The AppStore is undoubtedly the main stay of the iPhone market, that without it we question weather the iPhone would have been so popular. With 50 million of us downloading up to 10,000 apps a day, you can see how important the AppStore is to apple, and what this benchmark must mean to the other smartphone manufacturers.

Much of the AppStore’s current success has been contributed to the 3.0 firmware release which gave the developers up to 100 new features to experiment with like cut, copy, paste, compass, MMS, Bluetooth, and Push. With iTunes 9 Apple hopes to continue to give us new ways to easily search or wade through these apps with better search and discovery.

Now if only they could find a way to reduce the amount of useless, duplicated apps!

Please note this now appears to be a bug which is being fixed.

A recent app that I, like many others, bought on the AppStore with real money appears to have suddenly stopped working. A simple application called Night Stand, which is now copied by other app developers in true AppStore style, designed to simply display the time and alarm while dimming the screen. Not exactly a controversial app to say the least and has been available for some time! Now it seems that you can load the app but it simply won’t run.

This app has also been tested on a colleagues phone with the same results. This is not as a result of any updates as it was seen to work recently and, stranger still, the app has been pulled from the AppStore itself. As of this moment I have not yet been able to find any reason for it’s disappearance, but am more concerned about the fact that any app can seemingly be pulled from your device without warning or reason.

I paid good money for that app, all be it 59 pence but it is mine, or is it?

The release notes claim that 3.1.2:

• Resolves sporadic issues that may cause iPhone not to wake from sleep
• Resolves intermittent issue that may interrupt cellular network services until restart
• Fixes bug that could cause occasional crash during video streaming

The update is available from iTunes in the usual way!

Featuring App-organisation, new iTunes LP’s (with extra images, interviews, liner notes), Genius for App’s, Home sharing (share your library and App’s with up to 5 computers in your home network) and probably a few other additions as well.

We’ll post more details once we’ve had a bit more time to play.