I wonder if he gets a lot of support email.

Anyone on HN have an iPhone app out there with a low price point? It already takes a lot of time working on a desktop app and answering support emails. I'm wondering if it takes even more time with a low price product and tons of customers.

do iphone developers care about support? it's not like anyone can try the program without buying it or ask for a refund. worst case someone leaves a one-star rating saying "this program sux!" which no one reads anyway.

nobody reads those reviews, but those reviews drag down your overall rating, possibly making you lose sales to a better rated competitor.

colloquy's reviews are pretty much like that..except for the insane people leaving feature requests (and rating accordingly?! on what world do these people think that'll make a difference?), the rest of our reviews are 4-5 stars with a handful at 1 from the people that, for whatever reason, decided to buy an irc client without knowing what the hell irc was in the first place, and another one that made my day wondering why the fuck we don't have ICB support in the mobile client while we do in the desktop client...but we didn't mention anything BUT irc in the app description in the app store.

(Bonus: check out our latest reviews. the distribution is hilarious: http://img.skitch.com/20090214-df5e6ptrhqpmii4dy4yw8gbrhc.jp... )

And speaking of those people, we regularly get people on our support channel asking for where to find more chat rooms and what IRC was to the tune of at least a couple people a day, if we're lucky, and people who act like complete assholes for no reason and several more people asking what IRC is if we're not. You would be surprised.

edit: someone else on the colloquy team wanted me to mention we have an actual button in the app to connect directly to the support channel and that most apps don't have something like that.

I used to sell a PalmOS app for the Treo.

My app for the iPhone is much different, but I find the support to units sold ratio to be much better. It's probably something like 1% of the users need support.

Many many years ago I wrote a few apps for PalmOS devices and the biggest problems were small incompatibilities between different PalmOS versions and small quirks of each device. The fact that the iPhone has a very limited selection of handsets, means that the chances that something that works on your device will work everywhere else are much much higher...

Plus the PalmOS emulator was never as good as the iPhone emulator.

I have a $0.99 app and we built in email support. If a user has a concern or issue they can email me directly.

One thing I don't understand:

> After getting off his shift as an engineer at Sun Microsystems, he worked on iShoot eight hours a day, cradling his 1-year-old son in one hand and coding with the other. He didn't have the money to buy books to learn how to write an iPhone app, so he taught himself by reading websites.

I think there's one or 2 main books on writing iPhone apps(both by OReilly) and they're like $35 at Borders(so probably cheaper online). If you're an engineer at Sun, and spending 8 hours a day on this app, how could $35 be stopping you from buying a book?

There is more info in the original Wired article. The author responded in comments:

"As for how I was broke while making a great salary working at Sun, it was primarily due to medical bills after a my family had series of emergency room visits, a couple of emergency surgeries, and we spent a year taking care of and financially supporting a mentally ill relative. Sun had also discontinued all bonuses due to the financial climate, which didn't help."

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/shoot-is-iphone.html#c...

Cool. I figured it was just the Wired author spicing up the story.

so...does anyone else see the smart phone as a reboot for consoles? all these games doing well are the kind of games that could have been run on an NES. As we get more and more powerful smart phones will we see the same things?

Not sure if it's a reboot for newer consoles, but it's definitely the replacement for the Nintendo DS, PSP, etc.

Like this game--iShoot, is basically ScorchedEarth which came out for DOS in like 1994 (or that's when I first played it anyway).

It is fun though--I bought one.

I played this game back on my first DOS computer with Gorillas throwing bananas. Found it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_(computer_game)

It looks like it originated on Apple II in 1980, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game

i'm going to say that the app looks harder to build than it appears. i haven't messed much with open gl or any low-level stuff, but based on what i've heard/seen, it's pretty complex to build graphics/animation-driven apps.

Good for him. It sounds like he really had a rough go of it before he released iShoot. Stories like this always inspire me.

What's interesting is this is one of the top iPhone games, if not the top. Compare it to one of the top Facebook games. Mob Wars makes 2x that much money every single month, and unlike iShoot, it won't fall off of the store and into oblivion very soon. It probably took far less work to launch too.

You've gotta be kidding me.

I'd totally build one of these things if Apple would ever actually respond to me. It's been almost a month - anyone else experience this kind of delay?

To an extent the delay seems related to program complexity. I released a utility app (http://rankforest.com/ranktouch) that was approved after 5 days.

This kind of delay? 3 months. The wait was excruciating.

Was that for reviewing an App, or just accepting you into the actual program?

3 months for both paid and free contracts. The 2 apps submitted during that time was approved pretty quickly.

The first was submitted and approved in the first month (December). But without the contract, both (paid) apps couldn't be sold. Hell, I can't even provide free apps even if I wanted to. The contract paperwork was only completed earlier this week, meaning the apps can now be sold. I blogged about it here - http://motionobj.com/blog/stopping-development-of-iphone-app... - actually stating that I will state any further development of my apps until it was done. Being without without income due to seemingly simple paperwork delays and with 2 more apps ready to be submitted anytime was very frustrating.

Since the App store is very skewed towards apps which are mire recent (by submission/approved date, whichever), it means that the 2 apps which were previously submitted now hang at the back of the app listings which, again due to the way it works, makes it stay there pretty much.

While there are quite a number of glamorous stories about developers striking rich in the greenfield opportunity of iPhone apps development, there are still a few fundamental pitfalls that can break things if you are not careful. Looking back, I'm not sure what I could have done to speed this up actually, since emails sent seems to go to /dev/null. Not all the emails, but those I really needed responding to never received any.

It takes them 3 months to review your app for the Store?

But now, everyone will start making "Lite" versions of their apps, and the same trick will not work as well as it did for this guy.

Making a "lite" version is the same thing as making a demo, which has been around for decades. I don't think this is a cat that just got out of the bag, or anything.