Fraser Speirs and the Hype Machine

John Gruber, agreeing with Fraser Speirs on Apple’s future platform:

Fraser Speirs, predicting (rightly, I think) that the iPhone OS will be Apple’s main platform four years from now:

Put this another way: my iPhone app, Exposure, has picked up on average 3,200 new users per day since the App Store opened. Exposure already has twice as many users as FlickrExport for Aperture.

If there were one centralized place to obtain apps for OS X, and there were only about 500 OS X applications, then I would expect that FlickrExport would have numbers that are similar to Exposure’s. The fact that the iPhone application has a higher number of users isn’t surprising, since:

1. The iPhone is a new platform, which means there’s a lot of non-developers feeling around in ways they would not on a more established platform;
2. The App Store is new and has a comparatively small number of available applications, only some of which are even worth the time they take to download;
3. There is only one way to get applications onto the iPhone, meaning that people are being exposed to applications they wouldn’t normally seek out on their own; and
4. A Flickr upload tool is a natural application to want on a handheld device that contains a built-in camera, versus a desktop computer or laptop, built-in camera or not.

The numbers are actually more muddied than they appear at first glance. Exposure appeals to everyone who owns an iPhone and uses Flickr; FlickrExport for Aperture, naturally, appeals to everyone who owns Aperture and uses Flickr. I submit to you that these markets almost entirely overlap, with the Aperture users being a subset of the iPhone users.