iPhone App Developers Striking It Rich One Download At A Time

The Apple iPhone is a revolutionary product. It is a must have for millions of people. With its advanced technology, there seems to be no limit to the things that you can do with your iPhone. Apple also saw the great possibilities with the applications you can run on a iPhone. What Apple did was create a developers kit so coders with the knowledge could create apps to be downloaded to the phone. In doing this Apple created a virtual gold mine for independent developers. Since its launch in July 08, the App Store has grown to become an developer’s dream come true.

The Apple App Store, despite its corporate ties, has created an open market where developers can strike it rich so long as they possess the talent and the time. Developers earn 70 percent of App Store proceeds from the sale of their games, with Apple taking 30 percent.

Here are a few developer who did just that. They basically struck it rich over night. Here are their stories.

Ethan Nicholas, developer of a tank artillery game called iShoot, quit his day job the day his app rose to No. 1 in the App Store “I’m not going to be a millionaire in the next month, but I’d be shocked if it didn’t happen at the end of the year,” Nicholas has made $600,000 in a single month. In order to boost sales, Nicholas coded a free version of the app called iShoot Lite which contained an advertisement for the $3, full version of iShoot.



Steve Demeter, developer of the vastly popular $5 iPhone game Trism, announced he made $250,000 in profit in just two months. He contracted a designer for $500 and also had help from a friend. He knew iPhone apps would get big once Apple released a software developer kit to allow third-party apps on the handset, and he wanted to get in on the platform early. If his profits continue at this rate, Demeter will earn nearly $2 million by July 2009.



Bart Decrem built the free app Tap Tap Revenge, a music-rhythm game that utilizes the iPhone’s touch screen and accelerometer. His app hit 1,000,000 downloads just two weeks after its launch. There are over 1.75 million users who have downloaded Tap Tap Revenge, according to Decrem. He expects that number to grow to over 2,000,000 soon. As for profits, Decrem just recently began placing ads in the game, he has plans to release a premium version that will cost money. Decrem did not disclose profit numbers, but it is estimates are that any top iPhone app is making its developer around $5,000 to $10,000 a day.



Joel Comm, the developer of iFart, has been pretty forthcoming with sales his figures on his blog. He states that over Christmas Eve and Christmas day, he sold more than 58,000 downloads of iFart, netting him over $40,000 dollars in just two days. It was initially released on December 12th, and has since skyrocketed up the app store charts. At one point it was the #1 paid program in the app store. In the two weeks following its release, it’s was downloaded 113,865 times, netting the creators $78,908 in the process



According to developers, the recipe for success in creating a great iPhone app is paying attention to detail, keeping the app engaging and alive with various forms of gameplay, and plain old fashion word of mouth. Similar to Trism, Tap Tap Revenge was also an app that initially emerged in the Jailbreak community, and it spawned a loyal following there before breaking out into the broader market with the launch of the App Store. The field is getting crowded, though. There now are more than 1,500 iPhone games available from the App Store. The successes of these developers also has a lot to do with timing having a vision, and a bit of luck.