Of course, MOST of us are going to have a difficult time trying to develop for the 10 000 000 iPhones. You see, you can download the SDK and do all of the testing you want . . . good luck running your code on an actual iPhone though. A lot of developers read the fine print, and skipped over the finer print. To try out your newly developed games, or virtual worlds, against the actual iPhone accelerometer you have to be accepted into the OFFICIAL iPhone Developer's Program. Guess how many of the 100000 developers who downloaded the SDK were accepted into the program . . . Oh . . . So then you read the article already . . .
The short version is that Apple is giving its strategic partners a head start, EA, Salesforce, AOL, Epocrates, Sega . . . and Apple quoted a quite a few more the press release Intuit, Namco, Netsuite, PopCap . . . you get the idea. Good for Apple, its partners, and probably the iPhone . . . Bad for startups who happen to compete with something one of the partners wants to do. Guess which app will get the splash page billing on the iTunes App store, the startup's or the partner's?
There is SOME good news though, if someone is willing to search past the first page of the iTunes app store to look for your app, they will probably be able to find and install it without much trouble. Of course that is ASSUMING that you are allowed into the OFFICIAL developer's program, which there is no guarantee of either if you are making an app that competes with a strategic partner.
I think there will be other ways to distribute the app than the itunes app store. You have access to the users contacts, so with permission you can send the others an email/sms containing a request for the app. Similar to
facebook, myspace or twitter. You don't really need iTunes except for hosting the app for download.
they've said over and over again that iphone apps must be purchased through their app store. do you think they're suddenly going to say "oh yeah, and there's a loophole you can exploit, where you can email an app to somebody else. sorry for not mentioning that earlier."
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/03/15/apple-to-100...
The short version is that Apple is giving its strategic partners a head start, EA, Salesforce, AOL, Epocrates, Sega . . . and Apple quoted a quite a few more the press release Intuit, Namco, Netsuite, PopCap . . . you get the idea. Good for Apple, its partners, and probably the iPhone . . . Bad for startups who happen to compete with something one of the partners wants to do. Guess which app will get the splash page billing on the iTunes App store, the startup's or the partner's?
There is SOME good news though, if someone is willing to search past the first page of the iTunes app store to look for your app, they will probably be able to find and install it without much trouble. Of course that is ASSUMING that you are allowed into the OFFICIAL developer's program, which there is no guarantee of either if you are making an app that competes with a strategic partner.
Cheers!