Creating a basic iPhone app is easy. However, when you consider the following attributes in designing a new app, or enhancing an existing app, you can increase its appeal, create a more engaging user experience, and make your app stand out from the competition:

• Delightful. These apps are appealing because they have an attractive design, make excellent use of colors and audio, they’re simple to use and work as expected, they keep you involved, and they keep you coming back again and again.
• Innovative. Innovative apps are those which are fresh, new, and bring to market concepts that have not been done before, or in a new way not thought of before. These apps inspire users by making the complicated easy and by fundamentally changing the way they get things done.
• Well Designed. Well designed apps deliver high quality visual design and demonstrate attention-to-detail. These apps are easy to use, well-organized, uncluttered, simple, efficient, intuitive, and stable.
• Integrated. Add rich functionality and new capabilities to your app by incorporating iPhone technologies into your app (i.e., location services, accelerometer, camera, etc.), rather than writing your own versions of these frameworks. iPhone SDK provides you with a wide range of frameworks to use which will save you time, reduce code complexity, and improve the stability and performance when you use them as they are intended.
• Optimized. Optimized applications squeeze every ounce of performance out of the system and take maximum advantage of everything iPhone OS offers, including alternate input methods and interaction models.
• Connected. iPhone is always on and always connected. Connected apps share data and interact well with other native applications, allow use of on-board photos and contacts, and reach out to the internet or complementary desktop applications for valuable data and services.
• Localized. With iPhone available in more than 80 countries, you can reach a vast customer base, differentiate yourself, and gain a major competitive advantage by localizing your app. If you can also localize your App Store metadata, you can further attract customers from a range of countries and languages.

Watch Ingredients of Great iPhone Apps, presented during the iPhone Tech Talk World Tour, through ADC on iTunes for more details and examples of these characteristics.