Developers! Join the Improve The App Store Movement

Give me a break. As far as I know, there's no way for Wii game developers to 'hook' people onto their games with free demos... yet somehow those games sell for more than 99 cents. This '99 cent' argument is a distraction.

I'm looking right now in the App Store and see the top apps are
Inigmo: $1.99
Fieldrunners: $4.99
The Price is Right: $2.99
Pull my finger: $.99
Touchgrind: $4.99
Crash Bandicot Cart: $5.99

Simple formula: Make apps people love and tell their friends about, and people will:

1) find your app, and
2) pay more than 99 cents.

How about a Windows version of the SDK? I've made a few apps for Windows Mobile and Android, but there's no way in hell I'm shelling out the cash for a Macintosh just to write an iPhone app.

Some views from the buyers side:

While I agree in principles to their arguments, I think, if you look beyond the top 100 list and ignore Koi Pond, you will see that the AppStore is not as "99 cents" as they made it out to be. Have a look at Fieldrunner, Crash Racing, Enigmo, Touchgrind, etc. I really dont understand their gripes.
They made it seem like buyers are paying only 99 cents! I have spent almost 200 dollars, and I readily buy things that - I - perceive is worth 9.99, show it to me! Crash, Enigmo, StarWars, MonkeyBall, Sparta, are just some of the apps I paid 9.99 for, before they are even discounted, and I certainly will spend that much more, on apps like Rolando.
And yes, I only mentioned games on the above, I believe their "value" is easier to judge. Of course its harder to judge the utilities, I mean I certainly wont pay 10 bucks for a landscape keyboard, or a simple ToDo list.
There is no way you can convince me that something like a to do list, or milage tracker is harder and thus take more time to create than a complex game like fieldrunner, asphalt, etc. and hence the aforemetioned "perceived value", personally I wont pay 9.99 for a todo list.
BUT Nevertheless, that doesnt stop some 9.99 ToDo from hitting the top chart either, to prove that perceived value differs from individuals, and no app store buyers does not only buy 99 cent apps.

To conclude; yes there are some cheap apps there, because most of them are exactly just that, cheap apps. If you say that you hired designers, artists, etc. I believe your app would naturally look better, and be more attractive to the buyers! you dont need to set a 0.99 price! Apple even made it easy to change prices, so heck if you believe its worth more than 9.99 by all means do it, you can change it later. If you cannot sell at that, then maybe instead of blaming the other unrelated .99 cents apps, have a look at your app again. Im sorry but men-hour spent on creating apps does not equal good app automatically, you can hire a team of world class staffs and spend months making an app and if the end result is still crappy, you cannot blame the buyers or competition for that! Just like businesses some succeed some fails, its called life, sometimes you are lucky sometimes you are not, you just have to keep trying with other apps, not dwell on it, or spend more money on advertising, if you spend thousands of dollars on advertising, and expect people to foot the bill. Neither can you expect 1 or 2 apps to feed your family for the rest of your life, Bill Gates can yes, but he is the few lucky ones.

Bottomline, I dont think any buyer would want to see a "cartelization" of developers and start seeing crappy apps like countless versions of virtual pets costing 9.99 each!

Wow when we developed apps for Psions back in the 90s we never had Egos like this or moaned about people selling apps cheaper.

If people aren't buying you $9.99 applications then there's good reason, you're not offering value for money.

Drop your app price and guess what, you'll sell more which means more units, more users and a greater market share.

It's really not difficult.

I am not a deveolper, but I have what I think is a great idea if it could be developed into an app.

Imagine a "Share-a-Ride" app that would utilize GPS to locate users that need a ride and and those that are willing to share a ride. Users benifit by negotiating transportation fees.

GPS would keep track of user locations via mapping, and when clicked on will call,or email them so that a ride can be negotiated.
User would be able to turn on/off when they are available to share a ride.
User contact details would be kept private until owner chooses to share data.
Users would be able to choose to share contact data with specific users contact list
Driver and Passenger destinations would be visible.
Driver and Passenger destinations would be searchable.

www.appvee.com has an iphone app that fixes this prob

My app has been in review for over a month now. Hopefully this will help change the process.

@Boomcat: You have no idea, what you're talking about. The problem is, that there's no way to do some time limited demo versions whith easy and/or built-in upgrade paths to a full version. It's not allowed by the App Store.
The "free" version you're talking about is an ad sponsored version of the full application. This approach doesn't work for all software and it's definitely more than "a little work" to do two versions in that way.
In addition to that, there's no way to "upgrade" from a trial version to a full version besides trashing the trial version (i.e. loosing all app specific settings and data!), "re-buying" the full version and starting from scratch.
The past months showed, that the convertion rate of people switching form "free" iPhone apps to the full paid counterparts is much (much!) lower than the conversion rate (trial->full version) on the desktop.

Askwatt has hit the nail plumb on the head. Appleinsider does a bit of (presumably paid) promotion of some apps but where's the rest? Where's the app ad campaigns on podcasts, on net-radio &c.? Surely people aren't *really* that stingy that they won't fork out a few dollars for a quality app if they see a bit of show-and-tell info about it.

Re: "There's currently no way for developers to "hook" people on apps with a free demo."

Sure there is, it just takes a little extra work on the part of the developer/s.

Look at Twitterific. There is essentially a free (demo) version & a paid version.