IRetroPhone iPhone App -- $30,000 Net Profit for One Day's Work | Hacker News Reader

IRetroPhone iPhone App -- $30,000 Net Profit for One Day's Work

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28 pointsmoses140020 comments

Congratulations to these guys!! Totally awesome!!

runs to padded room. sound of muffled thuds, screaming.

fantastic for him, seriously... but a sad reflection of the state of the AppStore in regard to utility/quality. stories like this bring gold diggers out of the woodwork and pollute the store, imo.

not trying to be a pessimist here... just venting.

I'm reminded of an onion article

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29448

Why shouldn't any developer be able to make almost any app, then make money on it?

If this app made 30k, build a truly great app and retire.

Assuming that revenue scales with app quality...

I don't think it's necessarily a "sad reflection" of the AppStore, it's just what happens when a brand new (and hot) marketplace opens. Some people make a killing for little reason or effort whatsoever.

As time goes on the marketplace will evolve, and an application like that would never be able to be priced at $2.99 or get the kind of attention that it did in the very early days. Apple could have potentially prevented this with a little more visibility and/or less heavy-handed control over Apps going public, but probably not by much.

It'll probably happen with the Android store, too, but now that people haven't learned it won't be quite so dramatic.

The only reason he sold that much was because he was mentioned in a magazine with a massive readership. Almost any half way useful or interesting application would sell that much if mentioned in such a magazine.

So you are saying, work hard at getting good press?

No, that's not relevant. He created the type of product that is interesting enough to be mentioned in the 'wierd' section of a big magazine. He did not work for the press, he did not do any clever marketing, it was his product that was clever. He could just as well have never gotten mentioned, and his product would have made a hundred a month or so from the few people who like the quirky idea.

What he did right was create a simple and fun product. There is hardly any lesson to be learnt from the guys experience, apart from the obvious lesson that more eyeballs brings more sales, and that people will willingly pay for iphone apps.

>He did not work for the press, he did not do any clever marketing,

You can not really be sure about that, now, can you?

Great, I still think iPhone App building will be a golden mine for some time. Anyway, he must be a great coder to be able to do such an application in only one day - almost unbelievable.

Yes. It also looks quite nice (which probably takes the most of the time)

Let's see if there are straight-up clones of all these iPhone apps once Android hits the streets next month.

I wonder how Apple will take care of app pollution. The store works fine now that there are less than a few hundred apps in each category, but as that number grows, it will be harder to browse it in its current state on the phone.

Interesting. I had read some time ago that Apple patented the touch-based rotary dialer concept. If that's the case, I'm surprised they let this one through.

They will let him generate the publicity and then confiscate his earnings. ;)

Umm isn't it free? I have it and it was free for me.

guy sold 15,000 copies in the first day at $2.99 per

of course this will only happen once

Every time someone does something like this, I think "that was a good idea! Oh well, there are no good ideas left now".

Will I ever learn?

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