there's so many steps. you go from your marketing iPhone site, to the app store page of you app, and then you have the chance to buy it. thats at least one, if not two more steps. why can't you have a nice big "buy now" button on your website?

it's a black box. you can't see what works, you have no way of knowing if 75% of your tweets convert into a sale, and only 10% via fusionads.net - its not possible to tell.

iTunes or iPhone only. Good luck buying an app if you're at work, or on any computer where you don't have your iPhone set up on. Instantly preventing a) apps over 10MB from being installed, b) the casual news browsing "oh that looks like a cool app" you do whilst at work.

no refunds or trials. it prevents users from downloading ~$5 applications just because - you're not allowed to make apps that "explode" after 30 days. If you give away free trial apps thats fine, but a ton more work for the developer.

and lets ignore the fact you might get your application held up for weeks after you've been told it'll launch 1st August - after you've got all your press ready and such, they might just decide to not release it then. no reason why.

note: we're launching an iPhone app, and i agree with you - its all about the marketing, and thats why I've switched from dev to marketing for the next ~2 months before launch to get our iPhone app rocking.

Before 1997 (more or less) companies built mighty marketing empires on print ads, radio ads, and TV ads. No direct way to track sales, except for coupons, which had a down-market vibe. No selling soap to people while at work -- people had to physically go to a store to buy. (People at work couldn't even see the ads for your soap, unless they were allowed to read the paper on the job.) Yeah, there were refunds and trials for many products, but they required driving back to the store to return something.

It was like the dark ages! And, yet, go to a grocery store, or even a toy store, and count the successful products that were launched back then.

My interpretation of the current iPhone developer malaise is that the gold rush is over. Many of the people making theatrical exits from the platform are its fair-weather friends -- they were bound to leave, in droves, once they discovered that it's no longer a matter of putting up your farting app on the Store and watching the money roll in. The reason 99% of iPhone app marketing is via the Store is that this strategy used to work, in the early days, so nobody bothered to learn any other strategy. Now, faced with the grim reality that marketing software is slow, patient work, a lot of people are getting right back out of the business again, or desperately lobbying Apple to somehow turn the magic spigot back on (as if their competitors will vanish once Apple fixes some of its problems). Or they're cutting their prices to the bone, starving themselves in the process, like a desperate gambler throwing everything into the pot.

I was just reading about the real California gold rush. In 1848 you could literally walk to the right place in the Sierras, turn over one rock, and find a gold nugget the size of your fist. By 1849 thousands of miners had arrived and had turned over every rock, there was no more easy money to be made, and a lot of aspiring miners were staggering around the landscape, hungry and poor. Of course, the majority of the gold was actually mined in later years, by mining companies using gigantic hoses that could turn entire mountains into dust and pass the dust through separators. But that required capital, and a relatively long-term plan. The pick-and-shovel miners often preferred to just look around for the next gold rush; a lot of them ran greedily to Alaska when gold was found there. Not such a great plan: The post-rush climate was a lot colder and harsher in Alaska.

The pricing pressure to .99 distorts consumer's perception of value, therefore your marketing margins are often wiped out if you give in. A lot of people think $.99 is what every app should cost, they really do.

It's impossible to get quality metrics on your advertising initiatives. There's no way to really track an accurate conversation so you don't really know what works and what doesn't. You can loosely connect a few stats you setup yourself, but it's pretty weak and time consuming of a process - certainly a step backwards.

The inability to offer a demo of your product is a secondary issue with conversation. And, the inability to have a two-way conversation with user reviews, especially the ones that leave arm-chair feedback about your product and have no idea what they are talking about.

It's easy to say "marketing is a quick fix" for everyones problems. It's not, believe me, but that's not to say we're quitting anytime soon. The beauty of our company structure is that we're so low cost to operate that we essentially have an infinite number of iterations. We can pickup the mic after the fat lady has sung.

Yeah, that's the problem here -- you may need to be very patient.

For six months the iPhone platform looked like a gold mine for indie developers. Then the gold mine tapped out. Now we still don't know what the long-term prospects for indie developers are, because the data we have to date was tainted by the presence of the gold rush. The platform was too successful too soon:

http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/04/validated-...

If the market really is non-viable for indie developers, it will take time to figure it out and take steps. Apple won't fix something if it doesn't seem to be broken.

In the meantime, the iPhone app market may be dominated by major players with deep pockets, the way software marketing used to be before the Web. You might want to band together with some peers. Read up on the early history of personal computer software -- in which new companies like Broderbund, Sierra On-Line, and Electronic Arts recruited teams of formerly independent developers who wanted more marketing and sales clout than they could get from placing classified ads in the backs of computer-hobbyist magazines.