Jenna Wortham

App Fever Is Changing The Rules of the Game

Ian Lynch Smith, a shaggy-haired ball of energy in his late 30s, beams as he ticks off some of the games that Freeverse, his little Brooklyn software company, has landed on the iPhone App Store’s coveted, and ever-changing, list of best-selling downloads: Moto Chaser, Flick Fishing, Flick Bowling and Skee-ball.

Skee-ball, Smith says, took about two months to develop and deploy and then raked in $181,000 for Freeverse in one month.

“There’s never been anything like this experience for mobile software,” Smith says of the App Store boom. “This is the future of digital distribution for everything: software, games, entertainment, all kinds of content.”

As the App Store evolves from a kitschy catalog of novelty applications into what analysts and aficionados describe as a platform that is rapidly transforming mobile computing and telephony, it is changing the goals and testing the patience of developers. It is also bolstering sales of the Apple motherships the applications ride upon — the iPhone and iPod Touch — and causing Apple’s competitors to overhaul their product lines and business models. It even threatens to open chinks in Apple’s own corporate armor.

Thanks in large part to the iPhone, introduced in 2007, and the App Store, which opened its doors last year, smartphones have become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age. They provide a staggering arsenal of functions and tools at the swipe of a finger: e-mail and text messaging, video and photography, maps and turn-by-turn navigation, media and books, music and games, mobile shopping, and even wireless keys that remotely unlock cars.

The popularity of Apple’s app model has reached a fever pitch. Tens of thousands of independent developers are clamoring to write programs for it, and the App Store’s virtual shelves are stocked with more than 100,000 applications. Apple recently said that consumers had downloaded more than two billion applications from its store.

Major players like Research in Motion (maker of the BlackBerry), Palm (maker of the Pre), Google (maker of the Android mobile operating system) and Microsoft (maker of Windows Mobile) are scrambling to replicate the App Store frenzy.

App fever has even prompted cities like New York and San Francisco to open reservoirs of city data to the public to spur software developers to create hyperlocal applications for computers and phones.

Apple cloaks most of its inner workings in a shroud of secrecy — a tactic that has helped preserve the company’s mystique and generated intense interest in its product rollouts.

But the App Store relies on vast cadres of outside developers to populate its virtual shelves with products, leaving Apple in the unfamiliar and at times uncomfortable position of collaborating with those who haven’t drunk the company’s corporate Kool-Aid.

This has led Apple’s deep support of developers, once shunned by big telecommunications companies, while also frustrating many of them more recently with what developers see as the company’s inscrutable and arbitrary process for accepting programs.

For Apple, the review is a necessary evil. Apple says it receives more than 10,000 application submissions each week. Most become available in the App Store within two weeks, creating yet another problem — the difficulty consumers have in efficiently and effectively trolling through 100,000 apps to find hidden gems.

Still, the App Store is markedly better than the alternative, says Peter Farago, a marketing executive at Flurry, a mobile analytics company in San Francisco. Gone are the days when mobile developers had to negotiate with major telecommunications companies if they had any hopes of publishing their applications on a phone.

“It took six to nine months to build a relationship with a carrier, maybe a quarter-million to get the infrastructure built, and the company took 50 percent or more from each dollar,” Farago says. “Apple has helped create a much healthier middle class of developers and expanded the pie for everyone.”

Apple pockets 30 percent of the revenue earned by any App Store program, with developers keeping the balance. Although barriers to entry for software developers have dropped considerably, Farago acknowledges that “friction points have changed.”

Developers cite instances in which applications have been held in approval limbo, neither accepted nor rejected for months.

FreedomVoice Systems, a company in San Diego, couldn’t wait to roll out a mobile version of its telephone software for the iPhone. The company submitted an application to the App Store last year and excitedly waited. And waited. And kept waiting.

“We’re facing 396 days with no contact from Apple,” says Eric Thomas, chief executive of FreedomVoice, adding that he understands that it is Apple’s decision whether to accept his app. “But the idea they wouldn’t tell us it was a no — or even why — so we could try to do something about it,” he said, “is a very strange and unneighborly approach.”

Freeverse also creates games and programs for computers. But like legions of other developers, the company shifted its focus to the iPhone as the popularity of the device rose. But that doesn’t mean it’s been an easy road to riches. “For our size and seriousness, we are still treated like a college freshman who is doing this as a side project,” Smith says. “The trade-off being that there is a much lower barrier to entry for developers. Anyone can have a shot.”



The New York Times

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