Road To Riches Doesn't Run Through the App Store 305
Etienne Steward writes "Turns out that while a few fortunes can be made with Apple, Steve Demeter made most of his money by buying Palm (of all companies) at $1.76 and selling at $12. Apparently, there aren't as many iPhone App millionaires as we would like to be believe. From the article: 'In almost a dozen interviews conducted by NEWSWEEK, Apple consultants and programmers jettison the idea that the App Store is a world of easy opportunity, or a fast track to quitting the rat race. Instead they describe an anxiety-wracked marketplace full of bewildering rules, long odds, and little sense of control over one's success or failure. "It's kind of a crapshoot," says Demeter, who spent the last two weekends partying in Las Vegas and New York. "I think we've reached a point where people are thinking I shouldn't quit my day job for this."'"
Re:And common sense prevailed! (Score:5, Informative)
Surprise surprise: programming for the iPhone is as lucrative as programming for any other platform.
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Informative)
(are there really that many people who cannot calculate 15% of the total before tax?).
Yes.
Re:Another shocker (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Perhaps (Score:4, Informative)
And well, he was quite successful (like the article says in right the beginning)
Two years ago, the 30-year-old computer programmer became one of the first people to sell his product—a puzzle game called Trism—through Apple's App Store, a virtual marketplace where third-party software developers connect with customers wanting downloads for their iPhones. He pulled in $250,000 in just two months and quit his job writing code for ATMs. Demeter's success caught the eye of Apple's public-relations team, which profiled him in an inspirational video at Apple.com and gave him a shout out at its June 2009 World Wide Developers' Conference (WWDC). Media hailed the San Francisco resident an "App Store Millionaire" who would never have to work again—a happy financial reality that Demeter confirms. "Nine-to-five is no longer a concept for me," he tells NEWSWEEK.
Which seems quite successful for me. He then used the income to buy Palm stocks at low price and selling at high. He didn't specify how much he got out of it, but I guess it's enough to spend a few weekends partying in Las Vegas and New York.
And the app is over two years old.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
Actually they've lowered it to $150 per region now. I'm still waiting on my first pay out too. Although if they make the revenue cutoff too low, you'll get killed by bank wire transfer fees (hello bank, why in the #$!@ are you charging me when people put money *in* my account!)
Re:Another shocker (Score:4, Informative)
***citation required
bill gates bio [famousentrepreneur.info]:
"According to the 1992 biography Hard Drive, Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates the year he was born. Gates commented on this claim in a 1994 interview with Playboy:
PLAYBOY: Did you have a million-dollar trust fund while you were at Harvard?
GATES: Not true. . . . . My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive."
there you have it from the horses mouth: no trust fund.
Re:The real deal... (Score:5, Informative)
Both iPhone and Android are great platforms for development. Android is really cool because it's based on Java which is second nature to me at this point. Android also has a very low barrier to entry in that the development stack is free and it only costs $25 to become an "official" developer with checkout rights on the Android Market. The Android devices are feature-rich and generally ok, but not as well designed as the iPhone.
Both support OpenGL ES which is great for graphics applications. Developing on the iPhone is a bit daunting at first because Objective-C has a stiff learning curve that is purely related to its syntactical style, but once you learn Objective-C you'll never want to see C++ again. BTW, you can use C and C++ to build iPhone apps, but it's probably easier in the long run to just spend a few days getting familiar with Objective-C.
The iPhone is a much more closed ecosystem when compared to Android, but that's a necessary evil that supports Apple's business model. Also, the iPhone is a really good device that just oozes design quality. Developing on the Apple platform makes the developer think about design, usability, and quality above features. It's more fun to develop on the iPhone, to me anyway.
Another advantage of the iPhone is the availability of third party, professional tools like Unity (www.unity3d.com) which greatly speed up the development process. XCode is also a fair development tool and it's free with OSX so that's a big plus. I don't think I'll ever pay for something like Visual Studio again at this point. Between Eclipse, Netbeans, and XCode, why pay for an IDE?
