Apple confirmed Friday that it is allowing App Store purchases from within free applications. Until now, the company had only allowed purchases from paid applications on the iPhone and iPod touch.
Insiders agreed that Apple has made a prudent move.
John Muchow, founder of 3SixtySoftware.com and iPhoneDeveloperTips.com, wrote in an e-mail that the idea is solid. "I think this is a fantastic update and several clients have already contacted me to talk further about how to best leverage this capability into both existing applications as well as applications on the drawing board," Muchow wrote.
A Smoother Path To Sales
The key is efficiency. Lee Barney, a professor of computer information  at Brigham Young University in Idaho, said the new approach will lead to significant simplification for customers and developers. He is the creator of the QuickConnect Framework -- a way for application developers to employ JavaScript libraries on hybrid projects.
"It means that I could distribute one app that is both the demo app and the
fully functional app," he said.
The new policy may draw more corporate application developers to the App Store, Barney said. "Right now, a lot of developers are single individuals working out of their homes," he said. "This could encourage corporate group development. A company could produce an app and distribute it. It gives them an easy revenue stream. It makes it easier for customers to contribute to the revenue stream because they don't have to download the paid version."
Everybody Wins
Everybody is a winner, said Derek Kerton, principal analyst for The Kerton Group. "A common business model for software sales is the 'free-mium' version, which is giving away a free version in which levels and features can be unlocked at a later time if the customer chooses to purchase. Although this is a well-developed model in the software world, it wasn't possible to do it at the Apple App Store."
Despite the fact that Apple seems to enjoy boasting of how many applications it offers, the move could lead to consolidation and a healthy winnowing of those numbers. The coexistence of free and paid versions of the same application was not in Apple's best interests, Kerton said.
"This had the effect of vastly increasing the number of applications at the store and led to a certain amount of confusion to users," he added. "It also made the process of 'trial then buy' more complicated than it needed to be. In e-commerce, any small barrier to purchase means lost purchases."
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