Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
IPhone Apps: One Month And 60 Million Downloads Later. But Not One Of Them Is A Killer App (techcrunch.com)
9 points by terpua on Aug 11, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments


Can someone define "killer app"?

This article claims that "Super Monkey Ball" might have sold $3 million worth of software in a month. But that's not "killer", I guess.

The classic definition of "killer app" is "the app that, by itself, makes you buy the platform". But it's kind of hard to tell how well specific third-party apps are driving phone sales when the phones are selling approximately as fast as they can be made.

And, of course, the killer app on a Web-enabled phone will always tend to be making phone calls and using the web. If "more popular than MobileSafari" is the benchmark, it will be very, very hard to reach the benchmark.

Finally... one month? They say that good software takes ten years. One month is 0.83% of that time. Give the market some more months.


To be fair: it's one month from launch. The SDKs were in developers' hands much earlier. And the general details of the platform architecture were in public hands (via the work of the jailbreak folks) much earlier still.

To some extent, MobiltSafari is already the iPhone's killer app. Nothing else it does is really all that shockingly great. But a web browser isn't going to be killer for more than a smallish handful of people. It's not "killer" in the way that SMS texting was, for example. Will there be another? The jury hasn't come back yet.


SMS texting is a killer app but a web browser that is actually useful and productive on a small mobile screen is not? What color is the sky in your world?


But it's kind of hard to tell how well specific third-party apps are driving phone sales when the phones are selling approximately as fast as they can be made.

Well said. On a device that already plays music, is a phone, handles email and offers maps with a GPS, everything else is icing on the cake.

On this topic, the bloomberg app is great. I wish I could easily email links from it though.


Critical thinking 101:

First, why not see how long other successful platforms took to get their first 'killer app'?

Apple II: First released, June, 1977. Killer app (visicalc) released: May 1979.

PC-DOS: released in Aug. '81, first killer app (lotus 123), Jan 1983.

Mac: released Jan '84, first killer app (Aldus Pagemaker), sometime in 1985.

Second, what do unit sales have to do with expectations for a killer app?

It's a little early for tc to complain about a killer app.


I think there are two killer apps on the iPhone. Mobile safari with multi-touch and the gmaps app with multi-touch.

I don't use any other app on a daily (or even weekly) basis with the possible exception of the Yelp app and the WeatherBug app.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: