The iPad Gold Rush | Development On Rise

New products always elicit excitement and aggregate buzz around them. The iPad has been a perfect example of this truth. We’ve documented the build up to, and aftermath of, the iPad announcement in many articles. Now new information has come out providing further empirical evidence of the excitement the iPad has caused.

Flurry is a San Francisco-based analytics company that concentrates on the mobile space. They’ve recently released numbers indicating a sudden jump in iPhone OS development. Flurry tracks deployed and in-development applications through developers who incorporate their analytics package, a Neilsen system for apps if you will. According to a recent blog post entitled, Flurry Smartphone Industry Pulse, January 2010:

Flurry tracks over 20,000 live applications and over 2 billion user sessions each month. Applications that include Flurry Analytics have been downloaded to more than 80% of all iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices.
So if anyone has the pulse on the course of mobile application development its Flurry.

In the same blog post Flurry reveals they tracked 1600 new iPhone application starts in January. That doesn’t seem remarkable taken by itself. However, they tracked only 600 new application starts in December. That’s almost a threefold increase in application starts in the course of one month. The explanation, of course, is iPad anticipation.

Any successful person knows that to be successful you don’t merely follow the crowd, you lead it. The huge increase in new application starts just goes to show that not only were foresighted developers anticipating the iPad, they were actively pursuing the opportunities it brings. The coming months should see a new, virtual gold rush as developers move on the opportunities the iPad brings. The primary participants? At this point I think the developers really delving into the iPad will be those creating games, eBooks, and content delivery platforms. Those are the three areas really targeted by the iPad. Others will follow but these three areas will be the real veins initially mined in this new gold rush.

Will the iPad bring a new boom of development for the iPhone/iPad platform? Will this boom bring a noticeable stratification between iPhone and iPad applications? Will you be participating in the gold rush? Leave us a comment and give your thoughts.

By: Erin Peterson

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2 Comments on “The iPad Gold Rush | Development On Rise”

  1. Brian

    My company will definitely be developing apps for the iPad. We see the device as an extremely main stream device targeted at non-power users such as your mom or the person having nothing to do with tech. I think I would add one thing to the list of things this app is intended for. I believe you will see a lot of business focused apps for doctors, lawyers, real estate pros, etc.

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