Want an iPhone app business without all the boring hassle of actually programming and releasing iPhone apps? Boy, does Brice Milliorn have a deal for you! He's auctioning off his iPhone app business, which he says has 87 different apps for sale, over on eBay.

Milliorn says he started out developing apps on his own, but the business is just too big for him to keep up so he's selling all of the apps and their rights, all of the source code, and technical support for two months to transition everything over to the new owner. He doesn't specifically say that he'll transfer the developer account on Apple's App Store to your name (he says he'll send over a DVD with the source code and transfer "the whole kit and caboodle" to you), but we presume that's what will happen -- of course if you go for it, you're doing this at your own risk.

What will a burgeoning App Store business, complete with apps like iSexyRef and Swine Flu cost you? Just a cool $100 grand. That's the starting bid in the eBay auction, which has just over a week left and no bids as of this writing. There are certainly less expensive ways to get started selling apps on the store. It only costs $100 to register in Apple's Developer Program for a year, and then you just need to find a developer you can pay -- or even do it yourself with a helper service).

If you'd rather start off with a bunch of marginal to silly 99-cent apps and happen to have an extra $100,000 lying around to spend (maybe for a nice holiday gift?), here's your opportunity.

It's funny -- when the iPhone App Store first opened up, the first thing I asked for next was a way to manage apps from directly within iTunes. But when that finally did show up, I was still left unsatisfied for some reason. I'm not sure why -- app management offers drag-and-drop functionality with your app icons, and that's about the easiest way to organize things across the home screens. But for me, it still seems unwieldy somehow -- dragging icons onto full pages stlll creates empty pages, and dragging icons between screens is awkward to me.

I'm not an interface designer, but having more than one home screen open at a time seems like it would be nice, and being able to assign my own tags and categories to apps (combined with an auto-sort function) seems nicer. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that we can manage apps from iTunes, but it just seems harder than it should be.

Fortunately, iTunes 9.0.2 snuck a few updates to the system under our radar last week -- you can now put more than 176 apps in the organizer, and those will move on to grayed-out homescreens. You can still access them on the iPhone by using Spotlight, but those grayed-out homescreens only serve as a buffer to hold your overflow apps while you're organizing them. Doesn't really help the actual experience of sorting apps, but it should give you some breathing space when dealing with lots and lots of apps.

Speaking of buffers, it would also be nice to have a "shelf" to store app icons on while you're moving them around (you can use the bottom 4 apps as a minishelf, but that's not really enough). Maybe you could pile them into different areas on a screen and then drag them in the way you want onto your homescreens. Like I said, it's great that we do finally have an app management system in iTunes. But my feeling is that it's a little too much like the awkward iPhone-based system, especially with large numbers of apps, to be much help.

At least here in Colorado, the big game hunting season is mostly over for another year, except for a few late-season licenses. While many hunters may be nursing deer camp hangovers, maintaining their firearms, or telling yarns about the ones that got away, those who own an iPhone or iPod touch can still be blasting away at Bambi.

There are a huge number of hunting-related apps in the App Store, ranging from various deer and duck hunting simulations to duck and deer calls. Let's take a look at a ten-pack of apps:

Go out and blast at virtual deer, elk, caribou, grizzly bears, and black bears with 3D Hunting Trophy Whitetail [US$0.99, iTunes Link]. Four weapon types (Lever-Action Rifle, Bolt-Action Rifle, Scoped Bolt-Action Rifle, or Bow & Arrow) are available for your shooting enjoyment, and you get to use calls and scents to attract your prey.

wpbeginner has posted a terrific list of 10 iPhone apps that every blogger will love. The first item on the list is, as you'd expect, WordPress for iPhone. Version 2.0 was released earlier this week and it's a huge improvement over its predecessor. It supports blogs powered by both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress.org. WordPress 2.0 for iPhone is free.

Add as many blogs as you like and manage comments, posts and pages all from the app. Adding new pages and posts is as easy as editing existing ones. Best of all, you can delete, edit approve/unapprove and spam comments with a few taps.

Of course, not every blogger uses WordPress, and the other apps on the list acknowledge this. Shape Writer aims to make it easier to enter text by letting you trace the "shape" of a word rather than type its letters. Proper names and acronyms can be "taught" to the app by typing them once. They'll be traceable from that point on. Shape Writer costs $3.99US.

Also on the list is Jott, a voice-to-text app that records your voice, converts it to text and lets you send the result nearly anywhere, including a WordPress or Blogger blog (as well as Twitter, Facebook and more). I haven't tested it, so I can't speak for how well it works. If it does what it claims (speak up if you've used it), Jott for iPhone will make it much easier to publish long posts from your iPhone (provided that it supports your preferred platform). Jott for iPhone is free and requires a Jott Assist Plan, which starts at $3.95/mo. Mel reviewed the similar Voice on the Go service last week.

Visit wpbeginner for the rest of the list. As for me, I get a lot of use out of Instapaper (for reading reference articles when I'm away from my computer) and Evernote (pretty much the same reason) among others. If you want the simplest blog-from-your-iPhone solution, check out Posterous. All you need to do to set up and maintain a Posterous blog is send an email to post@posterous.com. It doesn't get simpler than that.

