The App Gold Rush !

In a world obsessed by technology, apps are the latest currency.

Apple opened the floodgates in 2008 with the release of the App Store - what followed was a surge of publishers and developers who quickly put the money-making machine into overdrive.

Ten million apps were downloaded within the first weekend of the App Store's launch… that number now stands at over ten billion.

The App Rockstars

• Kostas Eleftheriou

Made £63k ($100k) in just three months after releasing the iSteam app

• Ethan Nicholas

Made £22k ($35k) in a single day from sales of the iShoot game

• Steve Demeter

Made £156k ($250k) within the first two months of releasing Trism

• Ge Wang and Jeff Smith

Made £600k ($1m) in a year through various apps

• Igor and Marko Pusenjak

Made over £600k ($1m) each after selling 3.5m copies of Doodle Jump

Countless more have joined their ranks, releasing apps that beat the hundreds of thousands competing for potential customers' time... so how do you go about making an app, and what are the chances of success?

Reported Costs for App Development 

As you can see, putting an 'average' figure on app development costs is impractical given the variance. So what factors come into the process?

Staffing costs

You'll Need:

A Developer: £60-£90 ($100-$150) per hour

A Designer: £40-£80 ($65-$130) per hour

It should be noted that these are guide prices only - both can be found outside the US and UK for as low as £10 ($16) per hour, but this is likely to be false economy as the process nearly always takes longer and results in lower quality.

Time

An app can take between four to eight weeks to create - let's call it six for the sake of argument.

Generally this breaks down to:

Design: One week at 40 hours

Coding: Two weeks at 80 hours

Testing and Polishing: Two weeks at 80 hours

If we take a developer's fee to average at £75 per hour and a designer's to be £60, the total cost in this example totals £14,400 ($23,000). Of course, if we take the upper figure on fees this cost rises to £16,400 ($26,000).

Gaming apps are usually significantly more expensive to develop than this estimate, involving up to 2,000 hours of development with multiple designers working at the same time. Costs upward of £140,000 ($224,000) can be expected for making a gaming app.

Still too conservative?

Even the cost estimates above may be too low, since we haven’t factored in:

• In-house planning

• Equipment

• Project Management Fees

• User testing

• Unforeseen delays

• Additional updates after release

• Multi-platform releases

• Back-end server support

• Marketing

So, while many agree that very simple, one-function apps can be developed for as low as £3,000 ($5,000), it's of no surprise that feature-heavy apps such as Angry Birds or BBC News can cost over £125,000 ($125,000).

In fact, it's reported that Twitterific cost over £156,000 ($250,000) and Instagram ate up double that amount during development!

                                            

Mobile Market Illustration

At a modern point cell phone market grows a lot and many Internet leaders are attempting to make most from it. Keeping eye on this Microsoft Tag recently come up with a infographics which completely shows that mobile market is large, local searches, games and YouTube doing pretty well on Mobiles.

To better illustrate the growing mobile marketing opportunity, take a look at these infographics we found to be the latest and most up to date.

This picture shows the total mobile market size and the shares of more than 40 countries of the world in the industry! The chart below responds to the number of mobiles for every 1000 people within the countries!

Now let's see what is the share of the smartphones in this huge market. The second picture shows the outline of the shifting landscape among the major players of the smartphone OS market.

Nokia-Microsoft Alliance in a Win for Apple

The marriage of Nokia and Microsoft is official. The smartphone alliance combining the Windows Phone 7 mobile OS from Microsoft with the mobile phone manufacturing muscle of Nokia could be a line in the sand leading to a brighter mobile future for both, or a final desperate swan song. Regardless of how it ultimately works out for Nokia and Microsoft, though, the partnership is good news for Apple.

Al Hilwa, an IDC analyst, commented that foror Nokia to bet on Microsoft’s new phone platform is an incredible vote of confidence but it is also a natural partnership given the various points of synergies. In the long run, Microsoft will really need a stronger hardware strategy to compete with Apple and RIM and to make headway against the ubiquitously sourced Android.

Abandoning Symbian and embracing Windows Phone 7 seems like a well-orchestrated coup for Microsoft—a subversive takeover from the inside that conveniently provides Microsoft with a major smartphone development capacity without all of the financial and regulatory red tape involved in trying to actually buy Nokia.

