Getting Noticed in Cluttered Application Stores by Durke Newnan
Cell phone application development has become one of the hottest areas in the software development arena. With nearly every cell manufacture opening their respective application stores the cell phone programming business is booming.
This has led to a flood of applications into each manufactures app store making it more and more difficult to become recognize and generate attention for developers. The App Stores open market generates both high quality and low quality applications, which in turn has lead to much more choice and a lot more confusion.
When looking at the iTunes App Store "The dilution that occurs in the App Store makes it increasingly difficult to penetrate and receive mainstream attention, however, once you have become noticed the rewards are substantial." said Don Friend of Blackout9 LLC, a mobile development company. "Excluding marketing, we have found most success in applications that are done well and are intriguing by solving a problem or entertaining in a new way."
Some developers feel the solution is to limit the marketplace, however many do not believe the solution is restricting the number apps, but rather improving the search and category sorting methods. It would seem that with the recent updated iTunes 9, Apple has tried to improve the layout to sort through the clutter. This seems to be a problem that all app store hosting companies including BlackBerry, Android, Microsoft, Palm are facing. Verizon Wireless has announced its own app store will be released in the 4th quarter of 2009 and it will be interesting to look at their approach to solve this problem.
Until this clutter issue is fixed developers will need to rely on cold hard ingenuity to grab the attention of the marketplace and hope for free exposure, such as being featured on iTunes "New and Noteworthy". The free exposure is key in many cases because making only 70% of a 99 cent app (a common price point) is not much for marketing and advertising. In fact, many top app companies refuse to price their app at this price point and insist on a higher price point, leaving room for marketing costs, development expenses, and most importantly profit.
Looking at the iTunes app store again, the new section for "Top Grossing" apps in iTunes 9 helps higher priced/quality apps selling for $5, $10, or $20 become exposed. Prior "Top Sales" lists have been dominated by popular downloaded $0.99 and $1.99 applications, creating a problem for premium applications to get recognized as they had lesser downloads because of their price point.
Ironically, the Google Android App Store seems to be really lagging behind the competition as far as making searching and finding apps easy. The world's largest search provider, Google, has the least searchable app store (wow!). Being that it is only accessible from your Android phone makes it a nightmare to search through and find applications to download. Though Google has made recent improvements, it still lacks the app price and rating when app icons and descriptions are displayed. Because of this lack of search in the Android store, search websites such as AndroLib have appeared allowing users to easily search, locate, and view ratings of Android specific apps.
Application stores lacking a good search function only compounds the problems that developers have of getting their programs recognized. Also, until a cleaning process is adapted for poor quality and underperforming apps the market place will continue to get cluttered, which we are clearly seeing in Apples app store. Apples app store has over 225 whoopee cushions, how many apps are really needed for this?
"Our success with applications like iChampagne has stemmed from using features unlike what has been used before, in the case of iChampagne, it is using Bluetooth to pour from one iPhone into another" said Don "obviously combined with a strong marketing and PR... if you can"t find it, you can"t buy it." It has been said that a great working app is only 50% of the equation with the marketing composing the remaining 50% in determining the apps success.
As always, it appears to be clear that the cream rises to the top and the rest just seem to disappear. Unfortunately for independent developers the development teams that have plenty of cash behind their product are the ones that will be able to push their product out into the spotlight.
Durke can be reached for comments at DurkeNewnan@gmail.com. Blackout9 LLC is a multiplatform mobile application development company, can be reached at www.Blackout9.com and is the creator of Holla!, Wingman , iChampagne: Original, and other apps.
Article Source: ArticleSnatch Free Article Directory
Cell phone application development has become one of the hottest areas in the software development arena. With nearly every cell manufacture opening their respective application stores the cell phone programming business is booming.
This has led to a flood of applications into each manufactures app store making it more and more difficult to become recognize and generate attention for developers. The App Stores open market generates both high quality and low quality applications, which in turn has lead to much more choice and a lot more confusion.
When looking at the iTunes App Store "The dilution that occurs in the App Store makes it increasingly difficult to penetrate and receive mainstream attention, however, once you have become noticed the rewards are substantial." said Don Friend of Blackout9 LLC, a mobile development company. "Excluding marketing, we have found most success in applications that are done well and are intriguing by solving a problem or entertaining in a new way."
Some developers feel the solution is to limit the marketplace, however many do not believe the solution is restricting the number apps, but rather improving the search and category sorting methods. It would seem that with the recent updated iTunes 9, Apple has tried to improve the layout to sort through the clutter. This seems to be a problem that all app store hosting companies including BlackBerry, Android, Microsoft, Palm are facing. Verizon Wireless has announced its own app store will be released in the 4th quarter of 2009 and it will be interesting to look at their approach to solve this problem.
Until this clutter issue is fixed developers will need to rely on cold hard ingenuity to grab the attention of the marketplace and hope for free exposure, such as being featured on iTunes "New and Noteworthy". The free exposure is key in many cases because making only 70% of a 99 cent app (a common price point) is not much for marketing and advertising. In fact, many top app companies refuse to price their app at this price point and insist on a higher price point, leaving room for marketing costs, development expenses, and most importantly profit.
Looking at the iTunes app store again, the new section for "Top Grossing" apps in iTunes 9 helps higher priced/quality apps selling for $5, $10, or $20 become exposed. Prior "Top Sales" lists have been dominated by popular downloaded $0.99 and $1.99 applications, creating a problem for premium applications to get recognized as they had lesser downloads because of their price point.
Ironically, the Google Android App Store seems to be really lagging behind the competition as far as making searching and finding apps easy. The world's largest search provider, Google, has the least searchable app store (wow!). Being that it is only accessible from your Android phone makes it a nightmare to search through and find applications to download. Though Google has made recent improvements, it still lacks the app price and rating when app icons and descriptions are displayed. Because of this lack of search in the Android store, search websites such as AndroLib have appeared allowing users to easily search, locate, and view ratings of Android specific apps.
Application stores lacking a good search function only compounds the problems that developers have of getting their programs recognized. Also, until a cleaning process is adapted for poor quality and underperforming apps the market place will continue to get cluttered, which we are clearly seeing in Apples app store. Apples app store has over 225 whoopee cushions, how many apps are really needed for this?
"Our success with applications like iChampagne has stemmed from using features unlike what has been used before, in the case of iChampagne, it is using Bluetooth to pour from one iPhone into another" said Don "obviously combined with a strong marketing and PR... if you can"t find it, you can"t buy it." It has been said that a great working app is only 50% of the equation with the marketing composing the remaining 50% in determining the apps success.
As always, it appears to be clear that the cream rises to the top and the rest just seem to disappear. Unfortunately for independent developers the development teams that have plenty of cash behind their product are the ones that will be able to push their product out into the spotlight.
Durke can be reached for comments at DurkeNewnan@gmail.com. Blackout9 LLC is a multiplatform mobile application development company, can be reached at www.Blackout9.com and is the creator of Holla!, Wingman , iChampagne: Original, and other apps.
Article Source: ArticleSnatch Free Article Directory