Apple Apps and my initial thoughts

All the hype has been about iphone apps in the past couple hours, days, months.Besides for the awesomeness that is being brought into the palm of my hands I’m extremely excited in the pricing that is involved with the apps.I was first intrigued by Marco Arment’s great post awhile back about the anticipated pricing schema, explaining how if apps are priced too low it wouldnt be worth it for developers to bother creating apps.

So with the new AppStore launch, Pinch Media counted 552 applications - 417 of them paid, 135 of them free. (EDIT: Things are moving - we’re up to 559 applications at 7:00 PM EDT, 421 paid / 138 free. More data tomorrow.) Paid applications ranged in price from $0.99 to $69.99, with the most common price points being $0.99 (85 applications), $9.99 (82 applications), and $4.99 (62 applications).Marco was unfortunately wrong with his prediction of pricing not being less than $10. I’m almost positive there are tons of apps that still havent been released one of which is Marco’s app instapaper.

that I plan on buying on launch, since I have already have received tons of value from the web version of the application that I would like to support his hard work and effortAccording to John Gruber of DaringFireball Sega’s Super Monkey Ball game has been downloaded 10,955 times, and costs $9.99. That’s $109,440 in revenue in under a day. Its really going to be really interesting to see once everyone has the official new update how many apps will be purchased VS how many people will just download the free apps.

Gruber compares the two apps that have a freemium model for the app store.

Exposure & Twitterific both have free ad supported versions and have paid versions for $9.99

The numbers he provided were

Exposure 3,638

Exposure Premium 76

Ratio 48:1 Twitterrific 13,638

Twitterrific Premium 322

Ratio 42:1

I couldnt verify any of these numbers because when i checked the popularity it was listed as 0 downloads

Here are two screenshots of apps that are ad supported.

--To take screenshots with the iPhone 2.0 software installed, hold down the Home button and press the Lock button and your screen will flash—and an image of your phone’s screen gets saved to your Camera Roll’s images.via Lifehacker Iphone 2.0--

Twitterific NYTimes

The ads as you can see are pretty harmless even though the sigur ros ad has naked rears.I am really interested in seeing how many people actually pay for the non ad apps.I was surprised that there are no try before you buy applications offered.The RememberTheMilk Iphone app that is just a web version that is accessed from your iphone had 15 day trial period that I thought was too short to try since I only started getting into RTM now a couple months afterwards.I still havent purchased the Pro version of RTM yet because I am waiting to see if they launch a native iphone app.

I havent paid for any iphone apps yet.The apps that I have downloaded were free and can be seen below.

My favorites so far have been the Facebook App & Exposure.

The Facebook App is great because it provides me a list of all my friends and the ability to email them or call them. This is great because by no way do I have every person I am friends with in my iphone. I have neglected facebook for some time now but I went so far as to import my gmail contacts to get more facebook friends.Exposure: Is pretty solid. Its an app that uses the flickr API its really sweet. I’m really surprised Flickr hasnt released an app themselves. But hopefully it will come soon.As mentioned I’m really interested in the psychology of paying for software along with the economics these days. I plan on blogging more of my thoughts and personal experiences.

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I would also appreciate some feedback since I will be trying to blog more often.

I take criticism pretty well so please let me know what you like or dislike about this post or any future posts.

Thanks for your time.