The Life of an iPhone App

Very interesting analysis of iPhone app usage. What it shows is, in short, that iPhone app usage degrades severely starting almost immediately after first usage. Paid applications start at higher rates (in terms of % of users returning to use them on a given day), but degrade more quickly, almost zeroing out by 90 days out. Free apps, on the other hand, degrade more slowly, but are still around 1% of users returning by 90 days out. Sounds pretty similar to what I experience with apps on my own iPhone. This definitely doesn't mean every app loses its users, since this is an average, but it means if you want to really build a business on an iPhone app, you better find a way to differentiate yourself and make an app that brings people back beyond the first couple days.

The Life of an iPhone App: Nasty, Brutish and Short

CitySearch vs. Yelp Apps

CitySearch launched their iPhone app today. On the surface, it has a lot of the same data as Yelp, although Yelp has better deeper reviews (it is their specialty after all). However, CitySearch did one-up Yelp in one area: While Yelp allows image uploads from their app, CitySearch allows reviews to be uploaded through their app as well...

Citysearch Vs. Yelp On The iPhone: Can You Tell Them Apart?

Yelp's iPhone App gets even better (and smarter)

The Yelp iPhone App, which I already thought was the best in local, has now been updated with a bunch of new features. The most interesting, though, it that it allows users to upload pictures of the businesses straight to the site. With so many users running around with camera phones, this only makes sense. For the broader "local" business community, though, this doesn't necessarily provide a lot of content around the big revenue categories (most of which are services), but a cool feature for those categories Yelp specializes in...

Yelp Updates iPhone App « Screenwerk

Writeup of 15 Local iPhone Apps

Yelp is still the best in my view, though the Google Earth one is pretty sweet as well...

15+ FREE iPhone Apps to Navigate Your World

iPhone Food Apps

Mashable has a writeup of 21 iPhone food apps, most of which are restaurant finders and reviews. Their review of the YPMobile App? "When worse comes to worse, hit up the Yellow Pages". They also had some good apps I haven't heard of, like one that includes the menus of many popular restaurants. A good read if you're looking for new apps for your iPhone or just want to see what your competitors are doing.

21 iPhone Food Apps to Eat Your Heart Out

iPhone Apps - 4 of Top 5 are Local

There are now over 1000 apps in the iPhone store and if you look at the top 5, 4 of them are local applications:
1. Google (the only non-local)
2. UrbanSpoon, with its cool "shake me and get a surprise result" feature
3. BoxOffice, with an easy to use local movie time application and Rotten Tomatoes critic ratings
4. WeatherBug
5. Yelp, which in my view has the nicest local implementation, with the ability to easily search near you, a map view, and the ability to read every review in detail (so many apps do shortcut reviews, including the iTunes store, which doesn't give you anything beyond the star rating

It really seems that the iPhone is the platform that will finally drive broad acceptance of mobile applications and mobile search. Approx 10MM iPhones are out there in the US right now and with their ease-of-use and full-time access to the Internet, they will become the local platform of choice. And they're just scratching the surface of what they can do.

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