A Suggestion for iPad Developers

I just got my iPad the other day. From browsing the App Store, it seems like most apps in the store are between $4.99 and $9.99.



I think it's hard for most users will shell out 5 to 10 dollars based on a plaintext description and some pretty pictures. This is a model that holds for very early adopters (the types that are buying the iPad right now), but long-term I think publishers should switch to a try-then-buy model. This switched worked well for reMail: Initially priced at $4.99, I switched to a free app for Gmail which upsells you to IMAP support - download numbers increased along with revenue.

Adding an in-app store to sell features and levels is surprisingly hard - Apple provides docs but no sample implementation. If you want to add a store into your app, I suggest you download the reMail open source code and check out the Store* classes. They're fairly generic and should be easy to adapt for your purposes.