How to price your iPhone app out of existence

He may be right but I would have liked to see a deeper understanding of price elasticity of demand, as well as some data to back up some of his claims.

This post seems to gloss over the point about VALUE.

Sure, sell your app for $9.99 if you want. But it'd better be worth it.

And almost all of the apps ON the app store are little quick pieces of fluff, barely even worth 99 cents.

Even the better pieces of software are mostly timesavers or memory aids, games notwithstanding.

The problem seems to stem from the fact that there is this expection to spend a few weeks and crank out an app, then live on it for a year, when I just don't think this could be the case.

iPhone apps just aren't as big or useful as desktop apps. I'm not saying there aren't useful apps, but come on, you're not gonna see Photoshop or Visual Studio or.. World or Warcraft for the iPhone any time soon.

And this doesn't even get into the fact that a lot of apps I could use can be replicated just by opening the browser and going to a website. And that one app I WOULD buy, I can't, without jailbreaking. (Ah, Podcaster. C'est la vie. And that app is only 4.99 too.)

right, i'm not sure why the author feels like he has a god-given right to make $50,000/year no matter what kind of iphone app he/she develops.

go ask any of the top 10 iphone application developers -- i don't think any of them are having trouble with the 50k/year barrier. the marketplace will be the same as the web: the majority of attention goes to a small number of sites. just because i put out a website of marginal value and charge $9.99 doesn't automatically mean i'll be making $50k/year -- the issue is a lot more difficult than that.

What the appstore needs is not higher prices, it needs fewer developers: if there are 20 apps doing X then each only makes enough money to get by, but if there were 2 apps doing X they both could invest into making new features. What we need is a serious recession with a healthy round of bakrupcies and mergers.

i bought beejiveIM for $16, it kicks ass and is worth every penny