Polar Bear Farm chill

IPhone application developers say a problem with Apple's online application store means they are feeling the pinch.

IPhone users can download hundreds of thousands of applications - usually games and tools - to their phones from Apple's online iTunes store.

Layton Duncan, director of Christchurch application developer Polar Bear Farm, says the store's ranking system unfairly favours the best of the cheapest applications.

"The rankings are based on download numbers. There is no accounting for the revenue applications are making, and that makes it harder for higher priced applications to come up the rankings and have visibility in the store.

"There are 30,000 registered application developers and about 200 new applications a day, and the iTunes store is the exclusive distribution model for these applications, so visibility in the store and being highly-ranked is critical to your success."

The store's bias towards free and cheap applications means developers are under pressure to slash the price of their applications, he says.

Polar Bear Farm doubled the price of one application to $2 and experienced a 60 per cent drop in downloads.

"It's making things tough for a lot of people."

The company is about to launch its seventh application and is rebuilding some others, but it is in a holding pattern, Mr Duncan says.

"We're hoping for some clear direction from Apple as to what they're going to do with the store, but they rarely pre-announce what they're doing."

Mr Duncan has set up a website inviting developers to comment on how the store could be improved.

Polar Bear Farm's new application, Faces, detects faces in photos taken on the iPhone and recognises them if they have been tagged - or named - before.

"It integrates with Facebook so if you upload a photo to Facebook, it will be automatically tagged."

Polar Bear Farm's most popular application at present is Record, which has been in the top 10 list of paid downloads in 26 countries.

Record lets users record audio and voice and manage their recorded files.

The company celebrated its first birthday in October by offering its applications for free and had 100,000 downloads in one day.

It has been approached by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but is not looking for outside investment, Mr Duncan says.

"We're not the sort of company that needs that kind of investment, which comes with a lot of overheads.

"We're not making millions of dollars, but we're one of the top developers."

Bram Smith, technology development manager at Waikato University's commercial research arm WaikatoLink, says its five iPhone applications have been downloaded 150,000 times, but the application store's set-up has affected sales. "The way the store works has been beneficial to some of our applications, but it has also meant some of our applications have gone unnoticed - generally the higher-priced ones.

"But the store hasn't yet been up for a year, and I think people are still trying to see how the market works.

"We're waiting to see how different business models work in one or two years."

WaikatoLink has been approached by companies wanting iPhone applications developed, or their existing applications for other platforms such as PlayStations remodelled for the iPhone, he says.

WaikatoLink's applications include PowerCurve, which uses the iPhone's accelerometer and other measurements to calculate a vehicle's performance, and The Red Baron, which simulates the experience of flying a World War I biplane and is downloaded about 10,000 times a week.