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$20 bucks a day for a crappy app sounds pretty good. $20 bucks a day times 20 apps sounds really good. It's not like he spent a year and a half writing Zen Jar. Hell, he didn't spend 1/20th of 1 year doing it.

If you offered $400 a day for a year in exchange for 2 or 3 months work, I think you'd have a few hundred thousand takers.

Hahahahah does this really surprise anyone? Apple has successfully bullshitted developers into wasting their time building stupid apps. A handful of legit business models only exist to serve as inspiration under Apple's watchful eye (iFund anyone?). All the while, Apple makes mad $$ on the phone hardware and developers make a few 10s of dollars a month. Anyone who finds that much additional income helpful can do better.

Good for them, but public education will catch up soon enough. Then again, I've said that about them bs'ing the media too and I've been wrong, so who knows..

To be far more accurate - when he says apps arent selling, he only has sales figures on HIS apps to back it up. And BTW, when taking, say, 'Zen Jar' as an example, I would consider his ROI to be a complete success.

Why does everyone want to talk about iPhone apps sales as if all iPhone apps were created equal? 'Zen Jar' is not Twitteriffic, and 99% of iPhone games are not as compelling as Trism. We don't call the PC market a 'failure' because some software sells better than others - why does everyone insist we do this with the iPhone app store?

Also - he's #34 in social networking - that doesnt mean the sales figures above him scale linearly.

Look at it this way - 'Zen Jar' wouldnt make a dime on the web, mac, or pc.
From casual inspection- maybe it took an experienced iPhone dev 80 hours tops to launch?

One year ROI: $7665
Hourly rate: $95/hour

Thats just for the first year - after that, the rate just goes up and up.
Now multiply times 20 apps - $153,000 the first year.

hahah i havent looked at his app, but my guess the reason it isnt selling, is caus its crap.

the fact that it was free probably ment that people were downloading as an experiement as opposed to an application they actually thought would be useful. now there is a price, no matter how small, people will ask themselves "will I really use this?" before purchasing.

this would have created his dramattic slide in sales.

look at the guy who built iShoot for an example of an app that was worth money that made money.

The problem for the users is that the market is flooded (only the beginning) and the category search parameters do not allow distinction between Useful and useless Apps, or provide a really detailed category list with subcategories. The problem for the developer is that for such a relatively small $ investment of their time and money they dont have the risk $ to market the good useful Apps outside of iTunes/iPhone. The store providers need to get rid of free Apps and push the others.. unclutter the field.

The problem is there aren't enough iPhone users yet to create a mega hit for an iPhone application. Twitteriffic is huge, but then Twitter was huge first, and it greased the rails for the app.

21.4 million users is nothing to sneeze at, but it's hardly mainstream. I would wager apps won't become really profitable until the phone's monthly service goes down in price. Of course, when that happens, the market for applications is going to get REALLY flooded.

nice blog

Interesting article - but, his numbers seem a bit low from what I see from my own apps as well as what I hear from other developers. I think his main problem is the 99 cent price point. It is hard to recoup much when you are selling your apps at that price. I have found that my 4.99 apps do the best even though they sell less overall.