In Utah, we have an app for that

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2009, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Want an idea for a really good prank? Get Pranktionary on your iPhone. Want to play a 4,000-year-old Chinese board game? SmartGo is the application for you. Need to keep track of those bodily function to help you get pregnant? Lady Biz might be your app.

From the silly to the just fun to the serious, Utah companies are contributing to the tens of thousands of apps for iPhones. The apps, both free and for purchase, are those little icons on the screen that when activated allow you to do all sorts of things, many using the Internet or the iPhone's built-in GPS unit.

A year later, Apple said there were more than 65,000 apps available to consumers in 77 countries and that 1.5 billion had been downloaded.

Utah entrepreneurs appear to be leaping on the bandwagon and producing apps left and right, for themselves and on behalf of other companies. Some are even making a full-time living developing them.

That's because the apps for the iPhone have radically changed the dynamics of the mobile phone industry, said Andrew Buffmire, founder of the Utah-based startup company SignalSet and a veteran of the wireless industry. He served on the development team of Sprint PCS.

"What the iPhone has done is broken the traditional allocation of revenue between the carriers and the device providers," said Buffmire. "What Apple was able to do was take a more significant margin than any other supplier of a device. And it's because of the interface and the application layer and the elegance of the device itself."

Apple also greatly streamlined the development process for applications by opening up its computing platform to developers, giving them access to sell them easily on iTunes and offering them 70 percent of the revenues.

The explosive growth of iPhone apps -- with other smart phone companies now starting to catch up -- underlies a major technological trend. That is, the growing use of cell phones because of their power and ability to connect to the Internet from nearly anywhere, which has led to their adoption as a primary computing tool. They literally have taken over tasks once performed only on desktops, all the while opening themselves up to many other uses.

Steven Moon said he was struck by the iPhone when it came out in June 2007 because of its ability to act as a phone, connect to the Internet and play music, movies and games.

"I saw it as game-changing," said Moon, a computer programmer who founded Clever Coding in Springville, to make iPhone apps. "I don't know if 10 years from now the market will be dominated by Apple ... but I do think the convergence of everything on one device really is the future. ... I do believe passionately it is the future."

Clever Coding has released games that include MicroKart and Paper Pilot, as well as Young Words, the latter designed to help build children's vocabularies. It's main business, however, is writing apps for other companies.

Avantar Inc. of Provo believes it has some of the most popular nationwide apps and also might have the most popular of Utah-made apps. It offers Yellow Pages, AirYell, and Showtimes, which search for local businesses or services and local movie information using GPS.

"We are nearing 3 million downloads and deliver nearly 8 million local monthly searches per month to our iPhone, iPod and iTouch app users," said CEO Adrian Ochoa.

The Farmington company iTransact, which offers credit card transaction processing, has an app that allows a merchant to make a credit card charge through an iPhone.

The operator of a fruit stand beside the highway, a candymaker with a convention booth or an author on a book-signing tour who wants to make credit card sales are examples of those who would use the iTransact app, said Vice President Matt Sumsion.

"It's just crazy who's doing it," he said. "A little company that sells rainbow snows ... they sell their icies on the street and they want to take credit cards. I have a men's fashion designer who goes to the high-end homes of his clients ... and he needs a way when he drops off a pair of $500 shoes to take that client's credit card."

These days, if you're at the office or the store, you also can be notified on your iPhone when a door opens in your house. Platinum Protection, a Provo-based home security-system provider, has launched an app that not only connects you but can tell even you if you left open your garage door.

"You can see what's happened at the house," said Chance Allred, a partner at Platinum Protection. "It'll show a history of each time a door or window was opened or closed, each time somebody turned the alarm on or off. It'll show if the power went out. You can hook a camera to it so you can actually see what's happening in the house."

The opportunities to develop iPhone applications for other companies is spawning a number of enterprises and causing some people to leave their jobs to launch their own businesses.

Timothy Boyd, a co-founder of Appigo Inc. of Orem, said he and partner Calvin Gaisford started working in their spare time and released two apps.

"After seeing our first month of sales on the iTunes App Store, we discovered that not only did our apps sell well, but that we could form a company and do this as our full-time work," Boyd said. "Last month, just a year later, we moved from our virtual offices at home into offices in Orem."

But the huge explosion of applications at the App Store also has meant that it gets harder to compete, and more difficult for a consumer to find a desired app.

Zagg Inc., a South Salt Lake company known for its Invisible Shield that protects the screens of mobile devices, recently opened an office in Provo, in part because it wants to branch out into the apps business and create a Web site to find apps. But it also will be making new hardware devices and software to go along with devices such as the iPhone.

"We, like many others, are betting this is where things are going," said Brian Packer, vice president of marketing, adding that the company also would with others, such as the BlackBerry, Palm and Windows- and Android-based devices.

"We know this is where things are at, this is where the growth is happening," said Packer.

Zagg's Web site, being tested at http://appspace.com" Target="_BLANK">appspace.com, is aimed at helping users sort through the thousands of applications flooding the market.

AppReview of Provo has an app by the same name and a Web site, http://appreview.com" Target="_BLANK">appreview.com, that enables users to get reviews and other information on apps.

tharvey@sltrib.com" Target="_BLANK">tharvey@sltrib.com