Adding iPhone Apps to the Mix

The New York Times recently profiled a few developers who made it big selling iPhone apps, and while it’s becoming tough to compete in what is quickly become a saturated market, we are still in the very early days and there are still plenty of opportunities to be had in the world of iPhone and mobile development.

If you’re interested in learning more about developing applications for the iPhone, the opportunities are out there if you’re a talented developer with an entrepreneurial bent and some tolerance for the risk that comes with selling iPhone apps in a closed market environment.

For starters, you’ll want to visit the iPhone Dev Center and sign up for the iPhone Developer Program and see if you have the chops on the programming side. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be able to access the online resource materials such as videos introducing you to iPhone development, as well as documentation, sample code, and a wealth of articles. As you’ll quickly find out, iPhone apps are developed in Objective-C – a superset of C that uses syntax from both C and Smalltalk. Objective-C isn’t for the faint of heart but luckily there seems to be a fair bit of documentation out there such as Apple’s own Introduction to the Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language.

You’ll also want to be sure to check out the process for distributing an iPhone app and then also think of creative ways to market and promote your app – after all, you’re going to be competing with thousands of iPhone apps. In all this, you’ll also want to become very familiar with the concept of micropayments because, contrary to early predictions that micropyament would fail as a business model, micropayments have played an integral role in the revenue model of successful iPhone application businesses.

Favourite iPhone Apps?

For our part, we’re going to start reviewing some of our favourite apps right here in the Midstride blog. If you have any favourite iPhone Apps, we’d love to hear about them – drop us a comment below and let us know which you love, which you hate, which you wish you made, or better yet which iPhone app you wish someone out there would make!

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