[Via Wired]

It's another milestone (unofficially) met, as Apple has passed the 100,000 threshold of approved apps in the App Store, according to App Shopper. If you're unfamiliar with App Shopper, they list all of the apps that are in the store, tracking updates and price changes. As of this writing, they're listing 101,847 apps approved for sale and 93,118 actually available. We imagine Apple will make an announcement when the latter number officially hits 100,000.

Just last month, Apple announced that there were upwards of 85,000 apps available for purchase with sales figures in the billions -- 2 billion apps sold in fact, though there's no word on the mix of paid vs. free.

Despite the (often significant) bumps in the road, the App Store continues to grow at an incredible pace.

We've mentioned Digital Chocolate and their App Store releases before, of course, and we've even mentioned just how prevalent they are -- they've been extremely prolific in releasing new titles, and as a result, they've posted on their website that they are more or less ubiquitous in search results. They say on their official blog that any search of a "single digit" on the App Store search window has about a 20% chance of pulling up a Digital Chocolate release. If you search for "D," "H" or "3," they're the number one hit. I don't actually know anyone that searches "D" anywhere ("You know what I really want to play tonight? A 'D' related game!"), but it just shows how many releases they've got out there.

That does get them plenty of downloads -- they also say that they're number one in downloads on the platform as a whole, with 40 million downloads already of their software, with 1.5 million reviews (!) total -- but I think it says more about the App Store in general, and that we're not quite as far along as it might seem. If one company could so easily own, say, Amazon's search, you'd just say that Amazon needed a bigger catalog, no? 85,000 is certainly a lot of apps (especially in the realm of mobile software), but in terms of the platform's progress as a whole, it's still in its infancy.

So we're definitely in for more growth. Even Digital Chocolate sounds a little surprised that they're so prevalent, and I think as the App Store ecosystem grows and we get more and more companies with popular titles in different areas, we'll see the search results become more diverse.

Whether you think he's the voice of reason on the Web or an annoying pest, when Robert Scoble over at the Scobleizer blog speaks, people listen.

Yesterday, a Twitter follower of Mr. Scoble stated that he thought "iPhone users were beyond reason," referring to the almost unnatural fixation that most of us have for our phones. Scoble brought up a very good point in his blogged response -- every app that comes out on the market (more than 85,000 at this point) provides another way to customize your iPhone to the way that you live and work.

In order for another manufacturer to come out with a device that will pry that iPhone out of our fingers, they're going to need to exactly duplicate or surpass the functionality that we've become used to. That's not likely to happen, in Scoble's opinion, because the 85,000+ apps that filter down to a couple of dozen (or hundred) apps on each iPhone turn that iPhone into something completely unique. It's not likely that any iPhone user is going to want to give up that up unless every app in the special combination on his or her iPhone is replaced by something better.

It makes sense. I've worked with all of the other smartphone platforms, and in no case have there been compelling apps that hold me to the platform. With the iPhone, I've tried thousands of apps, kept about a hundred, and those hundred apps let me work and play the way I want to. iPhone developers have also made sure that the apps are simple to use, too.

Perhaps the Android or some other smartphone platform will eventually evolve to the point that there is a critical mass of compelling apps that provides the same magical combination of power, ease-of-use, and fun, but until that time the iPhone will reign supreme. That's even despite Microsoft CEO and iPhone hater Steve Ballmer's recent assertion about the iPhone, "That's why they've got 75,000 applications -- they're all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone."

Obviously Mr. Ballmer hasn't used an iPhone, or he'd realize that the iPhone is much more than Web apps. That might also give Ballmer a clue why Windows phones aren't even on the radar for most smartphone buyers today.

Disgruntled TUAW commenters, I'll save you some time: "OMG Mike of course a game powered by EA and one of the most popular franchises of all time is a hit. Try reporting some real news!" But not so fast -- Rock Band, which hit the App Store top 10 and conquered the Top Grossing list just days after its release this week, is actually a more unlikely hit than you think. For one thing, it sold at a price of $9.99 only -- no free versions, no trials, no pricing sales or schemes that have become the rule rather than the exception on the App Store lately. And for another thing, it had a comparable competitor in Tap Tap Revenge 3, selling for just 99 cents. TTR3 is a hit as well -- it's topping the list of paid apps that Rock Band is on -- but many people figured consumers would pass on the $10 app for the 99 cent one, and many people were wrong.

In short, even though, yes, Rock Band has EA's power behind it and it's based on an already popular game, it actually has bucked what we've seen so far: prices racing to the bottom, and tough chances of making a hit game, much less a profitable one, at the $9.99 price point. We don't yet know whether the game is profitable (or how either Rock Band's or TTR3's microtransaction models will do in the future), as it's just too soon.

But Rock Band is already seen as a game that stands as a shining example of what many were thinking wasn't true: big publishers with big name titles can put out big games at (relatively -- $10 is still cheap when you're talking about Rock Band at large) high price points and see them sell.