Obviously, the biggest con to iPhone development is the app store and the Apple submission process, but once you've been through it a few times you learn the ropes and it becomes easy to get apps published. Still, I make 20x more money on the app store than I do on the Android market, but that may change over time.
It took me three weeks to develop my first app which wasn't very successful but still makes a hundred or so a month worldwide. It took me a couple of months to make my second app which made the top 100 and still sells well in certain regions. Since then I've released over a dozen apps, some globally and some in specific regions and most of them don't make a lot by themselves, but they add up when tallied together. I am starting to see the wave crash a bit and sales have been declining in the last few months, but I suspect they'll go up again after the holiday season when a few million new devices are given as gifts and new users go app crazy.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Informative)
They take a whopping 30% cut (I've never heard of such a high cut for this kind of service - most download sites are free).
You are lying through your teeth or are so far past ignorant that you have no business posting, then.
Apple: 30% commission for hosting, payment processing, customer access
Palm: 30%
Microsoft: 30%
Android: 30%
Handango: 40%
Verizon VCast store: 30%
Blackberry: 30% (recently cut to 20% for some developer accounts)
Nokia Ovi: 30%
So in fact, Apple undercut Handango, the biggest prior comparable service. The other app stores have all followed suit with the same commission rates.
They don't pay you at all if it doesn't hit $250, and that's done on a per "region" basis.
All stores have minimums for payout in order to reduce the overhead of fees and payment processing. Payment is done per region because sales are done per region. If you never clear $250 in sales, you will get paid when you close your account. Otherwise, you will only be paid every time you reach $250. If your sales are so low that this interval is several months apart, it is unlikely that it would matter in the first place.
Other stores that only pay out at given market minimums: Google AdSense ($100), Amazon Marketplace (once every two-four weeks), direct credit card processors (most have a minimum of $100/week).
That's your money that they're keeping.
So is your bank. So is your boss, since you only get paid on an interval. Those are the rules you agreed to when you decided to participate.
You obviously have little experience in the business of payment processing and selling through a distributor. This is par for the course. The fees, as demonstrated above, are right in line with the others, the payout minimum is a common practice, and developer membership rules are an integral part of every store, differing only in the qualifications and approval process.
No, you just wanted to bitch about Apple again because simply ignoring the stories you're not interested in is beyond your abilities. Who cares if you like Apple or not? Neither the article nor your misinformed criticism of the store practices singles out anything specific to Apple. TFA capitalized on the name for Internet attention; Slashdot did it for ad revenue; you're doing it because you think the Apple whining is somehow less pathetic than the Apple ass-kissing. Every branded entity has blind fans, but Apple and Microsoft haters are a special breed of sad.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:1, Informative)
While you may consider it ignorance, most of us consider it unethical at the very least that they are not up-front about such practices, even though they may not be required by law.
It's all right there in the developer center for Apple, just like it is for Blackberry, Android, and all the other markets.
Apple is masterful at leveraging statutory regulations/laws to their advantage
Corporations are masterful at doing so. All of them. They pay lots of people a lot of money to do it. This is nothing unique to Apple. Any blame or credit is to be shared by the industry. There are distribution minimums all throughout the distribution market, as my earlier post highlights.
Google AdSense requires you to earn $100 before they issue an EFT/check. Most credit card processors have a weekly minimum of $100. Apple is in neither of those industries. It's a common business practice that is disclosed to developers when they sign up. They can choose to cancel if they find it unacceptable.
If you're not making $150 within about two months, you're doing it wrong. It's not any payment processor's fault if they don't want to issue checks or pay for EFTs for chump change. It's certainly not an Apple invention.
You want to complain, better open the scope of your complaint. You start with the premise that Apple is unethical and fill in the blanks. Instead, you ignore the fact that Apple's model is not innovative--it's built on the existing distribution/payment processing models in use by many companies for many years in many markets. Suddenly when Apple does it in 2008, it's unethical, but it was never worthy of complaint before? Please.
Like I said, it's just as obnoxious as the people who think everything Apple does is uncharted territory. Two sides of the same, sad coin.