App Store

With 100,000 apps to chose from, figuring out which ones are worth your attention can be a chore. We'll always do our best to find the gems in the rough for you, but a new app for finding good apps has been released that shows promise. Chorus [App Store, Free] is an app that gives you app recommendations from friends and people around you.

Apple has announced that the App Store has officially reached an inventory of 100,000 available apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. While more than 100,000 have been submitted and approved, not all of them stayed available for long, keeping the number below 100k. Apple issued a statement on their website about what they think this means about their success.

A T-Mobile advertisement for an app for Android mobile devices actually boosted sales of a similar iPhone application with the same function. In the latest ad for the myTouch 3G, Dana Carvey is shown writing "call me" using an application that simulates steam on glass that can be wiped away. After the add aired, iFog [App Store, $0.99], an iPhone application that does the same thing, saw a spike in sales.

According to App Shopper, Apple has approved more than 100,000 apps for the App Store, 100,867 to be precise (at the time of writing this). Of course this number is somewhat misleading as there are only 92,310 currently live in the App Store. This is, of course, due to some applications either being pulled by their respective developers or by Apple. Regardless of this fact, it's pretty great to see how quickly the store has grown in just over one year.

Apple's most recently reported App Store download count was two billion with 85,000 apps in the store, reported in late September.

The last time we told you about Elgato's EyeTV [App Store, $4.99], the app that streams TV to your iPhone from your Mac, version 1.0 had been pulled from the App Store at AT&T's request because of a recently discovered "easter egg" that enabled said streaming over AT&T's 3G network. There's been some confusion since then, but Elgato was nice enough to contact us and straighten things out.

On Monday, Wolfram Alpha, the online computational knowledge engine that launched in May, saw its application become available in the App Store. Per MacRumors, the app "plugs directly into Wolfram|Alpha's supercomputing cloud to deliver the unrivaled power of the Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine to the mobile environment."
While the app still requires an internet connection to work, it includes a special keyboard to make the entry of special characters for mathematical and other functions easy.

Apple has just notified registered iPhone app developers that In App Purchasing is now open for free iPhone applications. The new decision enables a lot of new possibilities, and promises to change the way developers make apps and the way we buy them, including eliminating the need for 'Lite' versions of apps.

I'm guessing that many of you have run into the dreaded "not enough free space" message once while installing apps onto your iPhone even though the app should be small enough to fit. So why does the message appear? The truth is that, even though an app may report that it's small enough to squeeze into the last few gigabytes on your iPhone, every app is compressed before it's downloaded. This means that an app is transferred to your phone, uncompressed, and then the compressed version is discarded, effectively requiring a little more than twice the space of the reported size of the app.

So how much space does a large app need in order to be installed?

Apple likes to point to Steve Demeter, developer of the hit puzzle app Trism [App Store, $2.99] , as the poster child for striking it rich in the App Store, but his wealth wasn't actually accumulated from his iPhone app. Demeter says that while he is now independently wealthy, most of the money came from, of all things, buying stock in Palm, Apple's rival.

A UK-based iPhone app developer has pointed out a largely unheard phenomenon in the App Store that is causing legitimate developers a lot of trouble: app name squatting. Like domain name squatting, a developer can register an app under a name to make sure nobody else can have it, without even releasing an actual app.