Iphone's Golden Touch (Time to quit your day job?)
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
When the word "lottery" is mentioned in the article, I thought it was a pretty accurate description of what is happening.
There are 10,000+ apps in AppStore and only 10 that can occupy the top 10 slots. That gives the average developer a whopping .1% chance at any given time to be in the golden goose category.
Keep building your continuity businesses folks, the old boring 37Signals model. It'll keep pumping money into your bank account, month-after-month, and if you have some moola left over -- hire a iPhone hacker to put something together for you.
Maybe you will get lucky and you'll have a flash in the pan for a few weeks.
Moving forward, the winners are going to be the people who can market the hell out of their applications. If you aren't marketing-savvy, you are leaving it up to the gods to get yourself into the big money list.
It gives the average developer a 0% chance to have a golden goose, but a good developer has a somewhat better chance.
The problem is that people tend to overrate their own abilities. I guess quitting your job and going for something like this is an effective, if risky, way to find out for sure.
So if you get into Android now and it fizzles out, then you've wasted some time and effort. If you wait and it turns out to be as successful as the iPhone, then at that point it'll also be crowded. I wish I could predict the future :p
Business useful: These apps are profitable on platforms that business users are already on. They make money based on any combination of: high margins, long customer lifetime, or volume. The cost and time of changing platforms is high.
Casual useful: These can be profitable on any platform where costs are super low or volume is super high.
Entertainment: These apps are HIT DRIVEN. That means: very low success rate, very very high margins & volume. That being said, entertainment apps thrive on almost every platform.
In that scenario, your only source of new users for your app is the ONE webste, and the best way to get positioning is to maximize volume. Thus you price your app for volume and you target your audience for volume.
It should produce an endless stream of developers willing to work for dreams, lured by the shine on the stars.
Then we might see some really cool premium models around on the web.
And that, right there, explains why I won't go anywhere near the App Store, or support the Apple/iTunes/iPhone dev ecosystem with my time or code. There might be money to be made, but only as long as Apple likes you and allows you to continue to play in their sandbox.
And besides services I believe there are already dev tools being sold.