right, i'm not sure why the author feels like he has a god-given right to make $50,000/year no matter what kind of iphone app he/she develops.

go ask any of the top 10 iphone application developers -- i don't think any of them are having trouble with the 50k/year barrier. the marketplace will be the same as the web: the majority of attention goes to a small number of sites. just because i put out a website of marginal value and charge $9.99 doesn't automatically mean i'll be making $50k/year -- the issue is a lot more difficult than that.

He didn't say that he has a right to make $50,000 year no matter what. He said that if you are not going to make $50,000 a year then your company is not going to survive, so you need to find a way to make at least that much money.

How much money the top 10 developers make is inconsequential to all the other developers that aren't in the top 10. The top 10 will always be filled mass-market applications. Most developers aren't developing applications with mass-market appeal.

He's still assuming that maintaining one app will consume a person's entire capacity for the lifetime of the app.

One app does not have to be your sole source of income.

It's a lot like how one-off pieces of art always seem really expensive, but the fact of the matter is that to make that art someone has to be able to support themselves doing something that typically doesn't really scale.