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Craig Hockenberry, designer of Frenzic and Twitterific applications for the iPhone, tells of tough choices he has to make, and he is forced to err on the side of crappy applications.  Why?  In a word, risk.  The model he presents will affect all phone app stores such as the Google Android store, BlackBerry application store and any other with customer traction. 

What Hockenberry suggests is the risk of developing a kick-butt application is too high, now that the risk of getting lost in a sea of applications or charging an otherwise seemingly reasonable $9.99 or even $4.99 gets heckled for lower prices.  The payoff for producing a $0.99 ringtone application is a much easier risk to take and many developers are going that route.  But, as Hockenberry points out, we are losing the programs that take time to develop and thus become a riskier proposition with programmers charging $150/$200 per hour.

Hockenberry posits,

With 10,000 apps in the App Store, it’s already a fricken’ cat fight to get into one of the top 100 spots. What’s it going to be like when there are 20,000 apps? Or 100,000 apps? Volume is going to get split amongst a lot of players, hopefully the number of devices/customers will increase at the same rate.

While my economics background suggests competition is always a good thing, the problem is in an extremely limited preview of what you are buying from the App Store.  Just a few screen shots cannot convey properly what the proposed software accomplishes.  Many of the negative reviews of software could probably be attributed to the lack of understanding about what the program does before purchasing.

Here’s a solution: free trials.  Nothing new in the software world, for sure.  But a free trial in the form of a set time limit would help users try before they buy without having to find the “lite” version as is done now.  Often, when searching the App Store, I am unaware of a lite version exists of an app I’ve stumbled across.

Another solution would be a better way to search the store.  Better search criteria would be the simple way to go.  Base it on the total number of reviews, or the rating or number of downloads, all this data suggests something worth checking out.  Without more information navigating through 10,000 apps today is only going to get more difficult.

Read [furbo.org]