Now that a few months has passed since Apple made the software development kit for the iPhone widely available, and began selling applications via the iTunes store, it’s time to gather a little metrics. For instance, what sort of apps do people want? And perhaps more importantly to application developers, for what type of apps are people willing to pay?
As of the last week in September 2008, of the top 10 free apps on iTunes, at least six can be classified as games. The top free app, iGolf, allows players to use their iPhone or Touch iPod, like a Wii—you swing your device as you would a golf club, and the motion detectors and accelerometers inside can tell you how far your should might have traveled in real life. Gambling addicts can download iSlots, the second most popular free app, and turn their iPhone or iPod into a Vegas-style slot machine. Rounding out the top free apps in the games category are time-wasters like Dactyl, Blue Skies Lite, SuperBall 2 Lite Edition, and BiiBall 3D Lite.
It’s not all fun and games on the top free apps list, although two of the rest could be classified as entertainment apps. Facebook, for example, is the iPhone and iPod app for using the sickeningly-popular Facebook social networking site while mobile. And the Pandora app brings Pandora’s streaming music radio to your iPhone or iPod. But students—engineering students, perhaps, or techies of all stripes—enjoy the Graphing Calculator app enough to make it number nine on the free list. And Earthscape, a Google Earth-type app, allows you to view the entire United States down to a resolution of 15 meters—enough to discern major roads.
If you thought the top ten paid apps list would be more laden with business, computing, or productivity tools, well, you’d be wrong. If the list is any indication at all, it seems as though iPhone and iPod users are just as willing to pony up for gaming or entertainment apps as they are willing to snag them for free. Of the current list, only two apps—Recorder and Air Sharing—are business or productivity apps. Air Sharing, in fact, seems especially useful: it allows users to mount their iPhone or iPod as a wireless drive on any Mac, Windows, or Linux computer. At only $6.99, that sort of functionality seems like an absolute steal. Just as useful is the number 10 app, Recorder, which enables users to record sounds with a simple one-button interface. And Recorder costs under a buck.
But for anywhere from 99 cents to $2.99, you can purchase any of the eight top paid apps, all of them games or other forms of eye (or ear) candy: White Noise (a white noise machine), Cro-Mag Rally (a racing game), Pocket Guitar (an interactive guitar chord chart), Fireworks (syncs your music to a fireworks display), iFish (a fishing game), Koi Pond (a koi pond for your device), Line Rider iRide (you draw a line, a boy on a sled rides down it), and Air Hockey (an air hockey game).
Now, none of these games will get you ahead at work, but for the price of a single at Wendy’s or a grande at Starbucks, they won’t break your bank, either. Still, if the mobile device is ever going to compete with the laptop, at least as a portable computing device, it’s going to need to run some sort of robust business-capable software. Or are we just going to rely on Google Apps to do the heavy lifting?