Apple's 'Blow Out' and a 'Welcome' from The App Business
Hello. Welcome to The App Business blog. As the name suggests, we’re in the business of creating apps and this blog intends to lift the lid on what that business is really like.
You can rest assured that we know our apps. The founding team spent three years working for Apple and ‘Steve’, himself. We were responsible for helping launch the iPhone, App Store and hundreds of apps around Europe and were in the privileged position of being able to peer into Steve's crystal ball. Since, we’ve spent the last two years going it alone as The App Business, helping brands create more than 30 business-transforming apps that have been tapped over half a billion times.
To kick things off, there’s probably no better place to start than Apple’s blow-out results. They smashed every single analyst’s expectations (although we came pretty close) with 378,000 iPhones being sold per day and iPads now outselling PCs in the US. The era of mobile Internet computing is here, albeit it's dawn, and the sun is finally setting on the era of the desktop. Audiences are now filtering the world around them via wearable computers running apps (native and web), which are either replacing existing products or asking new questions of them.
We're hugely excited by this. Pretty much every business out there now has the opportunity to create mobile software to enable audiences to get new value of their brands and products. And note that we're not talking about marketing apps here (the dreaded 'branded app'). We're talking about real software products that companion or replace a business' existing output - whether it’s the FMCG's app that helps audiences get more out of its shampoo portfolio via a personalized program, or the publisher's app that transpires to be its product (prompting the publisher to swiftly acquire the app's developer).
From our vantage point, most businesses aren't naturally set up for this challenge in terms of skills, know-how and structure. This is ultimately why we created The App Business: to help them navigate this era and build software products that transform how their brands do business.
We’ll be using this blog to share the lessons we learn along the way, so do stay tuned. Next time around we plan to sprinkle a little perspective on the HTML5 hype. In the meantime, please share feedback. You can also follow us @theappbusiness