Apple’s new iPhone App Store already has customers talking and picking their favorites — and bad-mouthing others. Earlier that week, Apple reported that App Store downloads exceeded 10 million in the first weekend. It said the store had more than 800 native applications, of which 200 were free and more than 90 percent were less than $10.

Microsoft appears to have noticed the comments and put up a Windows Mobile Applications site that week powered by Silverlight.

‘Line-Cutting’

One bump in the App Store road has been that some developers were putting special characters such as spaces, quotes, and numbers in front of their applications’ names so they would rank near the top in the listings. One Apple-oriented site described the practice as “line-cutting,” but Apple appears to have fixed that problem.

Earlier that week, the Apple iPhone School, an independent site, said the practice shows “extreme unprofessionalism” by developers and makes the store “look very disorganized.”

The school additionally said there have been rumors of developers “hiring folks to write positive reviews on their applications and negative reviews on competitors’ applications.”
that is reportedly not strange elsewhere on the Web, but the school called on Apple to “take a stand” and supply some regulation.

Even as some developers might try to tilt the deck in their favor, a handful of applications are already standing out.

Boston-based uLocate Communications announced that week that its location-based application called WHERE is among the most popular on the App Store, with “as many as 100 activations per second” and 125,000 downloads since the store’s launch. WHERE allows users to find friends in a city, locate the lowest gas prices, and achieve other benefits of mobile location-sensing.

WHERE made one of the first “top 10 of App Store” lists by noted technology columnist Walter Mossberg. Other programs on his list include the AIM…

Orginal post by Mike

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