March 1st, 2009 by Chris

One of the first questions we get regarding our iPhone app, Easy Dials It, is why we decided to write one in the first place. Anyone with a firm grip on reality understands that those get-rich-quick stories posted all over the Internet talking about companies that made hundreds of thousands of dollars in their first few months are “newsworthy” for one simple reason: they are the exception and not the rule. With over 15,000 apps in the iPhone App Store, have you read about even 1,000 apps hitting it big? We knew that writing an iPhone app would not make us rich; we were at least 99% certain that even an exceptionally successful iPhone app would not pay our current payroll for even a single year. So, why did our consulting services company decide to write an iPhone app at all?

Experience Matters

In the consulting business, you have to be up to speed on the latest technologies at all times. “Latest and greatest” does not necessarily equate to “better,” but it does generally reflect what customers want at a given point in time. If we can’t keep pace with the industry, then we should throw in the towel now. We don’t use Ruby on Rails because we love it or even because we prefer it to, say, PHP. We use Ruby on Rails because clients ask for it—plain and simple. The iPhone OS and Mac OS have become very popular platforms over the last couple of years. In IT consulting, you are frequently able to recommend certain technologies to clients, but you don’t always have the final say.

We charge a premium for our consulting services because we bring enough experience to the table to make our time worth every penny. No one knows everything about a given language or technology, so obviously we all need to do research for some tasks or problems. However, it wouldn’t be fair to our clients if we billed them while we learned a new technology from scratch if we were charging a premium for our expertise on the project. Learning to build a quality iPhone application required a LOT of time and effort (a.k.a. “money” in the business world)—from getting started with Objective-C to human interface guidelines specific to handheld devices. Added benefits of being familiar with these concepts and their applications are that it’s easily applied to Mac development as well as development on other handheld devices.

Years of prior experience with C/C++ and MVC made it much easier for us to learn the rules and syntax of Objective-C, Apple’s approach to MVC on the iPhone, and the frameworks involved in building an iPhone app. That’s not enough to bring real value to a client considering an iPhone app of their own, though. In our first application alone, we already have experience integrating with the iPhone’s Contacts application (address book), the built-in camera, the accelerometer, and the iPhone’s Settings application. We know what the SDK can and cannot do. We know what could get your app rejected by the App Store submission team (more on that in another blog entry). Best of all, we’re familiar with the overall, end-to-end process including registering as a publisher, getting help from Apple and elsewhere when things go wrong, leveraging Apple’s tools to locate memory leaks, distributing Ad-Hoc internal beta builds, submitting an app to the App Store, and interpreting cryptic “explanations” for app rejection.

Standing Out or Fitting In?

Ever since Apple first opened the floodgates by letting developers and “tinkerers” download the iPhone SDK, there have been thousands of news articles and blog entries discussing its popularity all over the Internet. Right now, Apple is boasting about reaching the 15,000 app marker. This makes some people question whether having apps in the App Store will make your company stand out or makes you another “me, too.” Since Apple only shares the “big numbers,” no one really knows the answer to that question. You won’t find any quotes from Steve Jobs saying anything like “while we do have 15,000 apps featured in the App Store, a third of those are lite/free versions of more full-featured apps in the store.” You won’t find Steve Jobs quoted as saying “100,000 developers have downloaded the iPhone SDK, but only 5,000 have successfully submitted apps to the store.” It’s not Apple’s style, and it would be counterproductive to their infamous “we are the trendsetting in-crowd” marketing approach. What we do have are loose numbers that we can grab and extrapolate from. That said, please excuse the informal collection of incomplete data that follows—it’s what we have to do in order to have this discussion at all.

What we know is the approximate number of apps, but what we want to know is how many publishers have apps in the App Store. This morning, I examined 5 lists Apple posts on the landing screen of the App Store: Top Paid Apps; Top Free Apps; What’s Hot; New and Noteworthy; Staff Favorites. I checked out the publishers of the top 10 apps in each of those lists (or “first 10” in lists that are not ranked) to see how many apps each publisher had in the App Store and this is what I found:

• The average number of apps per publisher in the Top Paid Apps was a mind-blowing 14.8 (minimum of 1; maximum of 109).
• The average number of apps per publisher in the Top Free Apps was a much more modest 4.8 (minimum of 2; maximum of 14).
• The What’s Hot category swung back up to an average of 8.5 apps per publisher (minimum of 1; maximum of 27).
• New and Noteworthy came through with a respectable average of 6.1 apps per publisher (minimum of 1; maximum of 19).
• Staff Favorites had the lowest average of all at 3.2 apps per publisher (minimum of 1; maximum of 5).
• There were 47 unique publishers among the 50 apps.
• Of the 47 unique publishers, only 7 had just 1 app; the 47 publishers averaged 7.5 apps each.
• The 40 publishers with more than one app accounted for 346 apps with an average of 8.65 each.
• 18 of those 47 publishers had at least 5 apps in the store. Those 18 were responsible for 288 apps with an average of 16 apps each.

Looking at these numbers, it’s easy to conclude that the majority of apps in the App Store were published by a relatively small number of companies and individuals. I feel comfortable stating that there are only 1,000 – 5,000 publishers worldwide who have successfully deployed software to the App Store and I’d be willing to challenge Apple to prove me wrong. More people than that died as a result of the drug war in Mexico during 2008. The iPhone is available in 83 countries, but publishers can live in any country in the world so the number is even more diluted. Some of those publishers admit that their apps are total crap (I can find quotes if you need them). There was even a 9-year-old kid that wrote one (I give much props to that young man, but let’s just say he’s probably too busy to work on your project for you).

Compare that to the number of C/C++, PHP, Java, or Ruby on Rails developers out there. I’d love to see some numbers for any or all of those technologies, but I don’t need to see them to provide a rough estimate of “a freaking LOT.” Yet our company still gets projects on a regular basis using every single one of them. Stiff competition? Not really. So, did we work our way into a congested arena when we ventured into iPhone development? The media hype (a.k.a. Apple’s free publicity toys) might say “yes,” but the numbers tell a different story.

What’s next?

We believe there is much to learn from this particular market segment (iPhone App Store) within the overall market of handheld device software. In trying to stay in line with the numbers posted above, you can expect more iPhone apps from Riverturn in the very near future. We’ve already created a lite version of Easy Dials It that allows people to test the functionality before buying the full version, and we have more ideas than we have time.

We won’t stop there, though. The hype surrounding the iPhone overshadows the fact that Nokia is still the leader in units sold to end-users by a very wide margin, so Symbian OS still shows huge potential. There’s also the BlackBerry, Android, and Windows Mobile. Expect to see us venture deeper into those territories in time, but we’ll likely leverage our momentum on the iPhone for quite a while.

Along the way, we’ll share some of our stumbling blocks, failures (they happen), and successes—maybe you can learn from our experience, too. If we “luck out” and get rich from one of our apps, we promise to write one last blog entry from a beach house somewhere to let you know how it all worked out. The more likely scenario is that someone out there will think of an idea for an app and their kids will be too busy with book reports, so they’ll need guys like us to bring it to market. When that happens, we’re ready. That’s how we roll.