Developer Digital Chocolate (who, according to that recent slideshow report, is one of the most frequent publishers of content to the App Store) has announced that they'll be going with OpenFeint for their social networking features. We've been covering OpenFeint for a while here on TUAW (and we've interviewed them before as well). The platform is designed to let devs add social features and multiplayer to their apps quickly and easily. And that's exactly what Digital Chocolate will be doing with it, apparently -- they'll be putting scoreboards and achievements into their games on the App Store.

This hardly means the end of the ongoing battle over social networking and app developers on the store. But platforms like OpenFeint, Plus+, and others continue to stack up developers under their respective umbrellas, and it remains to be seen just who will prevail.

We were recently inspired by the First&20 project, which presents the home screens of some notable iPhone users. So, we've taken screenshots of our own iPhone home screens for a little comparison.

Once you've purchased an app, you audition it on your phone. Its usefulness determines its spot on the phone. For most of us, only the top apps - those we use most often or love the most - make it to the home screen. While browsing the results, we noticed some trends.

1. Of the 11 bloggers who participated, seven had a Twitter app on their homescreen. Twitterrific was the most popular (Aron, Chris, Mike Schramm and me), followed by TweetDeck (Kevin and Brett) and finally Twitterfon (Erica).
2. Only three of us had an IM app, including Beejive (Aron and Victor) and Yammer (Kevin).
3. Six of us edited the default dock, most notably Kevin whose tricked-out iPhone is the envy of us all.
4. All but one (Kevin) had the Maps app on the homepage
5. Five of us have some sort of productivity app. The most popular is Daylite Touch (Steve and me). Mindmeister, Doris and Toodledo (Brett, Kevin and Victor, respectively) are tied with one each.
6. Brett, Chris, Erica, Kevin and I all had less than five bars of connectivity.
7. Mike Schramm has the most unread email messages. He's the popular one.

Click the gallery below to check out who's got what. The final observation is that the homepage is in a constant state of flux. I occasionally shuffle a new app to the top of the heap. Additionally, games are grouped together, so it's quite unlikely I'd ever have one up front.

What's on your home screen?

Just after reaching 1 billion downloads five months ago, Apple announced this morning that the iPhone App Store has reached 2 billion downloads since its launch in July 2008. Also, Apple announced that 85,000 apps are available to download or buy from the App Store, and there are now over 125,000 registered iPhone developers with the iPhone Developer Program.

These apps are available now to the 50 million devices running the iPhone OS (iPhone/iPod touch), creating an ever-expanding group of users.

With over 75,000 applications to choose from, it's no secret that every iPhone or iPod touch user has a different set of "favorites". A new website, First & 20, is shedding some light on the mystery of home screens starting with some popular website designers, developers, and writers you may have heard of.

The website's concept is pretty simple - get a glimpse of the home screens of popular Apple or online notables such as Joe Hewitt, John Gruber, or Jason Snell. The creator hopes that the website will help you "see something you've never heard of" and discover some apps that are so good that they made it on the phones of top developers, writers, engineers, and bloggers in the Apple world. The reason behind just featuring the home screen is also simple. While many people may have the same applications, the question is "how many love it enough to have it on their home screen, one of their first twenty apps."

In my experience, the website has opened me up to a few new applications and even some new ways to organize them. Leave a comment if you find someone's home screen to be of particular interest to you.

One of the great new features in iTunes 9 is app management; I've been begging for this one (among other things). We can now organize our pages (and pages) of apps right in iTunes, no more dragging jiggly icons across 9 or 10 screens. I'm ecstatic (and wondering what took so long).

From Apple's website:

[...] it's easier to organize all the apps on your iPhone or iPod touch, because now you can do it right in iTunes, right from your computer. Shop the App Store on your computer, iPhone, or iPod touch. Then go to your iTunes library to arrange (and rearrange) your apps and add (or delete) Home screens. iTunes automatically syncs your new Home screens with your iPhone or iPod touch.

$80 on apps? I didn't think it was that much, but after going over estimates in my head, that sounds about right, actually. A survey of 1200 App Store customers estimates that we've spent about $80 on applications so far, with an average of about 65 applications per customer. There's a little weirdness in those figures though: they also say that 65% of the apps downloaded were free, and that the average app price was $1.56. There's some extra information hidden in there: if 65% of the apps are $0, and the average price is still up above $1, that means people are spending way more than $1 on the apps that they do buy. More research seems needed there.

There's another surprising figure as well: of all the 1200 customers surveyed, altogether they only had about 15,000 unique apps on their iPhones. When you compare that to the latest figures of about 65,000 apps, that means you've got about 50,000 apps (definitely the majority) that are completely untouched by these customers. Of course, 1200 is a tiny sample when you're talking about the millions of iPhones sold overall, but if that is in fact a representative sample, that means that there are many, many more apps than people have actually downloaded and tried in iTunes.

Not hard to believe -- with iPhone developer numbers in the hundreds of thousands, tons of trashware on the store, and the relative ease it takes to crank out an app, it's no surprise that you've got way more apps than people interested in trying them. But then again, isn't that the way we want it?