The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is looking for a few good apps. In an effort to make the aerial and satellite imagery and other location-based data that the agency collects more accessible to the people who need it, NGA created the GEOINT App Store. Last week, the agency released an update to the store, which is available over the Web as well as on the Department of Defense's secret and top-secret classified networks. Now, it wants more developers to provide their wares there.

Work on the store kicked off in 2010 at the behest of Director of the NGA Letitia Long, who has pushed for the geospatial software industry to take on more of the burden of application development for the NGA's customers. The hope was that the NGA could leverage the "app economy" to make it easier and cheaper to get software into the hands of its customers and push forward development of mobile applications that would be applicable to a broader audience.

The store is open to anyone with a government or military e-mail address, or anyone with a government sponsor, such as state and local law enforcement officials and emergency first responders. There are a number of applications tailored to disaster response in the store, as well as iPad apps for military pilots that give them access to flight charts and details about airstrips around the world. Other apps, available only to users of the Secret Internet Protocol Routed Network or the top-secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System network, provide higher resolution imagery and an unknown array of things to do with it.

While some applications are available over the public Internet, they're for official use only—the Terms of Service for the App Store state that "[u]se of NGA Services for personal/non-official use (e.g., casual browsing, gaming, entertainment, personal communications, commerce) is prohibited."

Unfortunately, the NGA is still waiting for commercial software developers to pick up the slack. C4ISR & Networks reports that only 40 percent of the 270 applications in the store have been commercially developed. And as the NGA has discovered, maintaining an app store—testing and certifying applications, publishing them in the store, and handling payments to developers—is a pain.

So the agency is looking to hand off developer recruiting to a contractor to improve the commercial incentives to build apps for its very selective audience. Last April, the agency issued a request for proposals for "Application Operations Services Providers" to keep the store stocked, run competitions for vendors to provide various applications, and manage the feedback and upgrade process—all for a percentage cut on applications sold through the store.