iPhone App Store: Big Success

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 11

I admit it. I was ambivalent about the iPhone the first time around. It was beautiful and fun, and intriguing at first, but once I had tried out everything it could do, I got bored with it. I couldn’t add anything to it to make it do more things.

Now I have a completely different view. I’ve been alternating between an iPhone 3G and an iPod touch and have been absolutely unable to put them down. The reason? The iTunes App Store. There’s always something new and interesting to install on the device and play around with, and a lot of the time, they’re free.

My four very favorite iPhone Apps are the streaming audio Apps: AOL Radio, Last.fm, Pandora, and allRadio. This weekend I sat on my deck with the iPhone connected to the Wi-Fi network and streamed Pandora music — the Led Zeppelin channel — all afternoon. And last weekend, it was raining and I had a bad cold anyway, so I sat inside and launched allRadio, picked a station and got lucky: I caught this interesting episode of Ira Glass’ “This American Life.”

Word today from The Wall Street Journal is that Apple has hit the 60-million download mark on the App Store, and that it has been on a $1 million daily run rate since launch. At that pace it could grow to a $360 million marketplace within a year, and then could grow even more beyond that. CEO Steve Jobs says a billion-dollar market place is not out of the question at some point in the future. It won’t mean much for Apple’s bottom line: Apple takes in just enough to cover credit card processing fees and other associated costs, much the same way it does with music and video content on iTunes. He says during the first 30 days the top 10 developers earned about $9 million.

This is what I was talking about when I wrote “Why I Won’t Buy An iPhone” last year, a column for which I took a great deal of flack. There was a clear weakness in the iPhone platform a year ago, one which has now been filled in a big way.

The App store is a fundamental advance in the way software will be sold and distributed for wireless devices. There’s also buzz that it will be copied. But given the incredible response to the iPhone 3G so far, and the powerful results of the iPhone, I have to wonder what folks in other wireless camps are thinking. Whatever happened Google’s Android platform? There are stories circulating about delays, and every now and then I hear about an interesting Android application. But if Android phones are delayed, Google and its partners are going to find they’ve missed the boat.

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