Although Apple has managed to make the term "app" synonymous with mobile via campaign slogans like "there's an app for that," app is not a term strictly limited to smartphones, now more than ever with the opening of Apple's Mac App Store. This new addition to the Apple family, which launched January 6, opens a marketplace, similar to the iTunes app store, where consumers can purchase applications for their computer. Much like the iTunes app store, these applications range in function from recreational to business and come from established companies and independent developers alike. The question for many Apple iOS app developers is what exactly the opening of this store means for their business and if they should have a presence.

Upon its opening, many well-loved iOS apps already established a presence in the Mac App Store, making software that had previously only been available on iPads, iPhones and iPods suddenly available on any Mac laptop or desktop. Some of these early iOS app entrants into the Mac App Store include games Flight Control, Twitter, Angry Birds and Peggle.

What does it mean for the UX and UI of an app?
iPhone's touch screen opened a whole new way to play games and interact. A fingertip could be used to pull a canary back in a slingshot in Angry Birds or to slice through string in Cut the Rope. But apps on the Mac App Store will lose this unique touch functionality in favor of using a mouse or touch pad instead, and touching the screen of a computer does little more than get it dirty. For some apps this will be a non-issue, but for apps like Flight Control, where using the finger to drag planes onto runways was central to the game, it begs the question of how well the app will translate. For Flight Control, the developers used a click and drag and shift and drag method to execute the game's moves, but early reviewers have already commented on the difficulty in converting to this game play mindset after over a year using their index fingers to draw things into place.

What does it mean for revenue?
The iOS app store has become a "race to the bottom" where $.99 has become a standard rate. iPad was the first development to throw a wrench in this race to the bottom, bumping prices of apps to a dollar or more higher than their iPhone and iPod counterparts. Now developers are eagerly watching what happens in the Mac App Store in regard to app pricing. Thus far many of the well-loved iOS apps that have decided to expand into the Mac App Store are priced at $10 or below. For example, well loved app's Bejeweled and Peggle come in at $19.99 and $9.99 respectively, while Angry Birds and Flight Control, both $.99 in the iOS app store, sell for less than $5.99, though Angry Birds is pointing out that the price is a limited time half-price sale. As for its own apps, Apple has priced iMovie at $14.99, three times the price of the iOS version.

One of the interesting aspects is that developers set these prices without any competitive knowledge on what other apps would be charging in the new store, so we may see competitive increases or decreases in prices in the coming weeks. Since the store is new, we also have no information yet at what price point apps are succeeding since no one has shared their sales data, let alone gathered enough data to share. The Mac App Store opens a valuable market for popular mobile products to expand, but time will tell if its a decision that makes fiscal sense.

Many of Appiction's clients are already beginning to ask our opinion on this new development and whether they should rush to be in the first few thousand apps to stake a claim in the store, but in this early stage it's hard to tell. Whether or not you should port an app to yet another platform depends a lot on the existing popularity of your app, if it makes sense to put the functionality on a desktop, and how much it will cost to make the conversion. For those apps that have wrapped their functionality around the touch screen, converting the UI can be costly and time consuming. It's important to realize that while the names are similar, this is not merely a computer version of the iOS app store, but a completely new animal and time will tell whether is will be lucrative for app developers.

For more information on Austin, Texas-based smartphone app developer Appiction, visit www.appiction.com or follow us on Twitter, @appiction.