Newsweek recently carried a story noting that the App Store isn’t the fount of instant riches that Apple, and occasionally the media, sometimes suggest. The story follows some developers who created very popular applications, but found themselves just barely profitable, or sometimes losing money. It’s a good read, and has some particularly interesting stats: —Per [...]

This blog and JZ’s book have both taken issue with Steve Jobs’ introduction to the iPhone: We define everything that is on the phone. You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a [...]

A little behind the times, but here’s the update on the Google Voice story. Apple and Google both responded to the FCC’s letter; Apple’s reply is here and Google’s is here. So what did we learn? On the upside, we learned a lot about the approval processes for both the iPhone and Android phones; more [...]

As promised, here’s some of what we learned about the app approval process from Google and Apple’s letters to the FCC. There’s nothing ground-shaking, but a few details of interest to smartphone obsessives. Apple: Apple says a staff member tests every submission for technical issues like bugs and unauthorized protocols. More holistically, they look for [...]

If this story is true, I think it’s a real misjudgment on Apple’s part. Floatopian, a Virginia and Palo Alto-based developer, created an app called iSinglePayer designed to advocate for single-payer healthcare in the US. Per Floatopian’s open letter, the free app contained charts and information about health care reform; it could also calculate the [...]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer Fascinating: Steven Peterson, a web developer in San Francisco, put together a handy iPhone app called Routesy that gives schedules and arrival times for Muni, the city’s public transit system. The underlying data is collected by a company called NextBus, which puts trackers on the various vehicles. Generativity at its best—the government [...]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer Marcus Watkins, over at VersatileMonkey.com, has a writeup of what it was like to develop his first BlackBerry app. (BlackBerry came out with its own app store earlier this year, but it’s been strangely reticent about advertising it. BlackBerry users have long been able to get third-party apps from individual developers’ websites [...]

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer It’s been a while since we’ve done a roundup of what’s going on in the iPhone app world. Apple continues to reject or kill apps at a slow but steady pace. The rejections fall into a various categories: political rejections, content-based rejections (both explicable and not), and catch-all rejections of cool and useful [...]

I’m starting to get a better sense of what Google’s open mobile OS, Android, will look like in practice. Google has just pulled tethering apps from the Market, the on-phone equivalent of Apple’s App Store. Tethering apps allow users to use their mobile phone as a sort of modem/internet connection for their laptop, and carriers [...]

–by Elisabeth Oppenheimer The iPhone App Store is selling e-books, and (surprise!) has upset authors and developers by rejecting books with “objectionable content.” As usual, we don’t really know how the App Store rejection process works. But they seem to be searching books for the f-word and rejecting those that use it. Author Moriah Jovan [...]