The news spread fairly quickly through the techblogs yesterday –100,000 apps have now been approved by Apple. Although this hasn’t been formally announced and nobody is really sure why approved is not the same as available (see Mobilecrunch), 100,000 apps is a pretty impressive number. Even more so considering the momentum behind this development – roughly a month ago 85,000 available apps were officially announced. Of course, everybody is wondering where this will lead to in the future – next month, next year, three or five years from now?

It is as interesting thought that app development seems to be becoming more attractive and less attractive at the same time, these days. While the number of app downloads is speeding up, new potential revenue streams are opening up to developers and iPhone market share (as well as smartphone market share overall) is driving higher and higher (we wonder what is going to happen once operator exclusivity ends, if it does), it is becoming increasingly difficult for an app to get the users attention and for a developer to make a profitable business out of developing apps.

One fact that we think is often overseen is, that wide iPhone adoption poses the chance to develop for a steep target group, a special interest, a niche – in short: as in every mass market, the app long tail will get longer and longer (or bigger and bigger). In our opinion this hold true for every app category, even for games. We see a huge upside for developers in this. The challenge then lies in finding your target group and letting them know you have something that could be of interest to them. You can try just putting it up on the App Store, but our guess is you’ll need some extra promotion. You most probably have an idea of where you’ll find your most eager customer – but in the end you need data to support this, right?

What is your strategy? Have you found channels that seem to work for you already?