

Iphone's Golden Touch (Time to quit your day job?) - physcab
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/29/AR2008122902082.html

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bprater
In 1849, some guy discovered gold in California...

When the word "lottery" is mentioned in the article, I thought it was a pretty
accurate description of what is happening.

There are 10,000+ apps in AppStore and only 10 that can occupy the top 10
slots. That gives the average developer a whopping .1% chance at any given
time to be in the golden goose category.

Keep building your continuity businesses folks, the old boring 37Signals
model. It'll keep pumping money into your bank account, month-after-month, and
if you have some moola left over -- hire a iPhone hacker to put something
together for you.

Maybe you will get lucky and you'll have a flash in the pan for a few weeks.

Moving forward, the winners are going to be the people who can market the hell
out of their applications. If you aren't marketing-savvy, you are leaving it
up to the gods to get yourself into the big money list.

~~~
rsheridan6
>There are 10,000+ apps in AppStore and only 10 that can occupy the top 10
slots. That gives the average developer a whopping .1% chance at any given
time to be in the golden goose category.

It gives the average developer a 0% chance to have a golden goose, but a good
developer has a somewhat better chance.

The problem is that people tend to overrate their own abilities. I guess
quitting your job and going for something like this is an effective, if risky,
way to find out for sure.

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alex_c
If it's hitting mainstream media, the answer to "Time to quit your day job?"
(no matter the subject) is most likely no longer "yes".

~~~
Prrometheus
What do you think about the timing right now for putting together apps for
other mobile platforms, like Android? I am thinking of getting into it, since
iPhone seems crowded.

~~~
alex_c
Well, earlier is always better for jumping on a bandwagon... I think the real
question is how well Android or Palm's new OS will do compared to the iPhone.
In my mind there's a strong parallel between Facebook's platform/Open Social
and iPhone/Android. Facebook platform/iPhone apps are centralized, consistent,
sexy, first to market, and get all the media attention. Open Social came
later, required more effort (more fragmentation), and got far less media
attention (I haven't followed it closely, so I don't actually know how
successful OpenSocial apps have been compared to Facebook, but my guess is
much less successful, despite OpenSocial's larger potential user base). So I'm
curious to see if the Open Social/Android parallel will hold.

So if you get into Android now and it fizzles out, then you've wasted some
time and effort. If you wait and it turns out to be as successful as the
iPhone, then at that point it'll also be crowded. I wish I could predict the
future :p

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kleneway
Facebook had this same "Quit your job, get easy money by building stupid
little apps like this one!" buzz about a year ago. I actually know some people
who quit their very well-paying jobs to take a shot at it...and unfortunately
it hasn't yet panned out that well... Maybe the App Store's ability to provide
direct revenue to devs will make this platform more sustainable, but I think
it's more likely that it will be a similar pattern to FB (where the apps
launched in the first two weeks and a tiny percentage of very compelling later
apps will do well, and the rest will get zero attention)

~~~
anthonyrubin
How many Facebook apps do end users pay for?

~~~
kleneway
Better question - would Facebook apps improve to the point where they would be
worth paying for if FB built out a payment platform? Would enough pro devs
start building FB apps if they knew they might have a revenue stream besides
the dreadful social networking CPMs?

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jcromartie
I just read someone who said "make sure your software is aspirin, not
vitamins." iPhone apps are mostly vitamins. When the iPhone isn't as hot
anymore and people have bought all of the $0.99 fart programs they can stand,
and the app store is saturated with thousands upon thousands of apps that
mostly do what other apps do better, it won't look so rosy.

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teej
This isn't surprising at all. Let's lump [iphone, facebook, desktop, etc] apps
into three categories: business useful, casual useful, and entertainment.

Business useful: These apps are profitable on platforms that business users
are already on. They make money based on any combination of: high margins,
long customer lifetime, or volume. The cost and time of changing platforms is
high.

Casual useful: These can be profitable on any platform where costs are super
low or volume is super high.

Entertainment: These apps are HIT DRIVEN. That means: very low success rate,
very very high margins & volume. That being said, entertainment apps thrive on
almost every platform.

~~~
teej
I guess the corollary from this article is that "shit just got real" and
thousands of joe blows with the "next big thing" will start making iphone
apps. That's typically what happens when big media starts churning out
articles like this, at least.

~~~
jcl
Isn't this exactly what we've seen happen over the last couple months?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=366151>

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pmorici
If this model of selling software is so successful for the iPhone why don't
they have an app store for the Mac? I mean maybe if more desktop applications
cost 99 cents they'd be selling more of them.

~~~
teej
The price point isn't the core of the success of these apps, it's the
distribution. Imagine for a moment that when you searched "mac applications"
on the internet, only ONE website came up. Imagine as well that this ONE
website gave away free front page advertising to apps with the highest volume.

In that scenario, your only source of new users for your app is the ONE
webste, and the best way to get positioning is to maximize volume. Thus you
price your app for volume and you target your audience for volume.

~~~
jws
When you describe it that way, it sounds a lot like the "star" model used by
Hollywood since the '30s and the popular music recording industry.

It should produce an endless stream of developers willing to work for dreams,
lured by the shine on the stars.

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tocomment
All these mainstream media articles will be good for iPhone programmers for
hire, no?

~~~
undertoad
Yeah, sell shovels.

And besides services I believe there are already dev tools being sold.

~~~
tocomment
Speaking of dev tools, are there any high level URL libraries similar to
Python's urllib2? This [CFHTTP
stuff]([https://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Net...](https://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/Networking/Conceptual/CFNetwork/CFHTTPTasks/chapter_5_section_1.html))
looks low level nasty!

