After reading a lot on the immense success of these seemingly trivial and useless iPhone apps like iFart, virtual lighter, etc I can’t help but a. want to create an app on the iPhone and b. understand why this is happening.  This seems to have all the makings of another mini-bubble. Thinking about this a little, a few factors come to mind:

• The obvious one of the iPhone being a new platform, hundreds of thousands of users are hungry to try out new apps (akin to when the Facebook platform first opened up)

• There is a high initial cost of owning an iPhone and hence users are more inclined to “invest” more in their iPhones by trying to make them more useful and interesting.

• A more subtle reason could be the ease at which you can download and pay for these apps. With just a few taps on the app store, I can download several apps and never have to even take out my wallet or credit card.