There's certainly no shortage of Apps available for Apple's iPhone -- more than 65,000 by Apple's own estimates. Pricing varies -- and there is a lot of free content out there -- but even if they were all only priced at the lowest local paid price, $1.19, you'd be looking at $77,350 to buy them all. And about forty iPhone 3GS units to hold them all, but we digress.
Buying Apps can be a somewhat expensive process, even in the bite-sized prices that most applications sell for. It's even trickier when you consider that applications can and do drop prices, largely to boost their App Store presence, and then bring them back up again sharply without much warning.
There's a class of iPhone applications that do make budgeting a little simpler, as they track the ongoing prices of apps and alert you on a day by day basis as individual applications drop in price.
AppSniper and Pandora Box
AppSniper's probably the best known price checking application. It's not free in itself, but if you can score a discount on a given application it will pay its $1.19 asking price. You can simply track reduced price applications or pick a wishlist of applications you'd like to buy and get AppSniper to track them and alert you when prices drop. AppZap's Pandora Box does much the same thing, and best of all -- it's free.
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The AppSniper interface: pick a wishlist of applications to track
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Pandora Box's interface is easy to browse and includes current featured Apps.
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There are some catches to be aware of. For a start, US pricing is always the base, so you'll need to mentally adjust to the Australian price conversions, and the fact that all those "99c" apps will cost you $1.19.
iPhone apps and Australian pricing
The other thing to realise is that not every price drop gets mirrored into the Australian store at all. As an example, AppSniper insists that the iPhone version of EA's Sim City should only cost US$2.99. Click through, however, and that version isn't available locally. Instead, we get the "International" version. The difference? As far as we can see, the difference is that the International version costs $5.99.
There's one last minor caveat with both of these applications, however. They also track when applications go into free status, and the urge to install applications that aren't really costing you anything is pretty powerful. Before you know it, you may well have five plus pages of applications you've only ever used once.
Also in this series, Amazing apps for your phone:
Part 1: How to make the most out of your iPhone's GPS