Last night CNBC aired its ‘Planet of the Apps: A Hand-held Revolution ‘ program, and I got a chance to watch it after the BCS national championship game finished. 

It was nice seeing the iPhone, the App Store, and the whole mobile apps arena get featured like this in an hour long show; it was fascinating to me to see how a ‘mainstream ‘ media source covered these areas. The vast majority of the show focused on the iPhone, App Store, iPhone developers, and studies done amongst mobile app users.  I ‘m a sad iPhone / mobile tech geek, so I actually made liberal use of the Pause button and took notes during the program.  Hit the jump for some of quick notes on what caught my eye during the program

– Admob estimates that $200 million is generated each month from App Store sales.

– A fart app got mentioned within the first 10 minutes (by a ‘man in the street ‘ user, not the program presenter).

– Shazam got shown / mentioned early on.

– User study found that:

People use their app-phones around 30 times a day.

Blech.  Where did the term app-phone come from?  Do we really need yet another term for smartphone? 

– There was a mention “ a couple of times I think “ of the original iPhone having only 11 apps.  I ‘m pretty sure that ‘s wrong.  I think they were counting the two and three-quarters rows of apps on the home screen at the time, but forgetting the four apps in the dock.

– The Yowza mobile coupons app “ published by one of the stars of ‘Heroes ‘ got heavily featured.  It looks pretty good too.

– Rob Shoesmith “ the UK garbageman who created an app “ got a couple of brief mentions.  Good for him.

– The show featured Texthog “ an on-the-go personal expense tracking app  “ quite a lot, tracking its rapid development process from initial idea (it was a web service first) to approval and entry into the App Store.  The app looks very nice “ with easy SMS and email submissions for expenses as you incur them, and some nice automatic organizing at the web site, and so on.

– Jeff Scott “ who runs the 148apps.com site and is a friend of this site and one of the founders of the Got OATS alliance that we are part of “ made quite a few appearances throughout the show to comment on various topics.  I thought he did a great job and made some good points.

– Some of the flaws of the App Store, and the reviews process in particular, were mentioned.  The lack of feedback from Apple once an app is submitted was highlighted in the looks at the fortunes of a few developers. The Baby Shaker app scandal “ probably the single stupidest app approval in the store ‘s colorful history – got a quick mention as well.

– A study by Gravity Tank found that 29% of those surveyed (app-phone users?) say they use 6 or more apps a day

– Some figures on app spending were also thrown around: ‘Entertainment oriented ‘ users spend around $7 in the last month on apps.  Other users were in the $4-5 range.

– On average, the users included in the study spend around $60-65 per year on apps.

– Games are the best selling apps genre “ not a huge surprise I think.

– 80% of users in the study use games on their phones “ and the other 20% don ‘t admit it

– The Koi Pond app (remember that one?) has had somewhere between 800,000 “ 1 million downloads. 

– The Bump app “ that lets you exchange contact info with another iPhone user just by bumping your phones “ got a good mention and demo.  The app got an astounding 3.5 million downloads in 6 months.

– They were able to fit in some coverage of how badly thought of AT&T is.  Mentioned a NYT article that showed 1/3 of prospective smartphone buyers interested in the iPhone said they won ‘t purchase it ‘because of AT&T ‘.

– Jay Freeman (Saurik) “ the creator of Cydia and beloved keeper of our jailbroken iPhone hashes “ made a couple of appearances as well.  He talked mostly about how challenging it is to succeed in the App Store.  Interestingly, there was no mention at all of jailbreak during the show.

– 2 young kids (7th graders) who developed the Math Master app got featured nicely towards the end of the show.  Their app looks quite impressive too.

– The global market for mobile apps is currently estimated at $4 billion “ and estimated to grow to $25 billion by 2015.

Wow “ that last number sounds very impressive.  We live in interesting times, as they say “ and I ‘m thankful that we (here on this site) get to cover such a fascinating area.

That ‘s it for my nerdy iPhone geek notes.  Did any of you watch the show last night?  What did you think of it?  What highlights did I miss?

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