Clearly, it was a stroke of genius on Apple’s part to build the iPad on the same operating system as the iPhone, so iPad users could immediately take advantage of the catalog of more than 130,000 iPhone apps. Software developers working on iPad and iPhone development projects can access the same marketplaces to sell or give away their innovative apps. To date, consumers have downloaded more than three billion applications from the Apple App Store for their iPhone and iPod touch. This same potential market is waiting for the chance to download old and new backup apps onto their shiny new iPads.
By allowing software developers to list their apps on the Apple App Store, Apple benefits from the collective creativity of thousands of non-employee people to create apps for its iProducts, and gives those same creative people access to a mass market for their creations. . Every hobbyist programmer dreams of creating an app for the iPad or iPhone or iPod touch that can be sold to hundreds of millions of users for ninety-nine cents.
It’s no wonder that best-selling app charts are dominated by games. The products of the iPad and iPhone development wizards will undoubtedly create many new millionaires in the coming months among the thousands of developers coming up with innovative game ideas. But best-seller lists also include cookbooks and many other infotainment products, along with apps to handle all sorts of personal finance and business functions.
Apple has done a great job of encouraging iPad and iPhone development activity among programmers by offering a comprehensive set of programming tools to developers at a reasonable cost. Registered developers can use the iPhone SDK 3.2 (Software Development Kit) along with the other tools provided by Apple to create new apps for iPad that will also be compatible with iPhone and iPod touch. The iPhone Dev Center offers a step-by-step process for developing apps and bringing them to market.
Registered developers get access to all the tools they need for iPad and iPhone development. The SDK includes project management tools, a source code editor, and a graphical debugger. It includes an iPhone simulator so that developers can run and test their applications as if they were live. Tools are provided to easily create the interfaces to make the applications easy to use. Apple makes other resources available to registered developers, including forums for interacting with other Apple developers and engineers, libraries of sample code, and how-to videos.
If you’re not a programmer, all of this may sound too geeky to you. However, you don’t have to be a programmer to come up with a great idea for an iPad or iPhone app. The Registered Developer Program provides tools to test new applications in real time and also offers technical support from Apple engineers. Potentially the most valuable aspect of being a registered developer is access to the App Store to sell new apps (or give them away for free). Registered developers can upload their apps to the store and set the price for their product. Apple pays developers 70 percent of the revenue from their app sales and sends out the payments every month.
We are an Apple iPhone/iPad developer and can bring your vision of an iPhone app to life. Contact us today!