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My first iPhone app finally made it through the Apple review gauntlet. You can find out more info by going to the ControlPad page. In one sentence, ControlPad turns your iPhone (or iPod Touch) into a wireless keyboard/trackpad for your computer. It isn’t unique by any means, but I don’t think there is a competitor that has the same exact features.

I wrote a little IM client targeting the Treo 600 and 650 many years ago. Development took a while (stretched over many months/years), and in its lifetime it moved under 200 units. I wasn’t really in it for the money, and it really didn’t provide me with any. ControlPad, on the other hand, has done about 240 units in 3 full days. Cash-wise, I suspect it will beat out my IM client in a few days/weeks but it hasn’t yet. I have not promoted my app in anyway, and I believe all the sales are pretty much coming from being a recent app when sorting apps by release date. The app is not really a mass market app and I am treating it as more of an experiment. I have a bug fixing release in review, and I am waiting to see how that affects sales. I didn’t log the hours, but without a doubt ControlPad required much less development time than my PalmOS IM app. Most of that development time came from the holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas).

Compared to PalmOS 5, the iPhone is much more enjoyable to develop for. Cocoa and UIKit are so much more enjoyable than the PalmOS 5 API. Apple’s tools are much better as well (not that they are without fault). The tools I used for my PalmOS IM app were primarily gcc and pilrc, I believe this was (right?) before Palm came out with their Eclipse packaged SDK.

Most of the development was completed prior to 2009, however the review process took a little longer than I expected. It took a couple business days to receive a response, and I had to resubmit twice (so 3 total submissions, and 3 total reviews). This basically took a couple of weeks. I’ve read that the different categories are treated as separate queues, and review time varies depending on category. I couldn’t really say.

Another interesting observation is that I’ve received very few support emails (a handful). The ratio of support emails versus units sold is much smaller compared to my IM app. This is a pleasant surprise.

The App Store is definitely the right thing at the right time. I’m not sure if prior mobile platforms would have been appropriate (bandwidth, end user computer literacy). I’m wonder how long before Apple or Microsoft extend the software store to the computer. I am aware of some startups doing some similar things, but once Apple or Microsoft bundles it with their OS it will give the “shareware” market a huge kick in the pants. Software companies make huge amounts of money by being preinstalled on computers. This isn’t quite the same, but being one step removed from that would still be incredible.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.