I think you are doing a great job of covering the topics (i.e., timely), and I enjoy the brevity and crisp style, but a bit more detail on the stats would be welcomed.

The fact that an app sells for 99 cents on the app store is because it has to. If it does not, there are 10 copies of that app or someone will copy it and sell it for 99 cents. The concept of a price on AppStore is the same concept of wholesale in any other industry. Wholesalers work on a lower profit margin but sell a lot more product that way.

If you really believe that software that took months to develop, test, market, and sell is not worth more than 99 cents (or anywhere between 99 cents and 4.99 which seems to be the magic selling price based on an article that TC had a couple of months ago), then you are very much mistaken.

The fact that software on other platforms is more expensive is because there is less competition and not because it is being sold to business people and not to general consumers. If the AppStore had only about 5000 apps, I guarantee to you that the prices would be more expensive. But with 35,000 apps, the law of supply and demand kicks in (I double majored in Engineering and Economics).

Apple did a lot of great things with the iPhone but it also caused for the work of many developers to be very much de-valued. I look at some of the apps on the AppStore and think to myself that if I was the developer, I would never have even attempted to create ,sell these apps in the first place. You look at some of the games out there and you figure that it takes several months to develop them and then the developer prices them at 7.99 and it does not sell so he lowers the price to 1.99 and it starts selling somewhat but when he lowers it to 99 cents, it sells like crazy and you start thinking that all of the apps on the AppStore are on a Fire Sale.

Developers who charge the price for their apps that they feel needs to be charged are not necessarily thinking to themselves that “Because I am selling to a business person, I can make it more expensive”. They are simply exercising the law of supply and demand and value their software based on their efforts. For you to suggest otherwise is just plain irresponsible!

“Zero remains a popular number” and the rest all clearly are aimed at suggesting no-one but iPhone users download apps. The numbers actually show that betwen 2/3rds and 3/4s of non-iPhone users do download applications – higher than I’d have guessed and certainly pretty respectable!

Stating that Android comes second in app store downloads, and then not showing any Android stats in the graph, is just another crude way to over-emphasise a point. Of course here you do have the slight excuse that no-one is really buying Android phones…

The overall general outline of your argument does exist but this kind of writing comes across as zealotry rather than journalism.

By my estimate based on public information, fewer than 10% of the billion cumulative downloads were for paid apps. At an average price of around $2.50/app, this would result in a gross of $250M and a net of $75M for Apple.

If other platforms had as many free apps available, I think you’d see the numbers even out a bit, though I expect the iPhone would still have the edge here.

Also they made the content purchase experience very very good…. on most operator decks this is a bitch!

Overall they have shown that the operator lead model for content sales has have a serious look at itself.