That’s right, I haven’t finished with the new Mobile Computing Platform yet, specifically software for this platform. The platform is available on the Apple iPod Touch, iPhone and iPhone 3G.

I was trying to find a reference to most of the Apple iPhone App store applications being priced around $9.99. Instead I came across the following interesting information. Developers cannot charge more than $999 for a single application, and the maximum size of a single application is 2GB (see Mobile Magazine.com). I’m trying to imagine an application which would run on the iPhone and cost $999, it would have to be a very specialized vertical market application.

According to Techcrunch.com, when “iPhone App Store launched last Friday” (Friday July 11, 2008) “along with the new 3G iPhone, free apps made up 24 percent of the 552 apps available“. The article is bemoaning the low availability of free (or freeware) applications, but that isn’t a bad percentage, considering that the majority of the applications seem to be priced at or below $9.99.

If you had to look at a website selling mobile applications for Windows Mobile or Palm, the prices would be generally higher, as these are more mature platforms. In the case of Palm, which is unfortunately in decline, a number of shareware (not free) applications have simply been discontinued.

Posted on July 18th, 2008 by mervyn