There has been some interesting news about the App store: a recent survey of 20 developers working with the iPhone, results showed that around 71% of planned Apps would be completely free. This is great news for the App store as average prices were predicted to be around an average of 10 dollars. In fact the average cost of those apps developed by the 20 surveyed developers was only $2.29. The survey was completed by Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray.
Munster also looked at the context in which the developers were working and discovered that around half of the apps to appear in the app store were being developed for the iPhone and half for the Mac.
Apple will be mightily disappointed by all this news; it is desperate to encourage developers to charge for their apps. Why? Because every app sold through the app store nets Apple 30% of the profits. Under the current business model Apple are not charging developers or users anything for hosting or download.
Of course Apple want to see the developers charge! It has been rightly pointed out that 30% of nothing doesn’t pay for many Apple executive wages.