Browsing the iPhone Aisles

Throughout the day the Apple and iPhone blogosphere has been abuzz with today’s release of the Apple iPhone Application Store. New version of iTunes and the basic iPhone firmware have been dropping today. I have downloaded both, perused the apps store and installed a handful of third party programs on my phone. Why is the iPhone app store a big deal? Well, for you content providers, be aware that AP, NYTimes, Bloomberg, WeatherBug, eBay, Facebook, YellowPages, MySpace, Salesforce, and LonelyPlanet are already in the catalog of 500 apps. It costs virtually nothing to develop and distribute mobile content to a mobile device with 6 million  data eaters. This is what mobile media creation and distribution will be about someday. It should be this easy to get a sophisticated version of your brand to users’ handsets without having to spend more in porting costs than in the development budget. Many of the apps are free, and I understand that at least one developer is assembling a mobile ad network that dynamically feeds ads into these apps.

Not all is well in Appleland today, however. I experience some hiccups in the system. Bloomberg’s app failed to find the server the first couple of times I tried it. The otherwise excellent AP Mobile News Network crashes whenever I try to access local news set to a particular location. New York seems to work fine. And a couple of apps, including the App Store itself, have crashed on me.

At first blush, it seems to me we are seeing the up and downside of a more open approach to mobile programming. It is easy for most publishers to have a credible iPhone app up and running for free in short order. For those who want to venture into the paid arena, Apple is willing to give back 70% of the fee, which is highly generous in the mobile world where carriers gouge both consumers and content partners. On the other hand, there is a lot of ephemeral crap in the store. How many tip calculators and voice recorders do we need, anyway? I have not ventured to try more than a few, but some of the categories are swarming with one-trick ponies that should have been Web-based apps. Do I really need to carry around the IGN video game reviews in a standalone app that uses up precious phone memory?

More on the iPhone’s new content platform in coming days. For now, it is refreshing to see what mobile content should have been all along, however.