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Apple Launches ITunes App Store With 500+ Apps

Posted by timothy on Thu Jul 10, 2008 01:50 PM
from the first-one's-free-except-not-really dept.
Businesses Portables (Apple) Apple Hardware
L. Miriam writes "Apple launched the iTunes App store for the iPhone and iPod Touch today, following the earlier launch of iTunes 7.7. There are over 500 applications available for download, with prices ranging from free to around $35. Both MySpace and Facebook apps are there, as well as a mix of games, utilities and ebooks. You can download applications now, but you can't do anything with them until the iPhone/iPod 2.0 firmware is released. The App Store can't be accessed directly through iTunes, but Mobile Computer explains how to get to it, and has a few screenshots, too."
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  • You can access it directly within iTunes. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Trolan (42526) on Thursday July 10 2008, @02:02PM (#24140391) Homepage

    There's a section in Preferences -> General which controls which categories you have on the panel on the left. One of those available to display now is "Applications" which will happily take you to that section of the iTunes Store.

  • "500" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by samkass (174571) on Thursday July 10 2008, @02:15PM (#24140677) Homepage Journal

    The 500+ figure includes each e-book as a separate "app", but still there's a pretty good showing with much more to come. A lot of it is free or very cheap.

    Still, if people thought FairPlay DRM was a lock-in factor for iPods, they haven't seen anything yet. Android is going to be about 6 months too late to intercept the wave of lock-in happening right now with the app store. I'll bet Stallman is firing up a good rant as we speak...

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by tgd (2822)

      It also includes the doubling up of the free apps -- poking around, it looks like almost half of them are "free" demos, and there's a second premium app you have to buy.

      • Re:"500" (Score:5, Informative)

        by MojoStan (776183) on Thursday July 10 2008, @07:39PM (#24146027)

        The 500+ figure includes each e-book as a separate "app", but still there's a pretty good showing with much more to come. A lot of it is free or very cheap.

        It also includes the doubling up of the free apps -- poking around, it looks like almost half of them are "free" demos, and there's a second premium app you have to buy.

        It also includes some pretty crappy apps that surprisingly made the launch day cut [arstechnica.com]: "seven tip calculators, three flashlight applications, nine Bible-related entries, two Zen garden applications, five blackjack games, and almost 10 percent of the entries are ebooks. There is an application to simulate the playing of a tiny violin to console your friends, a Light Saber emulator, an application that gives you a cartoon eye, and two applications that simulate the look of a beer mug."

        A $0.99 "flashlight" app that does nothing but turn the screen white seems like a dubious inclusion in the "500+" claim. Others [cnet.com] include a $2.99 app called "Looky" that provides Google Suggest capability, which Google provides for free [blogspot.com]. My favorite is "Hold On!", which records how long you can hold your finger on an on-screen button (with "records").

        As for the "doubling up of the free apps," I see more free "ad-supported" versions than "demos." Double-counting "demos" would be really obnoxious, but fully-functional ad-supported versions are less so, IMO. One nice-looking example for Flickr users: Exposure [connectedflow.com] (free ad-supported, $9.99 w/o ads), a Flickr browser that has a "Near Me" feature which uses the iPhone's location capabilities (including 1st-gen iPhones) to browse photos near you.

        • A $0.99 "flashlight" app that does nothing but turn the screen white seems like a dubious inclusion in the "500+" claim.

          It's surprisingly useful if you're ever poking around behind desks. It's also approximately 5 lines of code; there are multiple free versions for jailbroken iPhones. Unfortunately one result of Apple restricting development and charging for keys is that users will get nickel-and-dimed for apps that would normally be free.

          • There is a free flashlight program and I imagine there will be free versions of many basic application types. Besides, what does 99c buy you these days? Might get you a packet of crisps (potato chips for those of you on the wrong side of the Atlantic) here in the UK, but that's it. If the apps were $2.99, I can see people complaining about price, but 99c? The real issue seems to be too many redundant apps, some of them at higher prices with no extra features.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by drinkypoo (153816)
            You could easily put some kind of super-easy scripting app on the iPhone and destroy 99% of the shit apps out there that will appear on the service. This is the great fear of the cellphone companies which currently make a ludicrous amount of money selling you shit which should be free. Did you know for example that if you have internet access on your GSM phone you can typically configure it to send SMS via that instead of SMS, and you don't have to pay to send them? Just to receive. Of course they count aga

    • Re:"500" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EastCoastSurfer (310758) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:09PM (#24141829)

      An app for the iPhone seems similar to the lockin one gets buying a game for the DS or PSP. Sure, Apple is controlling all distribution, but free apps are fine and I haven't seen anything that prevents you from releasing the source code of your app on your own website.

