
IPhone Apps: One Month And 60 Million Downloads Later. But Not One Of Them Is A Killer App - terpua
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/iphone-apps-one-month-and-60-million-downloads-later-but-not-one-of-them-is-a-killer-app/
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mechanical_fish
Can someone define "killer app"?

This article claims that "Super Monkey Ball" might have sold $3 million worth
of software in a month. But that's not "killer", I guess.

The classic definition of "killer app" is "the app that, by itself, makes you
buy the platform". But it's kind of hard to tell how well specific third-party
apps are driving phone sales when the phones are selling approximately as fast
as they can be made.

And, of course, the killer app on a Web-enabled phone will always tend to be
_making phone calls and using the web_. If "more popular than MobileSafari" is
the benchmark, it will be very, very hard to reach the benchmark.

Finally... _one month_? They say that good software takes ten years. One month
is 0.83% of that time. Give the market some more months.

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ajross
To be fair: it's one month from launch. The SDKs were in developers' hands
much earlier. And the general details of the platform architecture were in
public hands (via the work of the jailbreak folks) much earlier still.

To some extent, MobiltSafari is already the iPhone's killer app. Nothing else
it does is really all that shockingly great. But a web browser isn't going to
be killer for more than a smallish handful of people. It's not "killer" in the
way that SMS texting was, for example. Will there be another? The jury hasn't
come back yet.

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evgen
SMS texting is a killer app but a web browser that is actually useful and
productive on a small mobile screen is not? What color is the sky in your
world?

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comatose_kid
Critical thinking 101:

First, why not see how long other successful platforms took to get their first
'killer app'?

Apple II: First released, June, 1977. Killer app (visicalc) released: May
1979.

PC-DOS: released in Aug. '81, first killer app (lotus 123), Jan 1983.

Mac: released Jan '84, first killer app (Aldus Pagemaker), sometime in 1985.

Second, what do unit sales have to do with expectations for a killer app?

It's a little early for tc to complain about a killer app.

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webwright
I think there are two killer apps on the iPhone. Mobile safari with multi-
touch and the gmaps app with multi-touch.

I don't use any other app on a daily (or even weekly) basis with the possible
exception of the Yelp app and the WeatherBug app.

