Lately, there has been a lot of anti-App Store attitudes out there, along with anti-anti-App Store attitudes. I can certainly understand (and sympathize with) people being frustrated about Apple’s review process for moving your apps into the store. I am not here to argue about how some apps haven’t been approved or take forever to be approved. I am all for Apple improving or removing the approval process all-together. However, I think when it comes to success in the App Store, I think there’s quite a bit of confusion about how we should be measuring success. Disclaimer: These opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Iconfactory.

Everyone hopes that when they release their application to the public it will be met with tremendous success. We hope and dream about getting into the Top 10 application lists to regenerate sales every day. This rarely happens, of course, and to do it means the correct combination of marketing, recognition, and luck. Though making it into the Top 10 may mean success because you are regenerating sales every day you’re in the list, it doesn’t mean your app isn’t a success because it didn’t make it in there.

Success in the App Store should mean what it meant when we were developing Mac OS X applications, and that is… when you turn a profit. When you recoup your costs and start turning a profit, your product becomes a success. It’s tempting to blame the App Store when your product isn’t a success, even if it’s actually… your fault.

Yeah, I know some of you are going to shake your heads and say “the App Store is broken” and cite numerous reasons why the App Store sucks. But I think that there’s more to learn here.

There seems to be a lot of requests to remove the approval process and allow us to post our applications to our websites instead. While I see the benefit for this as we can post new versions immediately (and not have to fork over 30% to Apple), I highly doubt this would improve sales or make our products any more successful.

Take the Mac applications we’ve all developed. We’ve put them on our websites, and they sell, and just like I said earlier, we measure success based on when we can turn a profit. We who think of our iPhone applications as “desktop-class” apps most likely have websites for our iPhone products as well. On these websites, we have a link to the App Store similarly to how we’d link to the download on our Mac apps’ websites. So… the difference here is one is going to your sale system, where the iPhone app sites are going to the App Store. But does it make a difference in how many copies you sell? I don’t think so.

I’ve heard developers clamor for posting their applications to their own site so they can point people there instead of the App Store, but who’s to say you can’t do that now? Just as a Mac OS X application, or whatever else kind of software, your website can be whatever you want it to be to showcase your software, and when it comes time for the person to make a purchase, they will click on that link.

We’re quick to blame the App Store for not having an easy way to browse thousands of applications, but we never had that on Mac OS X, and our products sold just fine over there. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t “browse” websites for software. If I need some software for my Mac, I search Google for keywords on what I am looking for and find relevant results. So I don’t think there’s much browsing on the App Store as we all seem to think there is.

So what’s the problem? Why are we worried about the App Store if it’s just a download link? Well, simply put, I think we’re all jealous. We’ve seen “success” stories of people who have developed apps that made it into the Top 10. We’ve seen ridiculously stupid applications make it up there and make “tons of money,” but how is that different from any other kind of business?

In my hometown of Webster Groves, there’s a nice local bar and grill type of place that has some really great burgers. They’re like $5-10 or something like that, depending on what kind and what toppings you get. Quality stuff. But right across the street, there’s a McDonald’s. Now, of course, that McDonald’s has people rushing through the drive-thru and walking in and out of their store, bags in-hand. Those burgers can cost from $1-5, for example. They’re not really quality, but they’re a cheap, faster alternative.

My point is, just because that McDonald’s has all these people buying up their cheap burgers doesn’t mean that place across the street can’t sell deliciously better seven and a half dollar burgers. They might not sell as many, but it’s not about that. Again, success is measured when you can turn a profit. As long as those guys are making money and can run their business, they’re successful.

So, I have a suggestion. Let’s stop making Apple’s App Store out to be our scapegoat and let’s start publicizing our products on the web a little better. And just as with other businesses, if you can’t make a profit with your iPhone applications, for whatever reason, consider what you’re doing wrong and if there’s any way you can improve what you’re doing.

We’ll always be competing with the guys that make their applications cheaper, but if you make yours better and charge a little more money for that quality, I think there might be some people out there that would like to buy them. If you find that’s not the case, maybe the people who have iPhones just aren’t that into buying applications for their mobile devices like we think they are. We use our iPhones all the time, because we’re geeks. That doesn’t mean necessarily that everyone is going to use their phone to buy and use all our software.