The Day our iPhone app ranked #1 in Highlights!

I’ve recently release an emergency pharmacy finder for German iPhone owners [iTunes link].

In Germany 2.000 of a total number of 21.500 pharmacies are on emergency duty each day, available for 24 hours. The problem the app solves is how to quickly find the nearest available pharmacy on duty in case of an emergency.

Other location based apps, like “Telefonbuch”, “Around Me” or “Meine Stadt” provide users with the nearest pharmacy, too. However, they don’t take into account whether the drugstore is open or closed. In case of an emergency you might very well end up standing in front of closed doors, using one of these to find the nearest pharmacy.

The app, which has been conceptualized and designed by aperto move and developed for the iPhone via my personal holding acceleract GmbH, has experienced tremendous acceptance by iPhone users across Germany.

I’m very happy to report that today it entered the top #1 position in Apple’s “Highlights” section.

This drives the application to the default front page of the mobile and the desktop iTunes App Store and I’m eager to find out how this might impact application deployment.

Given that more sources claim that the App Store is only about games these days, it’s good to find out that an application which delivers true value can still make it into top positions within days. (“Apotheken” ranks #3 in “Utilities” and  #29 #20 #8 #7 in “Top Paid Apps”.)

Numerous iPhone Developers have asked via Twitter, why we’ve not chosen to go the EUR 0,79 route.

The rationale is simple: For once I personally very much dislike the trend to offer your app almost for free, just to get into the charts. Nobody can produce a quality iPhone application and give it away for nothing AND feel happy with it.

Second: Maintaining and updating the list of pharmacies which are on duty for every single day is a manual and time consuming task. We believe, it’s in fact really worth a one-time fee of EUR 2,39 – maybe even more.

Last but not least: I never really understood the pricing debate itself at all. The iPhone is not the best value-for-money cellphone you can get if you focus solely on hardware specs, yet we all love it and happily pay for it. We frequently pay more than 3 Euros for two glasses of diet coke. Why do we even think that purchasing an app which took a fair amount of time in design, development, testing and support should cost less than two drinks? :-)

With that said, I’d like to thank all customers for supporting “Apotheken”, the great amount of feedback and positive reviews and hope to stay in touch!