The Apple App Store - Is this really the long tail?

With 15,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, I have to ask, “Is this really the long tail?”. The marketing department at Apple would have us believe that the App Store provides iPhone users with a myriad of applications to suit your every specific need. But is there really a need for 50 different task management applications? I think that iPhone customers would benefit from two or three best of breed applications for managing tasks instead.

So is the current App Store ecosystem in the best interest of consumers and developers? It is undoubtedly a great selling point for Apple and it is definitely easier to buy, download and install an iPhone application than a Windows Mobile application. However, Apple may have has set the barrier to entry too low for iPhone developers. Today the most popular iPhone applications will bubble to the top, but what will happen in the future? Will the next great iPhone application remain undiscovered among the noise of 100,000 lesser applications?

iPhone OS 3.0 Shines

Apple unveiled iPhone OS 3.0 on Tuesday, addressing many of the short-comings iPhone users have had to suffer with in earlier versions of the OS. The most important feature – Cut & Paste – is now there, as is MMS support provided you have a 3G phone.

Apple has also included enhancements that will support the iTunes Store ecosystem including an API that allows developers to handle the purchase of content and services from the iTunes Store. They have scaled up their Push Notification service, allowing an iPhone to receive an application notification even when the application isn’t running. The Push Notification service is centralised meaning that all iPhone applications connect to the same set of notification servers. Apple’s rationale for adopting this architecture is that it eliminates the need to maintain applications running in the background which can significantly reduce standby battery life.

Interestingly, today’s smartphones seem to be just catching up to where the Japanese were with their i-mode service in 2002.

Other iPhone OS 3.0 features include Bluetooth peer-to-peer connectivity to support gaming between phones; inclusion of the Google Mobile Maps service; access to iPod hardware accessories and access to the iPod library.

Many of these feature will also be supported on the iPod Touch.

One of the most import aspects of this OS release is that is will be made available to all existing iPhone customers for free.