iPhone Developer Success Stories Continue to Inspire

[Substance]

Maybe one should consider the possibility that the pricing structure for software is antiquated and not serving the developer as well as it could. I've realized that I have far more games on my iPhone than I do on my Mac.

Why?

Because iPhone games are cheap. Many are a buck, some of the better ones are $5, and at most maybe $10. Granted I'm only looking at puzzle and brief time-waster games games, which tend to be the ones dominated by shareware developers anyways. Not RPG epics and video-card-crushing first-person shooters which charge the big bucks. But even those puzzle games on the Mac desktop cost at least $15 and often over $20. For that price I'm not buying.

At $5 and less (I tend to stick with $1 games) I'm willing to buy several apps knowing that if one is a dud, I've got several more to choose from. And it's working. The lower entry price on iPhone games is getting me to buy a lot more whereas on the desktop side I've just sat out and played solitare or emulators.

 

[dolphin842]

I wonder if the recession will put the brakes on this gold rush next year... just as thousands of young, budding developers begin to invest their time and effort getting to know the platform. Quite a bit of disillusionment down the road, perhaps...

 

[bretm]

I think Apple will fix this whole problem with developers. They just need to make better App Store and expand it into Apple TV and Macs.

Yes. But if they do so it will be to increase Apple's bottom line. To bring in better apps to increase sales to increase their cut. That's their job.

 

[bretm]

There is of course only 1 in a million chance

I guess it's more like a 1 in 10,000 chance, huh? So, let's see, a little hard work and you have a possibility of making a million. Seems to be a better bet than buying a lottery ticket of which the odds are as close to zero as you get.

And of the 10,000, some make millions, some make an extra 10 grand a year and some pull in a few hundred bucks a month extra. It's all good. Other than the labor to make the app, if you make it yourself, there aren't many costs involved. Successes like this will definitely help the economy move forward.

 

[baleensavage]

It's no surprise that Pangea has given up writing Mac games and will focus entirely on the iPhone from now on.

Well now I know whose iPhone games I won't be buying. Big jeers to Pangea for deserting so many years of Mac gaming for a quick buck. Let's hope that others don't follow their lead.

 

[bytethese]

"Some kid in his bedroom can literally make a million bucks just by writing a little app," Greenstone says.

Once the semester is over, I am going to try to write 2 apps I have ideas for before next sem starts.

 

[Unspeaked]

Well now I know whose iPhone games I won't be buying. Big jeers to Pangea for deserting so many years of Mac gaming for a quick buck. Let's hope that others don't follow their lead.

I agree; I hope that line was just misquoted or the intent misinterpreted. It doesn't make sense to me that Pangea would simply abandon the Mac OS X platform, especially due to additional success with a related platform.

If things were that bad on the Mac, why did they stick around so long before the App Store?

 

[Ted13]

If I were a developer, I would be strongly urging Apple to allow the use of the iPhone with more service providers (Verizon, Sprint). More potential customers will help all of the developers. The problem right now is that there is a bigger barrier to entry for consumers than there is for producers.

Here we go again: Yes, I think that Apple should sell full priced (no subsidy) fully unlocked iPhones.

But they still wouldn't work on Verizon or Sprint's networks, because they use the obsolete CDMA standard. Until the incompatibility ends with 4G, you will not see a Verizon or Sprint iPhone. Being GPS allows the iPhone to work in Europe which is far more important.

The one thing the iTunes App store isn't lacking is customers: 300,000,000 downloads! More iPhones sold than Razors (or all Blackberry models combined) in the last quarter plus untold amounts of iPod Touches... iPhone App developers may have problems -- but lack of customers isn't one of them.

 

[kdarling]

And of the 10,000, some make millions, some make an extra 10 grand a year and some pull in a few hundred bucks a month extra. It's all good.

That's like saying, if you make $1 an hour, then it's just as good as getting $100 an hour. It's definitely not the same if you want to see quality apps.

Other than the labor to make the app, if you make it yourself, there aren't many costs involved. ...

Other than the labor you do for your daily job, there aren't many costs, either. Oh wait, yes there are. Your house, car, insurance, utilities, food etc while you're creating the app.

