Breaking the choke hold

In the world of mobile application development ”“ if not her own ”“ Tessa Smith McGovern took a leisurely pace in developing her first app, centered on the leisurely activity of reading a short story.

It was not until this month, when she made the app freely available, that she got a quick lesson in how fast her business ”“ and by extension, industry ”“ is moving.

Founding eChook Digital Publishing L.L.C. in Westport last July as a publisher of short stories for viewing on mobile devices, tablets and computers ”“ with the eChook app originally priced at about $4 ”“ this month McGovern Smith conducted a little experiment.

“(In June) I put the price of one of our apps to free,” Smith McGovern said. “I didn”™t advertise it. Over three days, I had over 500 downloads.”

Chalk it up as one more lesson in the learning curve of Smith McGovern and likely thousands of other app developers as the market booms for single-purpose apps to run on the iPhone, Android, iPad and other platforms.

Suffice it to say that a short-story app did not appear on a list of the top 10 most important mobile apps for consumers as ranked by Stamford-based Gartner Inc. in February. That list was dominated by utility and communications apps such as location-based services, social networking, mobile search and e-commerce. Gartner expects users to spend $15.9 billion on mobile apps next year.

Still, Smith McGovern is not the only one to go after the book market ”“ in Wilton, Ruckus Media Group recently highlighted an app it developed for a children”™s pop-up book author named David A. Carter, with the app designed to challenge preschoolers to find colored dots hidden in interactive play spaces. In all, Ruckus Media has created some 20 book-based apps to date. And a company called 148apps.biz says book publishing trails only games for the most numerous apps available on Apple”™s online App Store.

For her part, Smith McGovern created eChook because she could not find a suitable app through which to read short stories and view accompanying art in color.

Creating her own app was not at all daunting, as it turned out.

“I literally went on the computer (and) typed, ”˜How do I make an iPhone app.”™”

She ended up picking away at the app-creation process, from scratch to finish, for about six months; but thinks if she had the time, could have knocked it off in less than a month ”“ and for about $600.

Smith McGovern is not the only one finding that app development is a fast and easy process ”“ 148apps.biz tracks counts more than 408,000 apps available for download at Apple”™s online App Store from some 90,000 developers, with fully 38 percent of them free and another 29 percent available for less than a dollar.

Only last month, some 8,400 apps were submitted for approval ”“ or about 270 a day ”“ with the company tracking an average publishing delay of between five and six days, and a maximum delay of about five weeks.

On the flip side, 148apps.biz counted another 106,000 apps that were inactive and no longer available ”“ perhaps some that were bumped aside by new and improved apps from their developer, but the majority likely those that never found a market or that were quickly rendered obsolete by competitors.

If creating an app was easy, Smith McGovern is finding building a business harder, but thinks in five years eChook could have as many as 10 employees supporting a subscriber base of 100,000 people ”“ a big-time platform for aspiring writers to publish their short stories.