Does $37K in one day sound like a decent paycheck?
That’s what Ethan Nicholas, an independent developer, earned the first day his iShoot war game hit the Apple application store. Just a month after that, he had banked over $600,000.00 as iShoot kept right on shooting – at one point, right to the top-downloaded app in the store.
All of that happened back in early 2009, according to www.wired.com. Since then, tales of iPhone app success have become almost as common as the iPhone itself. For every time you’ve heard the phrase, “yeah, there’s an app for that,” there is a story behind it, and sometimes that story comes with a healthy dose of rags to riches drama.
Here are just a few:
• John Casasanta, who developed an iPhone app that allows users to convert various units of measure (such as English to metric) saw his creation yield up to 6,000 downloads a day. That led to revenues in the $3K per day range.
• Eliza Block’s crossword puzzle application, 2 Across, earned her as much as $2K per day when it first came out.
• The popular game application Trism, developed by Steve Demeter, reportedly netted him over $250K in just two months.
Estimates of the market size for iPhone have varied widely depending upon the source, with some suggesting it could be bigger than $4 billion (with a “B”) per year. If that particular estimate is anywhere close, the app store’s sales are big-league by anyone’s standards.
And with 70% of the revenue going to developers, it looks like we’ll be seeing a lot more iPhone app success stories in the years to come.
Sources:
http://mashable.com/2009/08/27/convert-earnings/
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/09/indie-developer/
Stories of wild success related to custom iPhone application development are all over the Internet today.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends!
Seriously, there is money to be made with these apps. And if you think about it, these apps are rather fairly simple! Imagine an unit conversion app and a shooter game. It just goes to show that you don’t really need schmanzy graphics and over-the-top concepts to make money with Apple devices!
the truth is deeper…
I wish everyone were thinking about it…