iPhone App Store Thriving Despite Developer Tricks
Date : 17 Jul 2008 Category : Technology
NewsFactor NetworkMicrosoft appears to have noticed the comments and put up a Windows Mobile Applications site this week powered by Silverlight.
'Line-Cutting'
One bump in the App Store road has been that some developers were putting special characters such as spaces, quotes, and numbers in front of their applications' names so they would rank near the top in the listings. One Apple-oriented site described the practice as "line-cutting," but Apple appears to have fixed this problem.
Earlier this week, the Apple iPhone School, an independent site, said the practice shows "extreme unprofessionalism" by developers and makes the store "look very disorganized."
The school also said there have been rumors of developers "hiring people to write positive reviews on their applications and negative reviews on competitors' applications." This is reportedly not uncommon elsewhere on the Web, but the school called on Apple to "take a stand" and provide some regulation.
Even as some developers might try to tilt the deck in their favor, a handful of applications are already standing out.
Boston-based uLocate Communications announced this week that its location-based application called WHERE is among the most popular on the App Store, with "as many as 100 activations per second" and 125,000 downloads since the store's launch. WHERE allows users to find friends in a city, locate the lowest gas prices, and achieve other benefits of mobile location-sensing.
WHERE made one of the first "top 10 of App Store" lists by noted technology columnist Walter Mossberg. Other programs on his list include the AIM...