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.

>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.

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".

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.

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

There is certainly something to be said for being a big fish in a little pond, but just make sure that pond isn't a puddle.

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)

How many Facebook apps do end users pay for?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Further proof that an effective search solution needs to be developed. How easy would it be to develop a plug-in for iTunes that searches better than the current solution?

I prefer the term "discovery". Users need a way to discover things they like, be it through reccomendations, invitations, or google style "I want X, give it to me" search. In a perfect world, these would be designed so that "good" applications bubble to the top.

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.

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.

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.

Also there's no built in payment system for the web. It'd actually make sense for ISPs to launch a payment model, whereby you go to some website, agree to pay X for something, and it just gets added to your ADSL/phone bill.

Then we might see some really cool premium models around on the web.

"In that scenario, your only source of new users for your app is the ONE webste [sic]..."

And that, right there, explains why I won't go anywhere near the App Store, or support the Apple/iTunes/iPhone dev ecosystem with my time or code. There might be money to be made, but only as long as Apple likes you and allows you to continue to play in their sandbox.

Would anyone be that surprised if iTunes suddenly started distributing Mac software? I wouldn't bat an eye if the latest iLife and iWork suites and Final Cut Express suddenly showed up there, for instance.

Its an excellent question. Aside from the points already mentioned, the app store for the iPhone conveniently hooks into the payment scheme you have for the phone. No need to fool around with credit card numbers, trust issues, etc. (Basing this on the iTunes store would be a good idea with many of the same advantages.)

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

Yeah, sell shovels.

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

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...) looks low level nasty!