It’s been a month since I announced the availability of Camera Plus, my first iPhone OS application, in the App Store. I figured it’s as good an opportunity as any to give a short update, and to talk about a few things that I have picked up in the course of being an iPhone developer for a month.

First of all, do keep in mind that I develop iPhone apps in my spare time—and that I don’t have that much of it to begin with. Therefore, my impressions here are necessarily skewed by my particular perspective; someone who writes apps for a living will probably see things differently.

The results are in…
In the short 30 or so days that it has been in the App Store, Camera Plus has done fairly well—as of today, it was the #9 application in the photography section of the store, which translates in a reasonably good number of sales.

Although I won’t provide any numbers, I can tell you that, while I won’t get rich from CP, I have most definitely recouped my development costs at a very generous hourly fee (even by my standards, which are, probably higher than the average). Plus, of course, I don’t expect the application to die right away, which will hopefully set me up for an even higher profit.

I’ve also received a lot of feedback—mostly positive, but some negative, which I have tried to deal with in the best possible way: respond to reasonable requests that I can satisfy without compromising the application, and ignoring those few idiots who can’t be bothered to read the description of an application, let alone try to use it properly.

Lessons learned
Despite my short life as a part-time iPhone OS developer, I have picked up a number of important lessons, which have helped guide me through the process of maintaining my application, and creating the next one (currently awaiting approval—or rejection, who knows).

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Understand your market
I was an iPod and iPhone user long before I decided to become a developer. It’s not so much that my lack of Objective-C knowledge was holding me back (although there was a certain amount of inertia caused by the idea of having to learn yet another language)—I really wanted to understand how iPhone development worked from a strategic perspective.

It is now clear to me that there are four types of iPhone apps: Great Apps, Stupid Apps, Half-assed Apps and Apps that Belong Somewhere Else.

• Great Apps all share one commong characteristic: they know what they want to do, and they do it really well. All these applications perform one primary function, and every other decision—including pricing—revolves around facilitating the One Primary Directive. These applications closely follow the UNIX philosophy (although they are handicapped by the lack of a true equivalent to pipes)—and they are very popular as a result.
  
  
• Stupid Apps, charitably referred to as novelty apps, are applications that serve no particular purpose and amuse because they are crass. These apps are popular, but, in my opinion, it’s difficult to write a good Stupid App—that’s because (a) the stupidity of these applications is often superficial, and they are in fact rather complex, and (b) the novelty wears off at the first copycat, meaning that you only really make money if you’re the first out to cover a specific idea.
  
  
• Half-assed Apps are the true crapware of the App Store. They do one thing, if they do it, and they do it poorly. As far as I’m concerned, this is the worst kind of app, because it brings nothing useful to the table. On the plus side, these applications can be a great source of opportunities for someone who wants to improve on them and knows how to.
  
  
• Apps That Belong Somewhere Else are applications that try to do too many things. There are a number of problem with this approach, but, primarily, they boil down to (a) trying to use the iPhone as a general-purpose computing platform, which it isn’t, and (b) investing too much in one product, which results in it being priced outside the boundaries of what most people are willing to pay.
  

2. Focus, focus, focus
When I started writing CP, I had much grander plans for it, and kept bouncing against limitations in the iPhone platform. It took me quite a while to understand that I was trying to write a Great App—and that requires an enormous effort to focus on one particular goal.

Deciding what you want your application to do should be the first thing you do. Once you find that one problem that you want to solve, every other decision will stem from it—including how much you will want people to pay for your product.

3. Spread your risk
I have heard of people investing tens of thousands of dollars to being an iPhone application to market. In my opinion, that’s stupid.

The reaction of the iPhone market to an application is very difficult to gauge. Apple makes sure that that’s the case—you can’t release betas, you can’t release the application as trialware or shareware (yes, I know, you can release a “free” edition, but that’s not the same—in order for that strategy to work, you must have already invested time and money in building the application anyway), and it’s really difficult to create a testing environment without guiding your testers through a ten-step setup process.

