Really, come on: you should know better than that. While those issues certainly affected developers and their business, they were hardly the only impediment coming out of Cupertino. There's the still-mysterious application approval process, for one. And, for another, the fact that the store has been inundated with 99-cent apps.

That's a problem? Doesn't it just mean inexpensive apps for all of us? Well, on the one hand yes, but the fallout has farther-reaching implications. Iconfactory developer Craig Hockenberry, the man behind iPhone apps Frenzic and Twitterrifc, on the subject of what he dubs "ringtone apps" and his concern that they're affecting business for other developers. (Hat tip to .)

The problem, as Hockenberry sees it, is that low-cost and free apps climb to the top of the charts on the App Store due to their low price and high volume (glance at and you'll quickly see that 99-cent applications outstrip any other price point). It's much harder for a higher-priced app to get the same level of exposure as a 99-cent application; that, in turn, means that it's harder to justify the higher cost of developing a more complicated, more expensive application.

But what happens when we start talking about bigger projects: something that takes 6 or even 9 man months? That's either [US]$150K or $225K in development costs with a break even at 215K or 322K units. Unless you have a white hot title, selling 10-15K units a day for a few weeks isn't going to happen. There's too much risk.

Hockenberry goes on to point out the symptom of the situation: that people are buying applications based on screenshots and reviews alone, without ever trying them, as they might on the Mac. And it's much easier to drop $1 on an application that might turn out to be disappointing than it is to drop $5 or $10.