connect ten times a day to keep an eye on the sales figures, AppSales is probably just the tonic you need!

AppSales-Mobile is an iPhone app that allows you to download and easily analyze your daily and weekly sales reports from iTunes Connect. You can see daily and weekly trends, daily, per-country and per-product reports. AppSales-Mobile is an open source project (BSD licensed) and not available as an app you can buy yet, so you’ll need to check it out using SVN from Google Code and compile for yourself.

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Cocos2D is an development framework for building 2D games and other graphical applications in Python. Cocos2D-iPhone offers more of the same, but focused at the iPhone and Objective C! It’s open source and makes it really easy to develop 2D games for the iPhone. There’s built-in support for physics (using Chipmunk), sprites, parallax scrolling, iPhone touch and accelerator support, texture compression, and, of course, a lot more.

There are already several games on the iPhone App Store using Cocos2D, so it’s all ready to use right away - we can’t wait to start playing with it ourselves..! Cocos2D’s developer even shares some best practices to adhere to while using the library - very handy.

Note that while the library is LGPL licensed, the developer, Ricardo Quesada, states that it’s “OK” for you to use Cocos2D as a static library in your app (as is necessary to enter the App Store). He insists, however, that if you improve the library in any way, you need to share your code.

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InfoQ’s Werner Schuster reports on Rhodes, a new open source toolkit developed by Rhomobile that makes it possible to run Ruby applications on the iPhone, Windows Mobile devices, and the BlackBerry. Support for Symbian and Android is set to follow. The code is hosted on Github.

Rhodes works by packaging Ruby code with a Ruby interpreter honed for iPhone (or BlackBerry, etc, respectively) use. It’s uncertain how this works with Apple’s iPhone App Store policies, but developer Adam Blum told InfoQ:

To be compliant on the AppStore app developers can’t be downloading interpreted code on the fly from elsewhere. It is the app developer’s responsibility to be abiding, and if they do want to be violating there are much simpler ways to do it than embedding a Ruby interpreter and downloading Ruby code from elsewhere.

On the surface, it sounds as if getting into the App Store shouldn’t be a problem, but due to these tools being so new, Apple might find it difficult to analyze apps initially to see whether there’s potential for abuse (please write in to us with your successes / failures!). However, the iPhone-optimized Ruby interpreter does try and play it safe by disabling some features, such as eval. You also won’t be developing regular iPhone Cocoa apps using this technique (in the way you can develop full Cocoa apps with RubyCocoa or MacRuby). Rhodes applications are Web applications that run directly on the phone, so your views will be in HTML, etc.

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AppCubby, an indie developer of two popular iPhone applications - Trip Cubby and Gas Cubby - has put together a comprehensive blog post containing graphs and sales figures of their applications on the iPhone App Store. Entitled Financial Realities of the App Store, they look at the success (or not!) of advertising with MacWorld, AdMob and Google Adsense, and the effects of PR (such as a mention on Gizmodo) upon sales.

Perhaps the best conclusion, however:

[T]he only methods of marketing I’ve found to be measurably cost effective are working with the press and getting featured by Apple, both of which are essentially free, but incredibly hard to guarantee.

This continues to show that the App Store should rarely be relied upon as a marketing device in its own right - you need to do lots of legwork using good old fashioned marketing and PR to more reliably build up sales and coverage.

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Update: December 12 - see the bottom of the article for a different, possibly more accurate graph..

Are 99¢ apps harming the iPhone app ecosystem?: The Pragmatic Argument

Two days ago Craig Hockenberry wrote an open letter to Steve Jobs complaining about the prevalence of 99 cent apps on the App Store and the “rush” to that price point. He suggests the rush to the bottom is damaging the chances of more significant apps being developed for the platform. We’ve covered the “gold rush” on the iPhone App Store before, and dissected the App Store data to discover that the cheapest apps aren’t the ones making the most money (sounds obvious, but many of the complaints assume it isn’t so).

99 cent (or free!) apps do no more harm to pricier iPhone apps than open source or shareware apps do to commercial PC or Mac software. But the point still stands.. are 99 cent apps really that popular on the App Store? In terms of quantity, there are a lot, but are they significantly more popular than more expensive apps?

Popularity vs Price Band: The Data Argument

We ran the data from the iPhone App Store through the Mobile Orchard supercomputer and produced the graph above. It shows every iPhone app (free or otherwise) plotted in one of three bands (free, 99¢ apps, and more expensive apps). The y-axis within each band is random and just gives the data more room to breathe. The x-axis is an app’s “popularity” in terms of downloads - shown logarithmically (the App Store provides popularity information within a range of 0 to 1 and > 90% of the apps have a popularity of under 0.01, so we’ve plotted the data logarithmically otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see anything).

If you look at the different popularity bands, you’ll see the 99 cent iPhone apps occasionally have a very slender edge. For example, there are two 99 cent apps in the 0.5-1.0 band - with none from the higher price band. Look at the 0.03-0.05 band, however, and just 32 99¢ apps are represented against 25 from the higher band. This isn’t a whitewash for the 99¢ apps by any means. Visually, you can see that even though 99 cent apps appear to have the edge at higher levels of popularity, it’s just not significant and if you were to multiply the price by the sales obtained at each level of popularity, the higher priced apps would beat the 99 cent apps in overall revenue (we looked at this before in the Games category).

Variations between categories

Above, we looked at the iPhone App Store in general, but the difference between the popularity of 99 cent apps versus higher-cost apps becomes more pronounced if you hone in by application category.

Let’s run the data for several categories through the Mobile Orchard supercomputer:

In the Business and Productivity categories a clear preference for higher priced apps is shown. In the Games category it’s less obvious, but visually the 99 cent band is no stronger than the higher priced band. The Entertainment graph, however, shows that 99 cent apps are certainly a lot more popular there than the higher priced apps.

The Social Networking category shows a strong preference to higher priced apps. This category seems to have quite a few solidly-priced instant messenger apps and in comparison to the 99 cent apps, they’re doing very well. As always, however, the free apps completely trounce the pay-for apps.

Where next?

Seeing the differences between application popularity and price visually is very appealing, but we’re now working on processing this data numerically to produce “willingness to buy” scores for each of the application store categories. Which categories have people spending the most and what sorts of applications are people most likely to pay for? This information will undoubtedly be of use to you if you’re an iPhone developer or speculating on what to develop for the platform.

Update

Graph with all price points (> $50 mixed into top line) - click on the graph to get full size

There’s no analysis on this just now, but to help address those who want to see how it looks if price is more accurately traced on the Y-axis, we have this very quickly produced graph (same process as the others but with the y-axis accurately portrayed and no scale shown).

It is worth noting, however, that the main part of this article address whether 99 cent applications are more popular than all other higher priced applications - which is why the bands are defined as they are.

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