Until now, all MooCowMusic products have been developed using an unofficial "toolchain" environment, and required the user's iPhone or iPod Touch to be "jailbroken" to run them. This has not only hugely limited the potential userbase, but development has been slow due to the undocumented and unsupported APIs. Nevertheless, MooCowMusic has managed to release three quality applications in just over a month, which have been installed on around 200,000 iPhones.
On March 6th, Apple announced the iPhone SDK, which will revolutionize iPhone development by allowing application distribution via iTunes and by providing a supported and documented development environment. In our opinion it is likely that most of the users who currently jailbreak their iPhones will re-jail them in order to gain access to the new SDK-only games and applications in June (when the 2.0 update is scheduled).
To continue to develop applictions for the iPhone, all future MooCowMusic products will therefore be developed using the SDK. The improved APIs will mean that huge improvements can be made in functionality across the board, and ultimately the much larger userbase will give the brand higher visibility. The enforced three month "quarantine" period means that there will likely be many competing products available at launch, and so we will use this time productively strive to make our applications some of the best on the iPhone. Requirements for these future products are not set in stone, and you can request features by posting on our forum.
As far as application pricing goes, no decision has been made as yet. The SDK has a certain entry cost which needs to be recovered, but we intend to price our apps extremely competatively (likely only a dollar or two each), and hope to be able to release the three current toolchain apps (Pianist, Drummer, and Guitarist) for free. We see this as a way of saying thank you to everyone who is currently using our apps and has supported us so far.
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