I just released my first iPhone application on Apple App Store. The title is called "Tang Poems for the Youth" [幼學唐詩].
This application is for a very niche market, that is, people who have learned traditional Chinese. For me, this is a good opportunity examining the theory of long-tail market. As an independent iPhone application developer, I don't have a lot of resources or time. It is important to me that I don't have to resort to some esoteric programming tactics or interfaces to accomplish what I wanted to do. It is also equivalently important that I don't have to test through many different devices with different capabilities and screen real estate. In a sense, I created an application that appears to be outside of the main stream using mostly common programming interface on a generic platform, and made the product available on all the iPhone OS products For that, I praise iPhone and iPod Touch.
A friend asked me whether I will port this application to the Android platform. I am a registered Android developer though I have not put much of an effort in it. Android is an "open" platform for device manufacturers. It is no more open than Windows Mobile or iPhone OS for an application developer. It will take over iPhone in terms of volume, just like Symbian of yesterday. It will be a fragmented market for a developer like me. I will put more efforts in making my application iPad ready before having some quality time with Android.
In the meantime, there will be more titles coming out from me. I will see how far this long-tail theory will take me, and Apple.
This application is for a very niche market, that is, people who have learned traditional Chinese. For me, this is a good opportunity examining the theory of long-tail market. As an independent iPhone application developer, I don't have a lot of resources or time. It is important to me that I don't have to resort to some esoteric programming tactics or interfaces to accomplish what I wanted to do. It is also equivalently important that I don't have to test through many different devices with different capabilities and screen real estate. In a sense, I created an application that appears to be outside of the main stream using mostly common programming interface on a generic platform, and made the product available on all the iPhone OS products For that, I praise iPhone and iPod Touch.
A friend asked me whether I will port this application to the Android platform. I am a registered Android developer though I have not put much of an effort in it. Android is an "open" platform for device manufacturers. It is no more open than Windows Mobile or iPhone OS for an application developer. It will take over iPhone in terms of volume, just like Symbian of yesterday. It will be a fragmented market for a developer like me. I will put more efforts in making my application iPad ready before having some quality time with Android.
In the meantime, there will be more titles coming out from me. I will see how far this long-tail theory will take me, and Apple.
