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."'"
Another shocker (Score:5, Interesting)
The road to richess passes through Marketing (Score:4, Interesting)
If your app isn't featured or favorited or otherwise supported by a major marketing push, you're doomed.
The little band of freelancers I work with have produce two games. One for ourselves. It was really very good, which bombed at the store. We've sold just a few hundred. We're small, we don't have a marketing budget.
The next game we bade was honestly no very fun. It was okay, not complete crap, but not great. It's been in the top 50 for several weeks.
What's the difference? That second game was done for a Major Developer who was able to spend 20x as much on marketing as development. (No joke.)
And even for them, there's no money in it for them. They're only there to show a success to shareholders and that they're beating the competition in a competitive marketplace. Couldn't have the independent devs getting the top spots, now could they? That'd be embarrassing.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Interesting)
Why would you still buy Macs, if you feel that strongly about Apple?
The real deal... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Another shocker (Score:5, Interesting)
That's bullshit. It's luck. (And increasingly these days, the luck of having been born into the correct socioeconomic stratum.) The best we can do is to pursue opportunities to the utmost when they do appear and make the most of the luck we get in life.
Your statement reminded me of one of my favorite quotes.
I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. -- Thomas Jefferson
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Interesting)
Well I'll whore mine then. ;) http://www.rickb.com/iphone [rickb.com]
I think my apps are well programmed but suffer from my lack of art skills, which I am attempting to rectify. :) I have a day job as a game programmer, so my iPhone diversions are merely a fun hobby, I'm not really looking to get rich from it.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple has *ALWAYS* treated their 3rd party devs like this. They have done this since the Lisa. Mid 90s it cost 20k+ for a dev kit plus 2-3k more for a dev box. I could setup 10 MS devs for the same amount of money. Its better now (closer to free) but it will take awhile to recover from that.
iPhone devs are just the latest gen to figure out something. If you are a consumer of Apple and Apple only you get a pretty sweet experience. If you are a dev for their platform you feel like you just had someone rip you off.
I gave up around os7. Haven't looked back.
Apple and good will are words I would *NEVER* put together. Ask anyone who has had their iPod battery die or HD die.
You pay for the 'cool' you buy from them. Unfortunately they really do not like to share the cool.
The last real open platform they had was the AppleII and then they went into crazy lockdown mode since.
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how many of those developers are actually releasing though. For instance, I'm a registered developer (I paid my $100), but I did it solely for personal development.
That is, I'm an aerospace engineering grad student doing a lot of estimation and controls work, but mostly on the theory/simulation side -- as such I realized I really should have some experience working with actual hardware. Since my research doesn't provide that opportunity, and I had my phone, which has GPS, accelerometers and magnetometers handy, so I decided to see what I could do with it. Paying the dev fee was probably cheaper than buying custom-purpose hardware.
It's certainly been interesting, and I'm pretty far along in a program that one can attach to a telescope, align against known stars, and then determine where you're pointing afterwards -- but its entirely something I'm doing for me. When its finished (school, another project, and a girl have prevented me from working on it in a while), I'll probably push it on to the app store, sell it for a few bucks on the off chance I'll make the dev fee back, but really, if it makes the difference in me getting a job I want, then thats much more worthwhile to me.
Re:Another shocker (Score:3, Interesting)
you are right.... it takes balls to go through with the necessary ruthlessness that Gates engaged in.
He knew how to play dumb when he needed to. He knew how to say the right things to people to get them to listen. He knew the price points at which people would sell their mothers.
Digital pissing IBM off: Luck
gates learning about it: Luck
Gates going to IBM and selling them a product they didn't have: Balls
Gates buying Dos for next to nothing, knowing what he would get from IBM: Ruthlessness and Balls
IBM being stupid enough to agree to a non-exclusive license for Dos: Luck.
Re:iPhone devs have right to be AC (Score:4, Interesting)
It is because Developers are afraid of Apple and as the only channel is "app store" for non hacked iPhones, Apple can make one's life real miserable if they want to.
I'm the AC. Yes, Apple is one reason. Another is that I have friends in the industry and they can be hurt by association with me bitching about Apple publicly. But two more reasons: 1) If I want to do contract work developing for someone else, I might not want them knowing what kind of sales I've had, if they were dismal, as in this case 2) The product was/is on the other end of a legal battle with a company other than Apple.
So, as Yoda might say: up-the-fuck-I-must-shut.
Re:Perhaps (Score:3, Interesting)
There has not been a single fund that has returned 200% over the last five years (which is what you are claiming -- 1.25^5 == 3.05). If that's really the return you've made over the last five years, then I know some people who will want to talk with you about opportunities. Especially considering hedge funds averaged losses in the teens last year, with young funds having a stdev of about 6.5% (from an category-leading loss of only 11%).
Not that I want to help the guy in his penis measuring competition, but there are some funds that have done just that. They are all invested invested in either Latin America or in Metals/Minerals. You can see them all here:
http://screen.morningstar.com/FundSearch/FundRank.html?fundCategory=all&screen=tr5yr [morningstar.com]
Note, although that page says "5 year total return", that is inaccurate. It is listing a 5 year annualized return. To confirm, look up the #1 on google finance
http://www.google.com/finance?q=MUTF:PRLAX [google.com]
See on the right of the graph, it shows a 5 year annualized return of +31.12%. Loot at the 5 year graph. You can see that Oct 15, 2004 it traded at 13.44, and todays price is 47.24
Re:The real deal... (Score:2, Interesting)
Of the two platforms the iPhone was by far the easiest to get my head around - in terms of architecture an iPhone app is very close to writing a desktop app.
Android on the other hand has a completely different approach, it took a lot longer to understand and get productive with. You can do a lot more with it, but it's definitely a bit odd.
I've also written a couple of my own iPhone apps, one of them quite cool (Sudoku Grab [blogspot.com]) which was featured by Apple for a couple of weeks and one of them just a silly game to learn open gl. They make enough to justify the amount of time I put into developing them and the amount of money I've spent on marketing (approx 0). I chose the iPhone platform to develop against simply because it was the one I felt most at home programming against.
However, my money would be on the Android platform becoming dominant - it's going to have a few issue, device fragmentation being the biggest one.
What amuses me is how no one seems to have learned any lessons from the past. I remember working during the dot com boom and a typical conversation was "There's billions of people in the world on the internet - we just need 1% of them to use our website, that's just 1 person in every 100! We're going to be rich!".
I actually had someone telling me exactly the same thing about the app store the other day "there's millions of iPhones....."
Re:And common sense prevailed! (Score:3, Interesting)
That about $2K to get my 1.99 apps out the door, not to mind:
Hence in all, if I used my typical developer rate, I think I spent $25K in niche apps (meditation apps) with a creative partner and so far have made my last 3 months' developer fees. It took Apple about a month to review as well.
I'd say it's less lucrative than other platforms! In WebOS and Android, my dev experience was much easier in creating the same app... at 1/2 the cost. Sure, every ecosystem has appstore hassles, but they are either more predictable or respond faster.
Conclusion: it is a crap shoot, Apple gives consumers what they want at expense of devs and I would have had more fun in Vegas spending $5K--at least some touching and nudity would have been involved compared to building these apps.