Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

18th MobileMonday Taipei Event Report

The 18th Mobile Monday Taipei featured presentations from 3 iPhone developers. In its first month, December, the iPhone surged to a 2% market share in Taiwan, the 6th most popular handset and rising, and we’re not even counting fake clones from the mainland.

Lukhnos D. Liu of Lithoglyph Inc. kicked things off by presenting TapExpense: from Sketch to App Store Launch. Tap Expense is a no-nonsense expense tracking system for the iPhone, featuring Personal/Business categories, multiple currency support, and support for Excel. The app was conceived during Apple’s WWDC conference in June 2008, and they were able to ship version 1.0 as part of the app store launch 1 month later!. Version 2.0 was a complete rewrite, released in February 2009. Check it out on their website and buy it on the AppStore, where there is a fully featured trial version. Mr. Liu will be presenting at the Open Source Developers Conference Taiwan this April.

Yung-Luen Lan shared his experiences developing Free KanaQuiz, currently the #1 Free App in the Education Category at the Apple’s Taiwan AppStore, including sales figure for its first six weeks. These figures jumped rapidly when his app was featured on http://www.iphonetw.net

Ching-Lan “digdog” Huang then flowcharted for us the exact procedure by which you can become an iPhone developer. Which he learned early on in the process of creating his FrostyPlace RSS reader. While you can start playing with the iPhone SDK immediately, the $99 registration for Apple’s iPhone Developer Program confers several benefits. Non-members can only write apps and test them on the simulator. Membership lets you test your code on real handsets, distribute your app on the iTunes App Store, and make money. Digdog’s blog contains his entire presentation and flowchart.

The developers cited several key advantages to Apple’s system, particularly useful to individuals and small businesses. There is one simple central location for all worldwide customers. The localization and payment system is handled for you, and the customer feels secure buying from Apple. And some security is provided by the closed architecture of the iPhone. In exchange for this Apple charges a 30% fee.

Apple has strongly galvanized the market for developers with their AppStore. I wonder if they will extend the market to software for OS X software or music for garage bands? I suspect they are wary of upsetting incumbents in those markets.

Other companies are now trying to replicate the success of the AppStore. At this months GSM conference in Barcelona, Microsoft and Nokia declared their intention to set up similar stores, joining similar announcements by Research in Motion, and Samsung. Google’s Android Market is already online Clearly however, Apple’s success is based on a complex ecosystem, and it will take time and skill to succeed at replicating it, its not just a matter of jumping up and down on stage shouting “Developers!”.

I asked the panelists about the gPhone. They were skeptical about developing in the gPhone’s chosen java instead of the iPhone’s Objective C language, and concerned that Google gave free software first crack at the store and invading their turf. To get rich is glorious! The gPhone should be available in Taiwan this April.

Resources

Get yourself into iPhone Dev Program and iTunes App Store
Yung-Luen Lan
Lithoglyph
Apple iPhone Developer Program
iPhone tw
Open Source Developers’ Conference Taiwan
iPhone Not Popular in Japan
Japanese “hate” for iPhone all a big mistake
Competing App Stores
Report: iPhone “miles ahead” of competing app stores
Taiwan Top Handset Vendors
Android Market