Word: apps
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Apple recently released lists on iTunes of the Top 10 most downloaded paid and free iPhone apps of 2008. Which app was No. 1 is unclear - the list, according to Jennifer Bowcock of Apple, is "not in ranking order on the website." She wouldn't comment further, nor would Apple disclose how many copies of each application were downloaded, so it's hard to glean too much from the lists...
Still, the inventory (here, in plain text) breaks out the 10 "top overall" paid and free apps, and, luckily, a number of the developers behind them were happy to talk about their apparent success and the business wisdom they picked up in Year One of the iPhone App. (See the Top 11 iPhone applications...
Most would offer this advice to would-be iPhone-app entrepreneurs: Don't be greedy. You can easily make up for in volume what you lose in price...
...case in point is the puzzle game Enigmo. Formerly a desktop game developed by Pangea Software of Austin, Texas, it was ported over to the iPhone in May around the time the iTunes App Store launched. Pangea started out selling it for $9.99. "The iPhone App Store has been a textbook example of supply and demand because at first there was a huge demand for the new apps, but there was a very small supply of them - only a few dozen games," founder Brian Greenstone told me. "So we could charge $9.99 easily for them...
Zach Saul, a founder of San Francisco-based software shop and consultancy the Retronyms, created Recorder, a voice and audio recorder, which is the only utility among the Top 10 paid apps. Saul said the app was $10 at launch but went on sale a day later for $0.99 - and has sold nearly 250,000 copies to date. What's most remarkable about Record is that a number of other apps provide the same service - for free. "I think we're successful because we continue to improve and fix bugs and so on," he said...