      Overall, the iPhone ecosystem is one that other phone makers are going to try and copy because it's easy for the users and appears to just work.

      • Re:good alternatives available (Score:5, Interesting)

        by samkass (174571) on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:12PM (#24143193) Homepage Journal

        There are a lot of people buying iPhones who aren't "Apple fanboys", and these people will start spending actual money on apps. On many phones you'll have some random ringtones and free Java games and such, but you tend not to have a large catalog of apps you paid for. On the iPhone, if you consider moving to another phone after spending a lot of money on apps you'll have to throw it away and re-purchase everything.

        Look, I'm not actually complaining. I own an iPod Touch and plan on paying the $10 for the upgrade and buying some of the really cool stuff I've seen. I'm just saying... it's an interesting market trend. It also makes me think Jobs' allergic reaction to Java won't dissipate anytime soon...

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by speedtux (1307149)

          On the iPhone, if you consider moving to another phone after spending a lot of money on apps you'll have to throw it away and re-purchase everything.

          I have thrown away commercial platforms after spending considerable amounts of money when I realized that they were turning into bottomless pits for money. I think people sooner or later just naturally get fed up with DRM and Apple Stores and all that crap, in particular when they get an alternative.

  • where's the remote desktop or vnc app? or hell, (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2008, @02:29PM (#24140969)

    why not even a ssh/telnet client of any kind. WTF apple?

    • why not even a ssh/telnet client of any kind. WTF apple?

      Well, barring anything in the SDK that might prevent an SSH/telnet client from being developed, I suspect it's because none of the the currently-ready iPhone developers thought the market needed it badly enough to develop it now. Don't like it? Write one yourself [apple.com].

      • And yet, they think the market badly needs more stupid phone based games and animated emoticons. And in an even more depressing thought, they'd probably make more money off them than a ssh client. People who want ssh clients, are probably the kind of people that don't want to pay for ssh clients. If its not free, they'll probably hack the firmware to install a free one.

        • There won't be any changes , it is the device. If people line up for _that_ iPhone with _those_ applications, Apple is not really stupid to give actual smartphone experience to their users.

          J2ME, Symbian, WinCE, all have SSH solutions both commercial and open source.

          I am particularly against the idea of hacking a device to get secure shell support.

      • Re:where's the remote desktop or vnc app? or hell, (Score:4, Informative)

        by tgd (2822) on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:16PM (#24143277)

        VNC perhaps, but there's a bunch of handy apps (AFPd, SSH server, SSH client, shell access) that are against the terms of the SDK license agreement. Its legal not technical limitations.

        Thankfully 2.0 can still be un-crippled and the Installer.app managed versions of those apps will be usable.

        • It sounds like a market opportunity to develop SSH on the iPhone. It sounds like Yet Anooter SSH App if you develop one for a Windows or Linux phone.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Dekortage (697532)

          You know, people keep telling me this, but I haven't seen any actual proof that an SSH client would be prevented. But I may well have missed it in the SDK license. Can you point me to where Apple legally prohibits this?

    • If it's your webserver, you could always install Webshell [umich.edu].

  • Warning: Don't click "Buy" if you use ShoppingCart (Score:5, Informative)

    by douthat (568842) on Thursday July 10 2008, @02:29PM (#24140987)

    There are normally two ways to shop using the iTunes store 1) with 1-click "buy it now", which is the default, and 2) with a shopping cart, which lets you queue items and decide which to buy later.

    Just a warning: App Store does NOT respect the shopping cart setting. If you login to download some free apps and accidentally click "Buy" on a non-free app, YOU WILL BE CHARGED IMMEDIATELY

    Hopefully they fix this before tomorrow at 8am.

  • iPhone Developer Program (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tipo159 (1151047) on Thursday July 10 2008, @02:44PM (#24141307)

    By current guesses, Apple had about 25k developers sign up for the iPhone Developer Program and only let 5k in. I am sure that the 20k developers who are (still) locked out are pleased as punch that the 5k got first opportunity to get their apps into the App Store.

    Apple has been giving away the SDK, but you need to be in the developer program to run your code on an actual device (or to get your app into the App Store). They say that the Simulator in the SDK should be good enough even if it can't simulate one of the more interesting features of the iPhone/iPod touch, the accelerometer.

    The iPhone and iPod touch are so cool that we just put up with everything that Apple does and be happy little developers until Apple thinks we deserve to be let in, right?

    • No, the iPhone and iPod touch will sell so many units that developers are salivating at the idea of selling on it.

