We finally get this confirmation about the price and size limit of iPhone applications. There was this rumor that the price cap for iPhone application will be from 99 cents to $999.99. Phew!! That was shocking. Who will develop an application that costs half a dozen times more than the host device? And the other big question mark was, who in their right minds would shell out $999.99 for an application?
According to a survey done on developers who attended the WWDC, 70% percent of the developers said they won’t charge a cent for their applications. The average charge for an application derived from the survey report was $2.29. This was a welcome note to all iPhone owners. Before the WWDC, the prices of iPhone games that we know of were Trism ($4.99), Lumen ($5.00) and Aki Mobile Mahjong ($9.99). During the WWDC keynote, Sega and Pangea Software also settled their upcoming games at $9.99.
Now with this latest report, I think the stage is almost set for mass launch of third party applications. The final word on the maximum size of application is 2GB and the maximum price per application is $20. The pricing chart divides applications, tier wise, country wise, market prices and distribution regions. Apple has not revealed anything about the size limit. However, this limitation could be a technical necessity. Till date none of the developers have quoted more than $10, we need to wait and watch. What we all can hope for now is that the size limit does not hurt data heavy applications.
