Davide Di Cillo

How the iPhone 3G S will change the apps scenario

Next friday the new iPhone 3G S will be available for sale and the iPhone OS 3.0 will be released. All this will have a huge impact on the iPhone applications’ market.

In-app purchases
This new feature will allow developers to keep making money even after selling an application and we’ll start seeing a lot of applications engineered to be expandable. Another (positive) effect is that it might “clean up” the iTunes store. Right now there are many applications that could be easily combined in a container application plus additional modules.

For my project Art for iPhone, in order to sell each individual artist, I had to release one application for each of them. Of course that made feel good the artist for having an application with their own name, but at the same time is much harder to promote the applications and to cross promote the artists.

In the iTunes store there are plenty of other examples like tourist guides or other applications that could work better if assembled in a single one. If I buy a tourist guide with the Italy module for it, next time I’ll have another trip I will most likely buy another module from the same application instead of going digging again between 50,000 applications to find another guide.

More power, less market
Yes, the new iPhone is an incredibly powerful portable gaming platform, and now software houses can start releasing games with even better graphics, but I don’t think they will go all the way with this. If they start releasing games that works only on the new iPhones they are cutting out a 40 millions devices market, and that would be plain stupid. So my guess is that they will wait until there will be more iPhone 3G S around, and that the iPod Touch will be updated.

Video support
A lot of application will have finally access to video recording. Right now the iPhone is the most used mobile device for uploading pictures to internet, also thank to a killer editing interface iMovie style.

I bet soon it will be also the most used device to upload videos. For sure there will be a massive number of updates from applications like Twitter clients, and that will make flourish a number of sites dedicated to short videos, space currently dominated by Qik, Seesmic and 12seconds.

GPS Navigation device
Thanks to the compass now the iPhone can finally be used as a full GPS Navigation device. this could be a big shift for all the GPS device companies out there as they will probably more software oriented than manufacturing hardware.

Do you think the iPhone 3G S will bring big changes to the mobile market? If so, how? Don’t be shy and leave a comment.

Tags: Mobile