Apple: 200,000 iPhone developers so far | Hacker News Reader

Apple: 200,000 iPhone developers so far

macworld.com

8 pointsilamont9 comments

I guess walled gardens work okay when everyone's knocking on the gate.

200,000 download != 200,000 developers

Let's say half of them ever actually make an effort to develop apps (100,000). This could possibly be wildly optimistic.

I bet only 10% of them will ever actually ship anything (10,000). Of these, probably 90% will suck (1,000).

It still seems like enough to have quite a few really awesome applications that cater to enough lifestyle/professional niches (photography, GTD, CRM, ...) to create a little bonzai-tree software ecosystem, one that Apple has by the balls at all times.

Am I the only one who thinks "The App Store" is the exact same thing as Brew? Brew is pretty stagnant now, and I've always thought that Qualcomm's iron grip on the platform accelerated its death. I wonder how long Apple can keep a vibrant community interested in iPhone application development.

The general feeling I get from developers for OS X is that on the whole, Apple supports them well in their endeavours and that Apple gives great respect for people who develop on their platform. That being said, the lack of an SDK from launch was a bit of a blow to developers.

On the whole though, I'm expecting Apple to really push this, as they're talking up the App Store as a whole new market for them to enter into. They're not about to take the risk of harming their developer base.

i'd like to be an iphone developer, if apple would let me. they have given out only a handful of dev certificates, needed to install apps on real iphones, and the process reportedly degrades the phone such that it can't be used normally anymore. what the heck.

i'm as big an apple fanboy as anybody, but this is making me suspicious. i'm in wait-and-see mode.

June could not come any sooner.

I hope apple is not making the same mistake with the iPhone that AT&T made with its personal computer in the early 1980s. I personally think that the most profitable route for Apple would be to just publish the internal hooks for the iPhone OS and let people develop as they like. The extra apps from this move would make the iPhone an even more attractive device.

I heard rumors that Apple is a bit of a control freak that's fanatical about user experience. That seems to preclude letting anyone release anything on their platform.

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