14 Years Old Kuwaiti Achieves 800,000 Downloads for His iPhone App | Hacker News Reader

14 Years Old Kuwaiti Achieves 800,000 Downloads for His iPhone App

arabcrunch.com

59 pointsArabGeek36 comments

This is great. Congratulations!

FWIW I am a 35 year old New Yorker has 3,000,000 active users for his iPhone App (Darts). I am embarrassed by the advertisements but it pays the bills. sigh.

Just curious, does 3M active users generate a lot of ad revenue? One of our games is just about to go over 250k and I'm thinking of putting Admob ads in it or Google Adsense (they've approved us for beta).

Yes, it does work quite well for me. I could easily be an outlier and got lucky because of the name (literally "Darts").

Note that I am not using iAd (yet?). I started with Admob, then moved to Adwhirl and noticed that Quattro worked out the best. Now Quattro is Apple.

I am kind of an ass about the ads though since they are always present, in menus and during gameplay alike. If you read any of the reviews, my users hate me and it (used to) keep me up at night. sniffle. But, it helped me bootstrap a consulting business for mostly iOS work so I have taken a pragmatic view.

it is ok, there was no iPhone 21 years ago :)

True! I did play around on a Commodore 64 though!

yep I did not have a PC but i sued to play with my mom's Mac, it used to speak as i remember :P

[...] and Yes, and Yes, and Yes he is impressive. I love the self-starter type kids who have cool interests and do projects like these.

Side note: is this article a translation?

the writer is 32 years old and not translation

Very cool! When I was 14 it was all about hacking apart QBasic. Strangely no one wanted to buy my Gorillas clone...

Congratulations!

My first program was a curses-like Yahtzee written in QBasic when I was 16. I recall learning about particle systems about that time. If you got a Yahtzee in the game, gratuitous explosions congratulated you. It was utterly ridiculous but fun as hell.

Thats a pretty awesome achievement, I hope he keeps it up and does some good with it. Goes to show what 2 weeks of complete absolute immersion into something can result in.

There's always a chance that such a thing could be a fake claim, but I do think its definitely possible.

I've read several stories about kids like this but I never seem to hear about them later on. Were there any kids back in the 90's that are still active and somewhat popular today?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jez_San (started as a games developer in his teens, now better known as the founder of pkr.com)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twins

did anyone else think this was really smirky at the end?

Anyone else notice the uncanny resemblance between "doodle destroy" and "doodle vanish"?

This is awesome. I've always learned by doing as well. Thanks for sharing!

welcome, i got some people to help in some coding and then the rest by my self :)

I'm confused: are you or are you not the 14yo talked about in this article? In other comments, you say "he".

Congratulations! Your results make older developers feel like excuses are just that. How did you do your marketing? Do you feel you benefitted from the rapid rise in popularity of physics-based games?

I am not the developer guys who said i am the 14 years old kid :)

v ery inspiring!

I wish I wasn't the one to play the skeptic, but I'm naturally skeptical about stories like this. Kids are often used as fronts for adults looking for a promotion vehicle.

If you're interested in this theme (adults using kids as promotional vehicles), I can recommend a sharp satire I'm reading at the moment:

http://www.amazon.com/Serious-Men-Novel-Manu-Joseph/dp/03933...

Blurb from that page: "... a subtly wicked satire of subterfuge and ambition that bounces between the Mumbai tenement where low-caste Ayyan Mani lives, and the esteemed research institute where he labors as the assistant of top researcher Arvind Acharya. Forever spiteful toward his privileged superiors, Ayyan is deviously mischievous and pulls off a stunt that ends with his half-deaf (but otherwise ordinary) son being proclaimed in the local news as a boy genius. Meanwhile, Arvind is obsessed with proving his theory that extraterrestrial microbes are raining down on Earth from the upper atmosphere. "

so u r saying that kids at 14 can not code? he is not the first one to be an entrepreneur at his age in the world

Don't you need a credit card and a decent investment in Apple hardware to get started?

I doubt he did it all by himself, even if his work is authentic.

edit: is that no longer the case? I could have sworn it was that way, at least in the beginning.

No, I am not saying that. And I am happy for him.

I had coded a dozen games for my own 8-bit Sinclair Spectrum by 11.

The game doesn't seem to involve so much coding. Actually, it's not about the game, it's about how it got around 1 million download.

If you want to show us a 14 kid coding, then get it to do some coding stuff. Example, solve a math. equation or write an algorithm or hack Windows kernel... If you show us 800K downloads, it's just the app success that happens either by good planing and marketing or a sheer luck.

If he did his own physics engine, that's pretty impressive.

Why would he bother writing his own physics engine if there are free and easy solutions already? People who invent their bicycles don't end up shipping stuff in two weeks with no prior programming experience.

http://cocos2d-iphone.org (which uses:)

* http://code.google.com/p/chipmunk-physics/

* http://www.box2d.org/

>The game doesn't seem to involve so much coding.

There are layers of complexity that you simply can't avoid. Add that even the simplest physics algorithms are non-trivial.

Many of us were programming before we hit the grand double digits, however in ways modern development is more difficult in some ways because you're building on layers and layers of existing code (Motorola assembly was easy compared to developing for the iphone or Android), which is where experience comes into play.

Nonetheless, the way this story was delivered, the fact that this kid has purportedly made 10 apps...I dunno it seems like a really clumsy marketing tactic.

yes i agree it is how he got around 1 million downloads

the story was picked up from Kuwaiti blog i do not think his father is the developer using his kid's age!

go to the app profile on iTunes it got his name

Kuwait is on the richest countries in the world in terms of GDP, so not everyone is spoiled do not u think so?

I think here you mean the per capita and not actually the global country GDP. However, there is no relation. Having a higher per capita or GDP doesn't relate to luxury. It's the amount of work a nation has made over a year.

For the game, I think it's more about the idea than the coding itself.

yes per capita, and the idea played a big role yes :)

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