So that's the whole point. Is it worth chancing the labor to make the app. For kids with no bills, or those with angel financing, yes. For those of us who already make a very good living, it's a big decision to put divert major effort into a free lance project... as much as we might want to.

It's no different anywhere, mind you, but I'm responding to the apparent idea that software is free to make. It's not.

 

[alexbates]

I am only 14, so I am kind of new to all of this. I have had an interest in developing for the App Store since it first came out. I know it requires the iPhone SDK, and I have used it before (mainly played around with the iPhone simulator). The one thing that I am concerned about is time.
- Does anyone know how much code writing is required (3000, 300 or 30 line Xcode file) or can you copy and paste a lot of it from online articles?
- How much Cocoa do you need to have learned and be able to write with? I have mainly focused on writing in Ruby but I do have some expirience with Cocoa.
- Do most developers spend months and months writing one individual Application? Again, I am checking to see what kind of time I would have to put in this?

 

[kdarling]

The one thing the iTunes App store isn't lacking is customers: 300,000,000 downloads!

300 million / 10,000 apps = only 30,000 downloads per app (obviously very skewed, but you get the idea. Some get lots, some get few. Mostly free apps, no doubt. And many of those deleted afterwards.)

Big numbers are impressive.

There have been one million downloads of free Opera Mini from GetJar.com, a smartphone app source that's not well known.

There have been one million downloads of the free My Space app for Blackberries in the past month.

10 million people with dumb phones have downloaded the Verizon music id application in the past year. (Now THAT is a surprising number.)

Just saying...

 

[Doctor Q]

Perhaps not. When you saturate the iTunes app store with many junk apps and small minority of really worthwhile stuff, with only the very top apps receiving additional promotion from Apple, what you get is a situation where quality apps and low-quality apps get roughly equal promotion. The result is of this situation is that the most economic incentive exists for a developer to create a huge number of low quality applications. I'm afraid that if Apple doesn't change the structure of the store, pretty soon developers will only be able to get by by turning out a large quantity of low-value applications.

I think that the practical solution is to make it easier to find the best applications, not to try to prevent developers from making lower-quality applications. In the same way, it's not practical to prevent people from creating web sites none of us would find interesting, but it's not a problem as long as nobody links to them! Many tools could help us find the best iPhone/iPod touch applications, among them professional and user reviews, ratings, help from Apple, and good methods of retrieval.

 

[sangosimo]

their are always stories like this for every software platform, but for every success their is 9,999 failures.

 

[Hattig]

Well now I know whose iPhone games I won't be buying. Big jeers to Pangea for deserting so many years of Mac gaming for a quick buck. Let's hope that others don't follow their lead.

I don't call waiting over 20 years to make money "a quick buck".

 

[Hattig]

I am only 14, so I am kind of new to all of this. I have had an interest in developing for the App Store since it first came out. I know it requires the iPhone SDK, and I have used it before (mainly played around with the iPhone simulator). The one thing that I am concerned about is time.
- Does anyone know how much code writing is required (3000, 300 or 30 line Xcode file) or can you copy and paste a lot of it from online articles?
- Do most developers spend months and months writing one individual Application? Again, I am checking to see what kind of time I would have to put in this?

Depends on the scale of your application.

Setting up a screen is easy in Cocoa (and Cocoa Touch from the articles I've seen) but that's library convenience code. A simple 2D game would be drawing onto a canvas which you would need to control every aspect of - the lines of code could go up drastically. Tetris could be a few hundred to a few thousand lines and that quite simple - and that's only the block bin. Something 3D will be a lot more (even though a lot of that is in the OpenGL libraries, all the GL commands take up a lot of code, and it isn't a simple API).

Time, that's the problem we all have if we want to develop something beyond a shopping list or very simple game.

 

[torneko]

As a student who are majoring in computer science, I'm really happy about this news!!!

I felt a developer is just like an music artist whose songs are being sold in iTunes Store.

Better songs - more buyers.. better apps - more buyers too!

Steve Jobs gave developers or companies these opportunities!!!

 

[hypermark]

I think that the practical solution is to make it easier to find the best applications, not to try to prevent developers from making lower-quality applications. In the same way, it's not practical to prevent people from creating web sites none of us would find interesting, but it's not a problem as long as nobody links to them! Many tools could help us find the best iPhone/iPod touch applications, among them professional and user reviews, ratings, help from Apple, and good methods of retrieval.

