As this July 15th article says, App Store has served 1,5 billion downloads… and there are 65,000 applications.

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality” said Jobs. Well, at least the scale part is already clear. Something is going on here, a lot of people in obscure corners of the world (greetings from Chile here) are wetting their hands on Objective C and Cocoa to produce enormous quantities of applications.

Lots of the 65.000 apps are no doubt very small gadgets, mostly for a moment of fun.  One of those is iLightning by Javabu Adams:

http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning

It’s a small app that when you tap or shake the iPhone shows a lighting and shouts “lightning bolt”…

Java is very generous and he publishes the daily sales of his app.

http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning/sales/

I have summed the sales by month:

I suppose that Java isn’t doing any efforts to promote his app. He just identified an idea, created the product and sent it to the App Store.

On the other side, I suppose some of the 65.000 apps are complete and well written applications or games. In the BOS forums I’ve found an example: MicroCars:

http://www.microcarsiphone.com/

The game is very good. Labour of Love.  Even the sound is nice. Hundreds of hours must have gone into it.

Well, the sales on first two weeks were 228. On the first two weeks iLightning sold 216 units.

iLightning started in Feb 09 while MicroCarsIPhone started in July. In the meanwhile the number of apps in the store grew by 3x.  One must think that, as the app number grows, it will be more difficult to get noticed.

Humm, I need good stats here, like what was the change in the universe of iPhones + iPod touch…

Anyway, I would like to know how the sales of MicroCars… move. My gut feeling is that simple, one moment gadget apps like iLighting will have a decrease in sales while more stably appealing apps will get reviews, word of mouth and will get growing sales.

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Since January I’ve thinking of my first  iPhone application… It took a lot of time to sign in the iPhone developer program. As I am in Chile, and te Apple store doesn’t operate here I had to send a fax and the fax at Apple was busy for three or four months… (sad as it sounds).

Now I’m signed, I have my new iMac and my iPod Touch will get here on Saturday. I’m learning objective-C, Cocoa and getting to know the iPhone development environment. So far so good…

But I need an idea to start. Here’s the history of my ideas…

First one: a medication reminder. Sounds good don’t you think?. Sorry. Two problems;

1. There are already for such apps:
   1. http://www.medimemory.com
   2. http://pillboxer.com/
   3. http://dontforgetthepill.com/ (for birth control pill, nice pink interface and discrete warnings!)
2. The iPhone OS does’nt allow the setting of alarms of timers and your app cannot run in the background, so the user is forced to have your app open in order to get the alarms…

Ok, it seemed a good idea, then I thought about a little stupid but well, maybe that’s the way to go… My new idea, an iPhone insult generator. Orginal, isn’t it. Well, it’s not, at least 10 apps. There even exists a “Shakesperean Insult Generator” Greetings thou botlesss…

Third idea, a wheel that makes decisions for you !! Cool, don’t you think. You write as many options as you want, spin the wheel and the chance decides.

Why program it? it’s easier to buy it on the app store…

http://kirktech.com/336/wheel-of-chance/

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A lot of products ideas come to my mind. That’s a blessing/curse I share with a lot of people in the uISV community. A good thing is to get your ideas tested again the reality as soon as possible, in any case, before you invest any considerable amount of time and work in them.

Though obviously it’s an old idea, I like the term Andy Brice coined “Lazy Instantiation Marketing“. The idea is to create a minimal website with some registration features and see how it goes with the people…

This weekend I was haunted by the idea of making a website where people can register, pay and get SMS messages reminding them to take their medications. Following the “Lazy …” idea, I registered a domain and created a simple website.  My idea was to use adwords to get some people to the site and test reactions, % of registration, etc.

The “Lazy…” concept worked even before I started. When I got to adwords and tried to register my ad I learnt that you must have an “Online Pharmacy ID” to create any campaign with “Pills” or “Medication” on it. So the “Lazy..” concept saved me a lot of work. Now I know that the idea has an important drawback and that I will have to think about different way to promote it if I finally decide to go on. And I hadn’t yet programmed a single line of code!

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