The sales power of the Apple App Store is legendary with its 1bn+ downloads in record time. I have repeatedly held though that the other end of this ecosystem, i.e. the entry door to the app store (and related SDK and all) – and its relative ease of use – was an equally imporant contributor to Apple’s success. And now we have a beautiful example on how cool this really is: in Chicago, an 11-year old and his 9-year-old brother designed and programmed an application called “MathTime” that has just gone live on the app store. It provides random addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problems and their solutions.
The creators, Owen and Finn Voorhees, worked on it for 9 months and it is now live on the app store, which means available for sale in every country the iPhone is currently available – on deck so to speak! Try this with a J2ME app…
Now, I do not want to belittle Owen’s efforts (it is spectacularly awesome for any 11-year-old!) but this would arguably not have been possible on any other (mobile) software platform. Even if some smart kid might be able to write such a programme. To get it into live distribution on official on-device app stores (or operator portals) would be just utterly unthinkable. Try close those deals with all them operators. Good luck.
I have not seen the MathTime in action but since Apple approved it to go live, it must have passed at least certain thresholds. The whole ecosystem on any of the “classic” carrier channels would have thwarted any attempt to do the same. Would it have worked on Android Market? On the Blackberry App World? Nokia Ovi? I don’t know but it does not really matter since they are basically only further iterations of the model that Apple came out with first: a cr0ss-carrier, multi-territory, single-SKU deployment channel with a fairly regulated development environment. Fragmentation? Hah! Multi-channel distribution? What?
It is here where we should sing Apple’s praise: to make it possible that 5th graders can not only write but publish an application is truly stunning! That their dad needs to front it as the seller for being the only adult involved in the process is then only a touching and even more pronounced little detail, isn’t it?