Business based on iPhone applications

I have just read this blog entry "Financial Realities of the App Store" with economic details of a startup trying to survive to how iPhone applications are structured and distributed inside App Store.
What is extremely interesting of this entry is that it provides lot of details about how the business is running and their efforts to promote the applications on AdMon and AdWords, what seems very expensive and of low efficiency (one comment that stuck in my mind is the price of $0.37/click in AdWords).

So I'm going to list the things that in my opinion are horrible in AppStore:

- The way applications are structured in iTunes, and how to surf over all them (10,000) trying to find something valuable for you. Clearly the model followed to sell music is not applicable to applications and they have to improve the searching and the accessibility to the details and comments of the applications. The reality is that unless you are looking for something concrete that you have read on the press or in blogs, it is impossible to find any application among thousand existing in the app store.

- iTunes being the only way to sell or distribute applications. This is completely unusual and it's based on the strong position of Apple right now (imagine all Mac applications sold only by Apple). They are making a lot of money just with the distribution of applications charging developers with 99$ per year just to be able to test the application on a physical device and distribute it in the app store... (plus 30% of all the sales). So if you plan to make a small application perhaps useful to a little group of people and your idea is to distribute it for free you have to pay 99$ per year any way... not to mention the amount of crap you can find in the app store.

- The lack of a shareware or the ability to temporally test an application and buy it if you find it useful. Now you have like a number of promotional codes, which is useful to distribute the application to journalists or a limited set of users but not as a general promotional strategy.

- Apple evaluates all the applications to test first that the application doesn't break the phone (which seems ok) and second that the functionality provided is not the same already provided by the iPhone...hmm!, I only see a vast number of really bad, stupid, useless applications repeated until the infinitive but you know Opera web browser for the iPhone was blocked because it doesn't provide additional functionality to Safari... did you notice the mafia behaviour here?.

- And finally, I have seen in posts in Apple's Forum people complaining about the way Apple distribute the profit. Apple only distribute the money when you reach 250$ but in one country (or zone)... meanwhile Apple retains the money for you. I don't know the details of this, I hope that even when you are bellow the 250$ threshold you get the money some moment in time but I can ensure you that they take my money intermediately when I buy something and don't wait I spend more that 250$ to get my money :)

I really don't understand how people is able to distribute applications for free in iTunes without any collateral benefit (RTM for instance, is an impressive application but force people to go to a Pro account in their web application, so there is a business model behind... but others like Darts, a quite cool game is free and quite funny to me, as far as I know they are only spending money for the fun of others, they have win the heaven but have ruined their company :), actually is Brian Hammond ).