The Nokia-Microsoft alliance is good news for Apple, though—legally speaking.  By teaming with Microsoft, Nokia has a deep patent pool to draw from and can most likely bring its legal battles with Apple to a close.

Goodbye, $.99 iPhone apps!

Apps with a cheap, one-time cost will be replaced by apps that bring in advertising dollars or drive recurring revenue based on usage or a subscription fee. This is just one of many findings released today from a survey of 2,235 mobile app developers, jointly conducted by app development platform vendor Appcelerator and market researcher IDC. According to the report, developers are shifting away from free brand affinity apps and becoming less reliant on $.99 app sales. In fact, mobile app developers are weighing seven business models, the most prevalent still being app store sales with 59 percent of respondents using this model. Other models include advertising (43 percent), in-app purchase (42 percent), brand loyalty and engagement (34 percent), mobile commerce (26 percent), subscription (26 percent), and coupons and loyalty programs (10 percent).

So far, the fastest growing business model is mobile commerce. In a similar survey last year, only 14 percent of mobile app developers had mobile commerce as part of their business model mix. Today, one out of four have mobile commerce, a growth of 86 percent. Apps are also maturing and becoming more complex, evolving from simple content-based apps to apps that make use of location, social and cloud services to transactional apps that tap the power of mobile commerce, according to the study.

The study concludes, that as the customer experience evolves, so does application sophistication, customer expectations, business transformation opportunities and the underlying business models. On the tablet front, the survey found that Androids and, to a lesser degree, the BlackBerry PlayBook are gaining mindshare among developers at a faster rate than the market-making iPad. Seventy-four percent of respondents said they are "very interested" in developing for Android tablets, up from 62 percent last year. Twenty-eight percent are eyeing the BlackBerry PlayBook, up from 16 percent last year. The iPad leads with 87 percent, only a 3 percent increase from last year. Web OS tablet interest remained flat.

All tallied, this year mobile app developers plan to triple their app development efforts, according to the study. The average app developer will build for four different devices, a two-fold increase from the year prior. The top device continues to be the iPhone, with 92 percent of mobile app developers "very interested" in developing for the iconic phone. The iPhone is followed closely by the Android phone (87 percent), iPad (87 percent) and Android tablet (74 percent). After the big four, the drop off is severe with the BlackBerry phone (38 percent), Windows Phone 7 (36 percent) and BlackBerry PlayBook (28 percent).

Gorilla Monkey Crunch - a new game in expectation of new record-breakers

Apple finally approves Gorilla Monkey Crunch for Thanksgiving. So players have an opportunity to play a new game for holidays.
Gorilla Monkey Crunch is a new game released by a London based iPhone and iPod Touch software development company Appnoose ltd. for iPhones and iPod touch. This is an arcade style 2D action game and is available for $0.99 in the Arcade Games section of Apple's iTunes App Store.

Easy and absorbing to play Gorilla Monkey Crunch can involve players of any age.
All you have to do is bombard other small monkeys downward with coconuts. Watch yourself not to be injured by the coconuts you throw down. If you miss the monkeys they will throw it back to you in order to damage the bridge you're sitting on and bring you down.  But the game construction provide you with the bonus timers n order to extend the time and toolkits to fix the bridge.

Record of scores have already been held by a 6 years old player with 6100 points, so you can be the next to achieve better results and post them to Facebook and Twitter.


Gorilla Monkey Crunch can be downloaded from the App Store.

A new virus attacking the users of jailbroken iPhones

A new computer virus attacks the  iPhones and iPod Touch. It has been revealed by the company Sophos which specializes in computer security. The virus of type "duh" or "Ikee.B.", records and transmits personal information, including passwords, as well as  changes the administrative password of the device.

Main symptoms of infection may be revealed by shortening significantly battery life when the WiFi network access is enabled. The virus uses WiFi to transmit recorded information and broad cast on other devices. A worm first appeared on the iPhone last month but was not so dangerous. It is to notice that the worm only infects unlocked  iPhones and iPod Touch.

According to Sophos representatives, Apple's default root password - 'alpine' can't be a guaranty of security for most iPhone users as the new  worm may break in and and change it any way by directly editing the encrypted value of the password in the master password file, so that the new password can never be revealed. To avoid such kind of infections, Sophos strongly suggests to all users of jail-broken phones to change their passwords from  'alpine'  immediately.