Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jesse Feiler (Philmont, NY) is Software Director of Philmont Software Mill. He has server as manager, software developer, consultant, author, and speaker for organizations such as Apple Computer, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Prodigy. He has also written several books, including Real World Apple Guide (1558514295) and Application Servers: Powering the Web-based Enterprise (012051338X).

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GET RICH WITH APPS!

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

Apps 3.0 are surging like a gigantic wave. Are you waiting to be swamped, or are you preparing to ride the wave to personal profit and business growth?

The story of apps can be told in many ways. How many people do you know who will admit to not knowing about Facebook or iPhone, at least in general terms? "Create a Facebook Page" has been added to the to-do list for everyone from political advisors to realtors, large and small businesses, nonprofits, and individual users from teens to seniors. (Facebook has even developed a policy for handling the pages of people who have passed away.) On the iPhone side, "There's an app for that" is listed in The Yale Book of Quotations (Fred R. Shapiro, editor) as the third most notable quotation of 2009.

Alongside the anecdotal stories of Apps 3.0, another one is told in numbers. Here are some that you'll likely notice first:

* More than 50 million iPhones were sold in the product's first two years.

* There are more than 350 million active Facebook users, half of them logging on every day.

* There are more than 140,000 third-party apps for iPhone and more than three billion downloads from Apple's iTunes App Store.

* There are more than 350,000 third-party Facebook apps, and more than 70 percent of Facebook users use third-party apps each month. More than 250 third- party Facebook apps have more than one million monthly active users.

On the other side of the coin, not all statistics in the Apps 3.0 world involve large numbers:

* Facebook apps are free.

* iPhone apps are free or relatively inexpensive, with common price points of $4.99 and $9.99, although some cost $29.99 or more.

* The estimated cost to develop a sophisticated iPhone or Facebook app, such as Twitterific (iPhone) or those used by the Obama Campaign, can be anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000. Basic apps can cost a tenth of that—or even less.

* Developers commonly charge hourly rates of $50 to $150.

Finally, you may see these numbers:

* The Facebook app for iPhone is consistently one of the most downloaded free apps.

* People who access Facebook from mobile devices are almost 50 percent more active on Facebook than nonmobile users.

With so many users and such a relatively low developmental cost, opportunities for making money with these apps abound. Finding out what they are and how you can participate in this gigantic and rapidly evolving market is what this book is all about. This chapter will give you an introduction to this exciting new world. It will answer three immediate questions right away:

1. What are apps?

2. What do they mean for you and your business?

3. How can you monetize them?

What Are Apps?

Everyone talks about apps, but what exactly are they? So many people talk so fluently about apps that sometimes it is a little hard to muster the courage to ask what they are and how they can work for you. Well, here's your answer.

App Architecture

App is an abbreviation for application, as in application program. For example, your personal computer–based word processor or spreadsheet is an application. The office management software that runs your office and unites your staff is an application. But today, app is more than just an abbreviation—the word has taken on a very specific meaning, reflecting the evolution of software over the last half century.

There have been three generations of applications. Although they have evolved over time, all three still exist and are in widespread use. Here's a brief description of how applications have evolved over the years:

* First-generation applications: These are applications that run on individual computers—a personal computer or a corporate mainframe.

* Second-generation applications: These applications are networked with multiple simultaneous users using a single application program, such as a corporate database or office billing system. Many of them are still in use today, and their basic architecture is the same as that used to develop them originally—often in the 1960s and often for minicomputers that no longer exist today.

* Current-generation apps: Apps, which are referred to as Apps 3.0 if you want to be specific, are an advance on the second-generation applications. There is still a networking component in most cases and, very often, a shared database. Instead of the user interface being implemented in HTML on the Web or in a programming language running on a local computer, the user interface itself has two components. A framework defined by an application program interface (API) is used and reused for many different applications. A very specific piece of code—an app—is inserted into that framework for each task that is needed. The framework provides much more than just an interface; it is able to perform sophisticated tasks that are unique to that framework and its environment. For example, in the case of Facebook, those tasks allow the app to request a list of the current user's friends; in the case of iPhone, the app can find the device's location.

In this book, the word environment is used to describe this common framework or other API—the environment into which the app is placed and in which it runs. We use this specific term because other terms specify programming techniques. A framework, for example, can be used to implement either an app or its environment; similarly, an API can implement the environment or the app.

Apps 3.0 represent an evolution of software architecture in many ways. For years, the idea of building reusable application environments and having a task-specific application has been something of a holy grail. What is different in Apps 3.0 is that the environment not only provides the basics of the user interface, but it often contains a very specific set of interface elements such as those for iPhone or Facebook. Note: The iPhone environment (technically referred to as the iPhone operating system, or iPhone OS) powers Apple's new iPad. Almost all iPhone apps run on iPad. Unless otherwise noted, references to iPhone apps include iPad apps.

This new architecture is not limited to Facebook and iPhone, but they are the first two major players in this area. Google is now releasing comparable environments, and other companies such as Palm are also positioning themselves for this new future. By looking at the early players this field, this book will help you understand expected developments and how you and your business can become another player in this exciting and growing field.

Doing It Another Way

Both Facebook and iPhone provide alternative architectures in addition to apps. Both let third-party developers write software that links deep into the structure of the environment.

On iPhone, Apple calls them iPhone Web apps. These are Web pages that you build in exactly the same way you would any other Web page. When the pages are displayed in iPhone's browser, they can access certain features of iPhone directly. In the Facebook world, this alternative architecture is provided by Facebook Connect. You build a Web page just as you normally would, but that Web page...