The app only took a total of $12 hours of development time and fluctuated between $20-30 a day as a paid app. If he could crank out several more in that same time frame he could get a quasi-steady income going. But honestly, that sounds like a grind, constantly replacing older apps that have run their course. I can understand your discouragement and the same feeling keeps me on the fence as to whether I would like to try earning extra income through a web SaaS or try my luck in the app store casino.

I wish we could have seen revenue numbers if he had put ads on the app the day after he shot up the popularity charts and was doing 10s of thousands of downloads a day.

I'm surprised the author isn't putting ads on the free version.

Why are you surprised? Ads in the app = instant uninstall for heck of a lot of people.

He should wait to see how the free graph will develop after a few days/weeks because chances are that download numbers will fall pretty quickly to ~1000/day.

Why wait until he's flamed out then? The same amount of dev time will have be spent whether he adds ads on day 2 or day 20, why miss the bulk of his opportunity at the top of the charts?

I had the opposite reaction. He sneezed something onto the App Store in mere hours and it made quite a bit of return in a short time.

Agreed. I see a consistent story here; the formula seems to be 1) identify a current fad that doesn't have a lot of good apps 2) write the app quickly 3) profit.

I'm thinking of that story a couple months back about the Bible app, how there were a few but they all sucked, and people had decided that downloading the bible onto their phones was something they wanted to do.