First, it is important to know that Apple designed the developer program specifically for the iPhone with some checks and balances in order to keep the growing platform steady. This has been a blessing and a curse for developers. First, it is a blessing because it provides the App Store: an all-in-one solution for hosting and selling the apps. It doesn’t require any major effort beyond the development cycle and support role anyone who wishes to sell apps to undertake. The catch is that Apple has to approve the app first, which opens a new chapter in app propriety, and also keeps 30% of all earnings. Here it varies from person to person on how these policies are viewed. Personally, I think it’s a great trade-off.

But the biggest gripe I’ve heard is that it takes a lot of days for Apple to approve an app, or update to that app. And the one thing that is most valued is time, because it means potential business losses; the perfect example being that if a bug horribly cripples the app, you’ll start losing a lot of potential users due to bad ratings (without being able to respond to them directly, either!) before you’re able to get the update online.

This happened to me in TipAgent where the numbers would come out wrong in some specific cases when splitting the bill. After smashing my head on the desk for being so stupid after I quickly located the faulty part, I submitted the 1.1.2 version that fixes this. It’s been over eight days and I have yet to see the update get Apple’s approval. Thankfully, no one cares deeply about another tip calculator, so my crisis isn’t that important. But what about the big dogs and their apps? Maybe Apple should begin by implementing a new review system where priority is given to updates based solely on bug fixes. I know it could further mess up the wait time for new apps, but you’ll be thankful when you start panicking due to an uncatched bug.

Another recent event that of interest that shows this aspect of the App Store is the infamous Twitpocalypse, which was called the Y2K bug-equivalent of Twitter. Some developers anticipated this and updated their apps to prevent this. However, simulated testing is nothing when compared to the real deal. Twitterrific was the one notable iPhone app that was hit worst. Craig Chockenberry details the whole experience in a post he made in his website, and even goes one step further to propose another prioritized review system where developers are given a specified number of tokens for such priority when disaster strikes. It is a very insightful reading.

As for making money in the App Store, from what I’ve been told, it certainly is possible but it’s hard. I cannot tell you this first-hand since I only have the one free app available. The next step I’m going to pursue is releasing a 99-cent app to test that next. It should be coming soon…

P.S. If you’re one of those who have downloaded TipAgent, I do apologize for that bug and thank you for giving it a try. The amount of downloads (in the several thousands) have taken me by surprise, especially since I have not mentioned its existence outside from this lonely corner of mine in the series of tubes we know as the internet.

One drawback that was felt during the early days of this gadget’s launch was the lack of features that allowed third party applications to run on the iPhone. The advantage of such apps is that they allow you to customize the look and feel of your phone, no matter what features it initially came with. You can download as many or as few applications, depending on your need and preference. This downside was soon resolved with the introduction of the iPhone Developer Program and the SDK that was offered as a free download.

Apple has provided enough initiative for budding developers and coders to write apps for both the iPhone and the iPod by introducing iPhone Developer University program at colleges through which instructors are allowed to create teams of up to 200 students at no extra cost (professional developers have to subscribe to be able to join the iPhone Developer Program). The team is provided with the SDK and all the regular tools that are needed to write code with added icing to the cake coming in the form of free iPhones and iPods for evaluation purposes.

This incentive comes at a time when developers are evaluating the pros and cons of writing apps for the iPhone – while there are many advantages, they also realize that they are limiting themselves to the iPhone when they could be writing web apps that are suited to any smart phone that runs on Windows, Java or the Symbian platforms. Another decision potential developers have to make is whether to make the application native (one that resides on the phone) or web-based. The latter require a wireless Internet connection in order to be downloaded directly on your phone.
Hundreds of thousands of apps, some of them hugely popular and others falling by the wayside, some that are available free of cost and others that are charged at nominal rates, are now available for the iPhone. Goes to show that developers are in fact eager to jump on this bandwagon, seeing as it’s being pulled by Apple!

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This post was contributed by Kimberly Peterson, who writes about online accounting degrees. She welcomes your feedback at KimPeterson2006 at gmail.com

Presenting a simple tip calculator. To be honest, TipAgent has nothing special about it — it has no extra features, no eye candy, and nothing else but the ability to calculate tips and split the bill. So if you’re looking for a plain tip calculator, give TipAgent a try… it’s free!

So what’s the story? I was new to Objective-C when I started work on TipAgent. I had read about it, but never actually worked with it. One afternoon, I decided to give it a try and downloaded the free iPhone SDK. To start experimenting with the SDK, I decided to go with the cliché of making a tip calculator since it’s a project simple enough to play with. And with some documentation guiding me through the SDK (especially the Interface Builder), I was able to finish what is the core of TipAgent in that same afternoon. As far as for the interface, it took me a couple of more days since I don’t work much with graphic design. What was the real productivity killer was adding that nice little dot over the numeric keypad — Apple, in all of its infinite wisdom, decided to omit the dot for decimals. Following this guide, I was able to achieve this task.

So is this the end of it? I’d like to think that I’ll slowly be improving TipAgent with free updates as time goes by — so no, it’s not the end of it. Also, I already have plans to release some other iPhone apps. When? I do not know. It could be in a month or a year, just like that. Either way, trying the iPhone SDK was a great experience.