Bingo. Personally, it's ridiculous to hear people bitch and moan about crap apps or how hard it is for developers. Give me ample supply and better tools to filter out the crap or stuff that I am not interested in, and I am happy.

On the developer front, yeah most people won't become millionaires from the App Store marketplace. What was the better alternative before? The truth is that some developers will find the balance between compellingness and quality, and marketing savvy and some won't.

The best will build brands (oh, I am going to grab the Freeverse bowling game instead of the SGN bowling game because I like their stuff and all of my account/social data is integrated), and become sizable businesses.

Over time, more App Store variants will proliferate on other platforms (Blackberries, Playstations, XBoxes, Palms, etc.), growing the addressable market and driving competitive-factored innovation.

Give me a choice between surplus and scarcity and I will choose surplus every day.

There is a truism that when items shift from scarcity to commodity, tremendous wealth is created, and more innovation occurs.

This truth is made crystal clear every time my six year old asks where the other games are on my Blackberry, and I explain to him that my iPod touch has wings and my BB doesn't.

Mark

 

[russellb]

Iphone Store marketing

I dont want to dump on all those hard working people getting Iphone apps to us all. But I have to sort of agree with an article I read recently.

The App store is like any other market and there is a difference between putting your App there and selling your App.

Apple is not there to market your Apps , it is there to distribute them. It is up to developers to find ways to market their apps.

But i agree that it's a pain to sift your way through all the piles of junk apps

 

[morespce54]

Man, I wish I was that kid...

 

[russellelly]

As I'm writing an App now (albeit one which will never go on App Store) it's quite inspirational to read these kind of stories. I hope I can get something worth charging for on it at some point!

 

[6034126]

.

 

[macFanDave]

Are they going to mention the persistence involved in the success of "Pull My Finger?"

That story is heartwarming!

 

[sflocal]

As an iPhone developer I'm tired of seeing these types of stories published. Yes, a few people are making lots and lots of money, but in general the market is incredibly saturated with junk apps and new-comers will probably not like the situation they find there. Please, listen to other, less successful developers, the majority of which are just struggling to hold on in this insane marketplace apple has devised, and stop this gold rush! Stories like this only encourage more junk apps!

Or maybe, it should encourage YOU to make better apps.

 

[twoodcc]

wow. i've got to get some apps out there!

 

[holmesf]

Because Apple controls application distribution 100%. I hear people coming up with "stop whining, that's how the free market works" type arguments all the time. But the iTunes application store is not a free market -- it is the sole method of distribution and so its policies most directly affect what types of applications get developed.

What happens is not that your applications gets put up on the shelves and then you need to market it, rather your application is put up on the shelves while a plethora of other products, mostly junk, are quickly stacked on top of it making it impossible for customers to find. If iPhone apps actually operated in a free market, the iTunes app store would be pressured by other iPhone application distribution sources to improve their policies. Instead developers are forced to game these policies, and the problem gets worse.

It's true that you can market the app outside of the store -- and trust me, I have. But none of this makes as much impact as apple's policies in the iTunes app store itself. Once you're a developer, you will know what it means to go from page 1 to page 2 on the product lists, or from the top 100 list to nowhere land -- it means no more sales.

Besides, if Apple could come up with a policy that encourages high quality applications to be developed, and lets developers waste less time on marketing (I'm a programmer, not a marketer!) that's beneficial for everybody.

How is this situation different from any kind of store? A retail store like Target advertises a few choice products every week in a circular and otherwise it's up to the product manufacturer to externally advertise and get people to be aware of and want their product.

When is the last time you saw an ad for an iPhone app paid for by the app maker? Have you ever seen a magazine or newspaper ad advertising a company's new iPhone app? Why do iPhone devs think Apple owes it to them to do all their marketing for them? Putting your product on a retailer's shelf is not sufficient.

A lot of the most successful games (besides being fun) give places like Touch Arcade press releases and/or review copies and get the word out there. I can't remember the last time I browsed the App Store and its "top 10" or "top 100" lists, but I've bought a lot of great games that have been marketed toward me through sites like that.