@ Peter: Good question. But not all the cheap apps are single-purpose things churned out on a moment’s notice. Actually, considering the wealth and extent of Apple’s developer tools, if I told you the time it took for the original version of AIM, which is not a simple app by any means, you’d be shocked.

According to my friend Lee Givens, the Mac product manager at AOL, it took “2 weeks to build a prototype and about 3 months to get it to shipping quality.”

So what are you getting for 3 months development time? A whole lot more than some of you expect. Mac OS and iPhone apps come together a lot faster than the stuff done for Windows.

Peace,
Gene

“Thousands are free, in fact, and others are available for as little as 99 cents. Very few are priced beyond the impulse category, which means almost any developer, whether large or small, stands a chance of getting a hit, which can mean hundreds of thousands of sales in the space of just a few weeks.”

Of course, what’s involved in making an “impulse” App?

The Store is choking over 99 cent Apps that do very little. That’s not to say these are bad Apps necessarily–frankly I’m not going to pay more than 99 cents for a tip calculator or a digital whoopie cushion. But it sets expectations low. So someone who actually makes a serious App and charges more gets looked askance–”Why are you charging so much?”

I remember reading somewhere that the “typical” iPhone App takes less than 3 months from concept to shipping. What kind of App are you getting with 3 months of development time?

Let’s not forget the fact that Apple charges each and every user the same amount for OSX and gives them exactly the same features, rather than selling a crippled version with a lot of disabled features as its base model and then charging extra money to turn those features on according to a graduated scale of prices (which must be both exasperating and confusing to the customer). Why not call that marketing model a “Microsoft Tax”? And in fact doesn’t MS do something similar with Office?