Quimondo

iPhone Developers Go Linear.. Well At Least Their Numbers Do.

In the second review of the number of developers publishing applications on the iPhone App Store, it's amazing to find that the growth is so linear you could almost use it as a straightedge.  In fact, the number of unique publishers has doubled over the last 6 months, now approaching the 18,0000 mark.  Where admission into the Apple Developer AppStore program was once a bottleneck in getting an App to market, this is no longer the case.  One could predict that in the next 6 months there could be upwards of 35,000 developers, a considerable technical force to be reckoned with.

There's an app for that... in fact there are 25!

As any developer for the iPhone will tell you, competition is intense on the AppStore. If there aren't already 5 or 6 apps like yours when you launch, you can bet there -will be- within weeks of you going live.  One need only point to the number of flashlight apps, fart generators and beermug simulators to verify this.

Not everyone will rise to the top, but if you are interested in determining what your competition is, and how they have been doing compared to your app, I can help.  Given a list of apps you care about benchmarking against, I can run a chart similar to this one to help you understand ranking (absolute rank within category), percentile (normalized rank for the day, to take into account the growing number of apps per category. ie. a percentile of .93 says you did better than 93% of the other apps in the category that day) and other metrics like popularity, free vs paid, etc.

Drop me a line at JimmyG@msn.com if you are interested in these consulting services...