      Just like developers are now jumping onto the Wii bandwagon.

    • Re:iPhone Developer Program (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Macman408 (1308925) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:06PM (#24141787)

      Apple has been giving away the SDK, but you need to be in the developer program to run your code on an actual device (or to get your app into the App Store). They say that the Simulator in the SDK should be good enough even if it can't simulate one of the more interesting features of the iPhone/iPod touch, the accelerometer.

      I'm still furious that Apple released the Macintosh before I had a chance to write $APPLICATION, and now it's been about 24 years since anybody has written anything for the Mac, because the first 500 applications written covered everybody's needs.

      OK, seriously - yeah, it sucks that not everybody gets to be one of the first 500 applications. But, if you blow us away with your application, it doesn't matter. Make it so intuitive, pretty, and powerful that we can't resist. Find an application that meets the needs that I don't even know I have yet, then show me how much better my life would be with your application. That's what Apple does with its products (they were not the first to market with an MP3 player, but they effectively cleared the market of everybody else), and that's what you'll have to do to sell your software to the same users.

      • Re:iPhone Developer Program (Score:5, Insightful)

        by quadelirus (694946) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:22PM (#24142119)
        The problem is getting found as the great blow you away Sudoku app when there are already 25 poorly written ones in the App store that have already been downloaded and so (maybe) show up higher in search results, only because you couldn't enter the market on the ground floor. (BTW I'm not saying that the sudoku apps in the store are bad, haven't actually looked at them myself--just using them as an example).

        Of course, it may very well be (and hopefully is) that Apple has a better algorithm for bringing up new apps to users than that.

        If you spend 5.99 on a sudoku app in the next week are you really going to buy a much better one in a month? Probably not, you probably won't even be looking for one. Not that sudoku is the killer app for the iphone but the app that is already available is going to have a HUGE leg up on the app that isn't yet in the store.

        • If you spend 5.99 on a sudoku app in the next week are you really going to buy a much better one in a month? Probably not, you probably won't even be looking for one.

          Well, the point here is that if your application is a dime a dozen, who cares? Somebody will come out with one that's as good as yours (or close), and free. If your application is good enough to generate some word-of-mouth advertising, some the people willing to spend money on a different one in the first place will upgrade. But you're going to have more success by stepping off the beaten path, and coming up with something new.

          If you're the first one to make an app that enables voice dialing or voice-con

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Chyeld (713439)

          Which is why I'm sure that the list of developers 'let in' included all the groups that Apple felt they needed to kiss up to. Lets face it, Apple needs Adobe, Apple doesn't need Garage Developer #253221. At least not till #253221 comes up with something that takes over the platform, in which case Apple figures "No harm, no foul".

          Not that I agree with their take on the situation, and if I ever actually got an iTouch/Phone, I'd probably jailbreak it out of principle. But they really haven't shot themselves in

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Admiral Ag (829695)

            You mean like that Moo Cow Music guy with the "Band" app? IIRC he's an indie developer and Apple liked his app so much that they let him demo it at WWDC.

    • Re:iPhone Developer Program (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:16PM (#24142005)
      It is very frustrating. Some of the developers I know have been waiting for months. I have personally been waiting for about a month. From what everyone can tell the process is completely random who gets in but most people aren't talking about it because of the NDA Apple makes you sign to get in the program. Some people have been coding for Macs for years professionally (which is extremely similar to coding for the iPhone) and have been part of the ADC for years and haven't gotten the cert while people who have been coding for a week have signed up and received the cert almost immediately. General consensus among devs is also that this is the reason why many of the Apps in the App store look bad: because they are being done by people who have little experience writing Apple applications. I'm not saying they are all bad, I'm just saying that its not like Apple is only letting in the best. Many good developers are still waiting to get approved and I think we will see many more good apps as more of the developers are allowed in.
    • I'm hoping that there aren't actually 25k devs signed up. The chatter is that many of the devs who haven't yet been certified have signed up multiple times (as many as 5 or more) in the hope that one of their accounts will win the raffle. Also, the real hope is that the dev program will leave beta tomorrow and everyone will be let in. Who knows.

  • The first three things I decided I wanted to find (and even purchase if there wasn't a free version available were:

    • SSH client - No dice, nothing that I can find by browsing and searching.
    • IRC client - Once again, nothing.
    • MSN Messenger/multi-protocol IM client - You got it, nothing, only an AIM client but no one I know uses AIM

    Now, to my knowledge there is an ssh client available for first gen iPhones (jailbreaked) but despite this no one has bothered putting together a simple SSH client for the 3G iPhone?

    /Mikael

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