Day: July 10, 2008

The iPhone App Store is live

TechCrunch reports, and I can confirm, that the App Store is live. It’s not linked from the store navigation, but if you install iTunes 7.7, you can click through to the list of iPhone apps. The categories are pretty unsurprising: Business, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Games, Healthcare & Fitness, Lifestyle, Music, Navigation, News, Photography, Productivity, Reference, Social Networking, Sports, Travel, Utilities, Weather. And a few interesting finds, including a Bloomberg app, a location-aware Bank of America app, OmniFocus, SalesForce Mobile, Oracle Business Indicators, the AP’s news app (with no mention of being able to send photos back to the AP; whassup?), NetNewsWire, MooCow’s Band, and about 175 games.

Including Jared. (Happy dance.)

Update: According to TechCrunch and CNET, you can download the firmware now, though it’s a direct download rather than through Software Update. Alas, my iPhone is synced through my Mac, which is at home, so I’ll have to wait before I can try it out.

Day of updates: iPhone App Store, maybe MobileMe

Various sources report that the iPhone App Store will launch today. It’s clear that iTunes 7.7 is out, featuring the ability to control iTunes from a new free iPhone/iPod Touch app, and the New York Times says that Apple will be launching the app store.

What I haven’t seen reported anywhere is anything about a MobileMe launch today. But signs are good; right now I’m getting a maintenance screen on .Mac:

Fortunately, I’m still getting mail on my iPhone. But maybe this means a MobileMe launch is imminent too.

Update: Okay, I missed the .Mac status report on Apple support that indicated that MobileMe was actually supposed to launch last night; the maintenance window was from 8 pm to 2 am Pacific time. Right now the status isn’t pretty:

Update 2: As of noon-ish on the east coast, the update now says that all services are back online except for webmail and web pages: “With the exception of the new web apps, all of the following services are available: Mail, iChat, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and all published pages, including Galleries and iWeb sites.” Smart money has it that there’s a contingency plan being executed while they figure out why the new MobileMe apps aren’t RTWing successfully.