
14 Years Old Kuwaiti Achieves 800,000 Downloads for His iPhone App - ArabGeek
http://arabcrunch.com/2010/08/the-youngest-arab-entrepreneur14-years-old-kuwaiti-achieves-800000-downloads-for-his-iphone-app.html
======
fictorial
This is great. Congratulations!

FWIW I am a 35 year old New Yorker has 3,000,000 active users for his iPhone
App (Darts). I am embarrassed by the advertisements but it pays the bills.
_sigh_.

~~~
dpcan
Just curious, does 3M active users generate a lot of ad revenue? One of our
games is just about to go over 250k and I'm thinking of putting Admob ads in
it or Google Adsense (they've approved us for beta).

~~~
fictorial
Yes, it does work quite well for me. I could easily be an outlier and got
lucky because of the name (literally "Darts").

Note that I am not using iAd (yet?). I started with Admob, then moved to
Adwhirl and noticed that Quattro worked out the best. Now Quattro is Apple.

I am kind of an ass about the ads though since they are always present, in
menus and during gameplay alike. If you read any of the reviews, my users hate
me and it (used to) keep me up at night. _sniffle_. But, it helped me
bootstrap a consulting business for mostly iOS work so I have taken a
pragmatic view.

------
cj
[...] and Yes, and Yes, and Yes he is impressive. I love the self-starter type
kids who have cool interests and do projects like these.

Side note: is this article a translation?

~~~
ArabGeek
the writer is 32 years old and not translation

------
sspencer
Very cool! When I was 14 it was all about hacking apart QBasic. Strangely no
one wanted to buy my Gorillas clone...

Congratulations!

~~~
fictorial
My first program was a curses-like Yahtzee written in QBasic when I was 16. I
recall learning about particle systems about that time. If you got a Yahtzee
in the game, gratuitous explosions congratulated you. It was utterly
ridiculous but fun as hell.

------
skowmunk
Thats a pretty awesome achievement, I hope he keeps it up and does some good
with it. Goes to show what 2 weeks of complete absolute immersion into
something can result in.

There's always a chance that such a thing could be a fake claim, but I do
think its definitely possible.

------
KeithMajhor
I've read several stories about kids like this but I never seem to hear about
them later on. Were there any kids back in the 90's that are still active and
somewhat popular today?

~~~
ig1
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jez_San> (started as a games developer in his
teens, now better known as the founder of pkr.com)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twins>

------
whatwhatwhat
did anyone else think this was really smirky at the end?

------
eingko
Anyone else notice the uncanny resemblance between "doodle destroy" and
"doodle vanish"?

------
ecargnfx
This is awesome. I've always learned by doing as well. Thanks for sharing!

~~~
ArabGeek
welcome, i got some people to help in some coding and then the rest by my self
:)

~~~
wallflower
Congratulations! Your results make older developers feel like excuses are just
that. How did you do your marketing? Do you feel you benefitted from the rapid
rise in popularity of physics-based games?

~~~
ArabGeek
I am not the developer guys who said i am the 14 years old kid :)

------
imran
v ery inspiring!

------
ergo98
I wish I wasn't the one to play the skeptic, but I'm naturally skeptical about
stories like this. Kids are often used as fronts for adults looking for a
promotion vehicle.

~~~
kranner
If you're interested in this theme (adults using kids as promotional
vehicles), I can recommend a sharp satire I'm reading at the moment:

[http://www.amazon.com/Serious-Men-Novel-Manu-
Joseph/dp/03933...](http://www.amazon.com/Serious-Men-Novel-Manu-
Joseph/dp/0393338592/)

Blurb from that page: "... a subtly wicked satire of subterfuge and ambition
that bounces between the Mumbai tenement where low-caste Ayyan Mani lives, and
the esteemed research institute where he labors as the assistant of top
researcher Arvind Acharya. Forever spiteful toward his privileged superiors,
Ayyan is deviously mischievous and pulls off a stunt that ends with his half-
deaf (but otherwise ordinary) son being proclaimed in the local news as a boy
genius. Meanwhile, Arvind is obsessed with proving his theory that
extraterrestrial microbes are raining down on Earth from the upper atmosphere.
"

~~~
ArabGeek
so u r saying that kids at 14 can not code? he is not the first one to be an
entrepreneur at his age in the world

~~~
csomar
The game doesn't seem to involve so much coding. Actually, it's not about the
game, it's about how it got around 1 million download.

If you want to show us a 14 kid coding, then get it to do some coding stuff.
Example, solve a math. equation or write an algorithm or hack Windows
kernel... If you show us 800K downloads, it's just the app success that
happens either by good planing and marketing or a sheer luck.

~~~
orangecat
If he did his own physics engine, that's pretty impressive.

~~~
raquo
Why would he bother writing his own physics engine if there are free and easy
solutions already _? People who invent their bicycles don't end up shipping
stuff in two weeks with no prior programming experience.

_ <http://cocos2d-iphone.org> (which uses:)

* <http://code.google.com/p/chipmunk-physics/>

* <http://www.box2d.org/>

------
ArabGeek
Kuwait is on the richest countries in the world in terms of GDP, so not
everyone is spoiled do not u think so?

~~~
csomar
I think here you mean the per capita and not actually the global country GDP.
However, there is no relation. Having a higher per capita or GDP doesn't
relate to luxury. It's the amount of work a nation has made over a year.

For the game, I think it's more about the idea than the coding itself.

~~~
ArabGeek
yes per capita, and the idea played a big role yes :)