Therefore, a better business approach to app development is to create an application, release it as soon as possible, and then continue to update it if the market warrants it. If your app is a dud, it’s time to cut your losses and move on. If it’s not a dud, you will have ample opportunity to improve it and expand it organically—with the added benefit of doing so in response to customer input.

4. Release early, update often
I have now updated CP 3 times since its original launch—each time with a small incremental addition (as well as any bug fixes that came along with it), and my customers love it!

This approach goes hand-in-hand with the point I made in the previous section—an application that is updated often will be perceived as a better investment by your customers. At the same time, updating your application gives you an opportunity to get in front of more and more customers, as your app gets bumped to the top of the new releases list every time you push an update out.

5. Never, ever give out a paid app for free
I’ve seen some folks give out their application for free for a limited time as a way of boosting up their ratings and reviews. Invariably, this approach fails miserably, because, as someone put it, the threshold between free and $0.01 is insormountable for many people.

When you give out your application for free, your “customers” have no vested interest in it. They will try it, and most likely toss it away without a second thought. After all, it cost them nothing—why should it be worth anything to them?

This, incidentally, is the same reason why I think that the absence of a “try-before-you-buy” feature from the App Store is a good thing. As a matter of personal experience, people put no effort in seriously evaluating something until they have invested in it.

6. Never, ever sell your app for $0.99
A base price of $.99 is a bad idea for a number of reasons. First of all, you can’t back out of it—the only way to go is up. This means that you will never be able to boost your sales by running a promotion (and, in case you’re wondering, the value of a promotion is not in the reduced price, but in the reduction in price).

Second, if you can’t run a sale, you will miss out on a lot of potential sales because so many people access the App Store precisely with the idea of getting a bargain on an application that others had to pay full price for—that’s why apps like App Sniper are so popular.

7. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst
There is but one number one spot in the App Store and, frankly, your (or my) chances of getting there are pretty slim. If it happens, that’s great, but I’m fairly sure that there is no way, currently, to reliably predict whether an application will be a hit or not, which, in turn, means that you shouldn’t bank on it.

That’s why you should consider spreading out your risk. Instead of spending 100 hours building an app that will only make you money if it reaches #1, build five applications that require twenty hours each, then refine and improve the ones that generate the most revenue. I’d rather have 10 applications that make $100 a day each than one application that makes $1,000 a day.

8. The App Store is a marketing medium
Ignore the pundits: the App Store is much more than a distribution medium. If it were only a way to get applications to your clients and collect money from them, the 30% commission that Apple keeps would be highway robbery.

Ignoring the App Store as a marketing and sales medium is a big mistake—I have hardly made any investment in marketing (I don’t do this for a living, remember?)—but I have paid considerable attention to the way my app is presented on the store. I have been running sales, paying attention to customer feedback, and worked hard to make sure that my screenshots actually look like they were taken on an iPhone (as opposed to a competitor whose pictures were clearly doctored). It’s paid off. It’s worth it. It could be your best shot at making your product popular—take advantage of it.

9. Don’t get mad at Apple
The internal developer forums are overrun with people who complain about how unfair Apple is; how it’s out to screw them; how they had to wait forever for their application to be approved; and so on, and so forth.

That’s wasted breath. As far as I’m concerned, Apple has been pretty forthcoming in terms of what they will and won’t let in the App Store. While I’m sure that there have been isolated incidents of people who have been treated unfairly, as long as you steer clear of the touchy areas you won’t have any problem getting your application in the App Store. How do I know? Simple: there are 55,000 apps in there, and they didn’t get approved by giving Steve a free manicure. My first app took just over two weeks from submission to approval (because of the holidays), while CP took six days.

Moreover, as I mentioned in my previous post, the folks from Apple have generally been pretty good about returning my e-mails. Maybe I just got lucky—or maybe I just asked pertinent questions in a polite way. Who knows?

Thanks to the update, I now have 5 more coupons for a free copy of CP to give away. DM me on Twitter if you want one—and remember, these work only in the US store!