Apple’s Latest Opens a Developers’; PlaygroundWhen Apple opens its online App Store for iPhone software on Thursday, Steven P. Jobs will be making an attempt to dominate the next generation of computing as it moves toward Internet-connected mobile devices.

The App Store will let iPhone users download applications like games. One program offers baseball highlights.
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Applications developed by Tapulous for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch:
Friend Book, a contact management tool
Tap Tap Revenge, an application that tests your rhythmic skills
Twinkle, an online chat tool
The store, which will offer more than 500 software applications, including games, educational programs, mobile commerce and business productivity tools, may be a far more important development than the iPhone 3G, which goes on sale at the same time. An abundance of software could make the iPhone’s operating system dominant among an abundance of competing phones.
“The reaction we have gotten so far has been really strong,” Mr. Jobs said in a telephone interview this week. “The quality and the sophistication of the applications you can write for the iPhone is in a different class.”
Mr. Jobs failed to make his personal computers dominant, in part because software developers did not write as many programs for Mac-based machines as they did for Microsoft Windows PCs. He did not make the same mistake when he developed the iPod music players. Apple’s iTunes stores, with easy and inexpensive downloads of music, gave the device an insurmountable lead, to date, over other players.
With the App Store, Apple simplified the process of adding software to the phone. Mr. Jobs contends that Apple does not plan to make much money on games and other applications; he has also said the company does not make much money selling music on iTunes. “We are not trying to be business partners,” Mr. Jobs said of the App Store. Instead, he said, the goal is to “sell more iPhones.” Apple gives developers a 70 percent cut of sales.
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(Via NYT > Technology)
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