65,000. Ask any iPhone devotee and they will tell you that that is the number of apps available in the AppStore.
Next question: How many peripherals have been approved? Uh-oh – long silence…
In a very interesting blog post, Us Two, a mobile content studio with 43 developers, outlined that their first iPhone game, Steppin, cost around $50,000 to develop and netted them a profit of only $1,600. Subsequently, they developed a much smaller app, MouthOff, which sold almost 30,000 copies. With development cost of 11,000 pounds Sterling, they broke even.
You cannot do hardware development with that kind of money. If you develop an iPhone peripheral, cost will run into the 6 figures; depending on the complexity of the hardware, it might even be mid-six figures.
Here’s the rub: Why would you chance that kind of money, if you are not sure Apple will approve the peripheral? Risking 20 grand is one thing – risking 6 figures is a total different business proposition.
Which is why it is good that the FCC is looking into Apple’s rejection of Google Voice and why I’m sure the European Union will start investigating Apple in the near future as well: Apple’s AppStore is a monopoly – it’s the only way an app or a peripheral can be brought to market legally. And unless Apple makes its approval process more predictable, developers will remain unhappy, peripherals will only show up in a trickle and the Feds will investigate Apple.
Having worked on the Intel Inside Co-Marketing program in the past, I know a thing or two about situations like this: To be (perceived as) clean and having created a level-playing field, you have to publish your rules! You have the freedom to set your own rules (within the law, of course), but once they are published, you’ve got to execute against them as impartially as you can. Unless Apple will publish their rules and stop approving or disapproving an app on a (perceived) whim, their quarrels with developers and regulators will not go away.
Once we will see a flood (not a trickle) of peripherals show up in the AppStore, we know that Apple has fixed its AppStore approval process. It’s as simple as that!
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