Fred Wilson is a well known venture capitalist who coined the term “Freemium” which is a business model where you offer basic services for free and make money through selling advanced services. His latest post is how Android will own the market in a few years because of its low price point.

I don’t follow VC blogs anymore because I have no interest in venture backed startups, but there is something very interesting in the comments for independent software developers in the mobile space. When talking about making money in the Android ecosystem here is Fred Wilson’s response:

we are not talking about selling software here

we are talking about web services, which are largely monetized with advertising

The takeaway is that if you want to sell software then the Android space is not the place to be. Building a company by selling software requires organic growth. This is antithetical to the current climate of VC business models. The current model is that you need a large and ever expanding user base with the potential for monetization (Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Flikr, del.icio.us). That monetization may never occur (YouTube, Skype, Flikr, del.icio.us), but the potential is there. You sell that potential to Google, Microsoft, or someone else with deep pockets and that’s where the VC and founders make their money. The business for the VC was in monetizing the company transaction not an actual product or service.

Hey, if that’s the way you want to play, I have no qualms. I’m just trying to highlight to developers and people interested in selling software on mobile devices that the iOS and Android ecosystems are two different beasts. If you want to develop a high quality app that you can charge money for, then you’ll have more success on iOS. If your application or service is geared more towards a free app with advertising then you’ll probably find more success on Android.

I would like to see a lot more iPhone apps that entertain, encourage, and educate from a confessional perspective. To that end, I would like to encourage anyone who’s interested to start developing some apps and I’d be willing to help to the best of my abilities. One book I can recommend on the subject that I just finished reading is Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. It’s not an iPhone programming book, it’s about how to design the look and feel of and interaction with an iPhone app. It’s the first technical book I’ve read from cover-to-cover in a while.

I read an article on the state of testing in Cocoa. The author, Alex Vollmer, paints a pretty dismal picture of BDD in Cocoa community and I’d have to agree with him. In my decision to use Ruby over Python for my web apps, I mentioned that BDD (Cucumber and RSpec) and the Ruby testing culture was a major reason I went with Ruby. I would really love to see that aspect come over to the Cocoa community. Alex believes that snobbery and elitism are dominant attitudes that prevent the community from adopting testing practices from other environments. I haven’t dealt with the Cocoa community at large, so I can’t comment on the snobbery and elitism, but I do know that XCode and the various Cocoa frameworks didn’t grow up in a BDD world and the fact that the community didn’t grow up with BDD, like Ruby and Rails, makes it a lot harder to inject.

I know there’s been some work to use Cucumber with the Simulator, but that requires you to drop out of Xcode. I’ve gone down this path before, I don’t want to switch between editors and shells for my development environment. I want to see Cucumber and RSpec equivalents that can be run from within XCode. For me, it was running those two in combination while going through The RSpec Book that was my aha moment for BDD and I think it would be the same for the entire Cocoa community.

While tracking down a memory leak in my latest app, which looks to be a known problem with the simulator, I ran into someone suggestion to run the “Build and Analyze” (B&A) command from the Build menu in Xcode. Being an Xcode novice, I had never tried this before. Well, I would just like to thank Apple for including this feature because it helped me to fix an intermittent crashing problem, better understand Objective-C reference counting, clean up my code, and just have a better sense of satisfaction about my code.

Coming from the Java world, B&A seems to be a lot like Coverity which can do static analysis on your code except B&A is a lot faster. I’m not sure how often I’ll run B&A, but it seems like a good idea to clean the project and run B&A after every feature and/or major code restructuring. If you’re not already using B&A regularly I highly recommend you do so.

My second iPhone app is available on the App Store. “Triglotta – The Book of Concord” is a version of The Book of Concord that is designed for the iPhone and is also optimized to work with the iPad. The idea was suggested by Frank Gillespie on Twitter and I picked it up and built the app. There were a couple of delays due to naming issues and iPad approval delays but if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad (as of tomorrow) go download it, it’s free!

What follows are the download statistics for the first full week that “Cwirla” was available. I have no idea what they mean. I’m just surprised that France and China were 2nd and 3rd in downloads.

I received approval last Friday evening for my first two iPhone Applications (they work on the iPod Touch and should work on the iPad when it is released). The inspiration for the Apps came from Pastor Todd Wilken when, after discussing the video I made “There’s a Pastor for That“, wished for a “Cwirla App” for his iPod Touch. Well, I couldn’t resist the inspiration and put together the Cwirla app which is available in two versions. The free version is a collection of wisdom from Pastor Cwirla excerpted from episodes of The God Whisperers. The $0.99 “blue” version includes the same excerpts, plus it includes the story about Pastor Cwirla’s confirmation class which includes some “home schooler alert” language. It also includes some risque quotes if you “shake” Pastor Cwirla. All proceeds will go to the God Whisperers coffers.

My urge to try a new kind of development got to me again and I’ve jumped on the iPhone development bandwagon. The nice thing about iPhone development is that the definition of a proper application is a lot more basic than a web or desktop application. I started my dive into iPhone development last week with Beginning iPhone 3 Development. I put together my first app and submitted it for app store approval yesterday. I’ll put together a proper announcement after it has been approved and I’ll also do a series on the development and submission process.