Its no secret that being an iPhone app developer is at times rough business, mostly due to Apples goofy authoritarianism. But judging by some recent soul-spilling by a few leading devs, things are getting rougher.
Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory, developers of Frenzic and Twitterific, started things off with a post lamenting the difficulties of rising above the iPhone apps endless sea of 99-cent mediocrity (a sea I’ve spent plenty of often painful time wading through for our Week in iPhone Apps column). In his post, he worries about being damned to endlessly constructing 99-cent so-called "ringtone" apps rather than well-designed and innovative apps that take more resources to develop.
Hockenberrys "Dear Steve" states that an iPhone devs life would be a lot easier if they could accurately track who exactly is downloading their apps (and which ads/links they clicked on to get to the store), and the ability to offer free demo version of apps that expire after a given time, prompting people to purchase the full app.
After setting off quite a ruckus of folks accusing Hockenberry of groundless complaining, the folks at Appcubby came to the rescue with a full monty on their financial records, showing, down to the dollar, what goes into keeping food on the table for an iPhone app developer (wherein we learned just how much Jasons post on Gas Cubby spurred sales). The Cubby folks backed up the call for free demos and more ad-tracking capabilities as two things that would greatly help the situation.
As is well known, our mission is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. We aim to do this through technology, and in Africa, that means developing tools for the mobile phone. Africa has the world’s highest mobile growth rate. Mobile phone penetration is six times Internet penetration -- one third of the population owns a mobile phone and many more have access to one. Most of these devices only have voice and SMS capabilities, which is why we have chosen to focus our initial mobile efforts on SMS.
Today, we are releasing Google SMS in Uganda. Google SMS is a suite of mobile applications which provides access, via SMS, to information on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more.
The suite also includes Google Trader, a marketplace application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. Users can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs. Google Trader has been designed to help make markets more transparent. Many people in Africa lack access to information and markets beyond their immediate business and social networks. Google Trader allows sellers to post items for sale via SMS, and for buyers to search for such items.
Google SMS Tips is an SMS-based query-and-answer service. After you text a free-form query, Google algorithms restructure the query to identify keywords, search a database to identify relevant answers, and return the most relevant answer. SMS is a very limited medium: each SMS can be no longer than 160 characters, and, unlike the web, allows for one result to be returned in response to a query. Short or ambiguous queries are particularly challenging. For example: weve received queries as brief as "hiv". What exactly is someone asking for: symptoms? Causes? Prevention? Treatment? We not only have to discern intent in order to identify a relevant answer, but we also have to convey information back to the user within the confines of SMS. The challenge is further complicated by the fact that people must pay for each individual SMS message.
These are the sorts of technical challenges that have surfaced in developing SMS Tips, so please dont view it as a finished product. We need to greatly improve search quality and add to the content that we have in the Health and Ag focus areas. Now that Google SMS is live, were working on improving search quality and the breadth, and depth, of content. As for Tips, we will work to add more focus areas.
Clearly, were just beginning; theres still much to be done. If youre curious about what Google is doing in Africa, visit the Google Africa Blog. And heres a video about the broader effort initiated by the Grameen Foundation to introduce mobile applications to under-served communities.
