Flipping for iPhone: Boise company enters into app development 

Jason Crawforth wants to help you make up your mind. Earlier this month,  he and four fellow software developers at Boise-based MobileDataForce unveiled iMakeDecisions – an application for Apple’s fanatically popular iPhone and iPod touch that provides users with a suite of virtual decision-making tools to help them navigate through any situation.

“I started looking at some of these (decision-making) applications that people were writing and there were a ton of similar things,” Crawforth said. “I thought, ‘OK, these are weak, these are what I’d call iPhone app 1.0. We need to make one that combines several of these tools.’”
Programmed part-time over four months, iMakeDecisions sells on Apple’s online App Store for $2 and includes 10 different tools – from the classic coin flip (picking from a host of international currencies) to “Will it Stick?” (throwing a range of things from pickles to slime at a wall to see what stays).
The app – designed by MobileDataForce programmers Dave Carter, Pete Fransen, Will Hannold and Devin Parsons – is lighthearted but represents the firm’s first foray into a growing and lucrative new market.
“When Apple came out with the iPhone there was nothing like it; it’s a brand new space,” said Crawforth, MobileDataForce’s chief strategy officer. “It’s a whole new area, everyone’s pouring into it. It’s exciting.”
No matter how you slice it, pretty much anything related to the Apple iPhone is big business. When it hit the market in July, users snapped up about 1 million units in the first three days; after a month that figure had climbed to about 3 million. In late October, Apple announced it had sold 6.9 million of the sophisticated, touch-screen smart phones in the quarter ending Sept. 30, and had already far exceeded its goal of moving 10 million by the end of 2008.  
Now consider that every one of those iPhones is loaded with apps: In the first month of availability, users downloaded about 60 million apps, and by October that number had risen to more than 100 million.
While most apps are free, the dollar amounts corresponding to those numbers are equally impressive. According to an Aug. 11 Wall Street Journal piece, Apple sold an average of $1 million a day in apps over the first month alone. Because it funnels 70 percent of the revenue back to app developers, that means those creating the programs pocketed $21 million from July to August.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in my career in software,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the WSJ.
The big question now, though, is whether the app space is a gold mine or a gold rush.
“What seems to be going on right now is the number of apps that are getting put into the store still have a really sharp upward curve, so it’s getting tougher for apps to get exposure in the App Store specifically,” said Dieter Bohn, editor-in-chief for the Smartphone Experts family of Web sites, which track trends in the smartphone industry.
“Because everything is so in flux right now… it’s really tough to say for any given app that you’re going to be able to make money on it long-term,” he added.  
Pete Fransen, a senior developer at MobileDataForce, agreed that the app market is still pretty wild and wooly.
“There’s a lot of noise in that space,” Fransen said. “It’ll be interesting to see what Apple does about that.”
A big part of the reason for all that noise is the same thing that makes the app market attractive – there are relatively low barriers to entry. All anyone needs to do to get an app on the App Store (the only place they’re available) is pay a yearly fee of $99 to become a “professional developer.” The software development kit is downloaded free and includes a complete suite of tools for programming and testing. Developers set their own prices and, for 30 percent of the revenue, Apple handles all the billing.
“As one person you can go spend your $99 and give it a shot. That’s your total cost out of pocket, other than your time spent learning how to do it,” Fransen said. “It’s a pretty good deal for what you come out of it with.”
The up-side to that open arrangement is that it gives developers the opportunity to learn, get exposure and (hopefully) make some money; the down-side is that there are also a lot of amateurs in their garages turning out quickie apps that often unnecessarily duplicate better-made programs.
“There’s not a lot of quality control from Apple – there are 50 different apps that help you build lists for grocery shopping, and things like that. Some of them cost, some of them are free. If you’re charging for your app obviously you don’t want somebody releasing one that does the same thing for free,” Fransen said.
“The x-factor here is that because you have to buy everything through the App Store, some of the onus is on them (Apple) to figure out what’s good and what’s bad,” Bohn said.
In the meantime, there are currently 19 categories of apps (from “books” to “weather”) and the best way to ensure an app makes money is to keep it listed among the top 10 of whichever category it’s in. As of this writing, iMakeDecisions was sitting at 128 of the roughly 400 apps in the “lifestyle” category – not bad for only having been available for about a week.
But the secret to cracking the top 10 is still unclear to developers and analysts alike.
“Everybody’s trying everything right now, but it seems to me that you really need to focus on some sort of marketing scheme – you need to make sure you not only get the word out, but in a consistent way over time,” Bohn said.
Crawforth said he’s using a lot of Web 2.0 marketing – including Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Digg, del.icio.us and StumbleUpon – but added that what’s going to propel the best apps to the top is simple quality.
“Since you have a one-shot place to go (the App Store) it just forces you to make a better product,” he said. “If your app is good enough, no one’s going to try to beat it. That’s what we want to do with ours.”
A good case in point is iBeer, designed by Las Vegas-based Hottrix. Consistently in the top 10 of all paid apps (and priced at 99 cents), it’s probably one of the least utilitarian programs on the App Store but is a huge money-maker with enough clout to get an almost-identical app made by Coors booted from the App Store (in addition it’s suing the real-beer giant for $12.5 million in lost revenue).
As might be gathered from its name, iBeer simply turns an iPhone or iPod touch into a virtual glass of beer. Shaking the handset causes the beer to slosh realistically, and tipping causes it to appear to empty out.
Hottrix – a 20-year-old mail order business – offers several other novelty and food- and beverage-themed apps – including iMunchies (which gives the appearance of popcorn popping in your iPhone) and iMilk (which duplicates iBeer’s function) – but iBeer is by far the most successful.   
So why would people pay 99 cents for a fake beer?
“Hottrix apps are plain fun,” said iBeer inventor Steve Sheraton in an e-mail. “Often you only realize while performing them that they’re a ton more useful than any social networking app. They’re bringing people together by laughter, not GPS.”
In part that’s what motivated iMakeDecisions.
“We wanted to try to do something fun, but we’re looking at some things that are more serious. … This helps us create another platform,” Crawforth said, adding th
at MobileDataForce programmers are already working on new apps.
“It’s the future of mobility. It has been and is going to be the next wave,” he said.

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