The Market

Like the platform itself, selling products for the iPhone is a whole new world. Chances are you've never sold software to a mass market: That's about to change with iTunes!

As discussed on Choose your customers, setting your application's price is one of the more difficult aspects of preparing your release. You're the only one who knows how much work went into the product and how many licenses you need to sell in order to recoup your investment.

To help you make this decision, you need to look at the market you're about to sell into. In Chapter 4 you took the first step in marketing: thinking about how to position your application before you even start coding. Now it's time to start thinking about how you're going to price and then promote that final product.

Metrics

To begin to understand this new market, take a look at some of the numbers that define it. Keep in mind that this new market is also evolving quickly—the links included below should help you keep up with the latest changes.

Surprise! Apple is secretive

Apple doesn't provide much information about the iPhone OS market. The only substantive metric is the number of iPhones sold in each quarterly financial report. Using these numbers, you can see in Figure 8-8 that growth of the market is pretty impressive.

It's interesting that these numbers don't include a significant portion of your potential customer base: Apple does not break out the numbers for the iPod touch (instead, it reports the total number of iPods sold). ...

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