There’s a lot of hype around the iPhone right now. It’s an amazing device, for sure. Companies seem to be scrambling to put something, anything on the iPhone. Shoot, we’ve even been sucked into the hype, working on developing some apps so that we’re able to help our clients get in on the action.
We might all need to take a deep breath, however, and think before we spend. The average iPhone app costs $30,000 to develop. In a rational setting, the ROI on that spend should justify the cost. It seems, though, like there are a lot of companies wanting to create an iPhone app just for the sake of having one.
If you’ve been sucked in by the iPhone fervor, this article is a good gut check.
Here’s an excerpt:
For all the euphoria over the iPhone, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has sold only 17 million of the devices worldwide, a sliver of the overall market. Mark Lowenstein, a consultant at Mobile Ecosystem, recently said at a conference that a successful iPhone application is one that’s been downloaded by at least 20 percent of users—but that’s still only 1 percent of the global mobile population. Further caution came from Bango (AIM: BGO), an analytics company, which said that according to its data, the iPhone is the 24th most-popular handset for browsing and buying mobile content on the mobile web—and that companies are targeting it at the expense of the mass market.