Building a great iPhone app

CIO.com has posted an article (single-page reprint here) covering one company's foray into the app development scene. Recently, clothing retailer Gap held an app development contest. The goal was to develop the "best" app to represent the retailer on the iPhone or iPod touch. Gap partnered with Mobclix, the mobile ad exchange operator (more here), to come up with the contest for the best Gap-branded iPhone app.

The contest ran for three months and had 100,000 400* submissions. While the winning entry isn't available for download on the App Store yet, and Gap doesn't currently have a release plan, CIO.com has a list of 5 attributes that contribute to a quality iPhone app. One of my personal favorites is the consideration for how far to stray from Apple's UI guidelines. On the one hand you have an easy-to-use app that everyone can understand, but on the other hand you have to consider how "similar" you want to be to everyone else.

I won't spoil the fun and tell you all of the different attributes, but if you want to check out the winning app, you can see the submission video in the second half of this post.

Mobclix contacted us to correct the count of the number of app submissions.

[via Macworld]