OMG stabs eyes repeatedly

They certainly can be. Some people make hundreds of thousands or millions.

Oh, btw, Monster RPG 2 is now #4 in free RPGs in the home of the JRPG. What an honor.

Some of those people are average joes.

edit: I wouldn't risk a lot on it though.

With a lot of luck though. E.g. the guy I currently work for made a few millions with his iphone app.

Making money is mostly about marketing and having a good sales team. This means your product has to cost enough to justify paying for that.

It's easier to make money paying people to sell and support $50,000 software than it is to make money with $1 applications. I once wrote a content management system for a company that did just that. The software probably cost them around $100,000 over six months, but they were able to sell 50 (?) licenses per year via a dedicated sales team.

A lot of people have, apparently

0.01/0 == INF
5.0/0.99 ~= 5

I hate being overly critical, as I can see it should be a really good game, but I just couldn't get past the quirky interface:

- The yes/no dialog, no matter how much I pressed, wouldn't let me quit or continue - it would happily go from yes to no but nothing else
- On the standard movement control (the overlay buttons), the control images are right in front of the main menu so you can't see the menu and the overlay for the red/green showing what they do are underneath the green/red button images. Moving it to the top hides most of the screen
- Whenever I used the touch mode to scroll the screen, it jumps randomly all over the place, usually to the bottom
- In the tutorial I couldn't even figure out how to get to the beach as requested as pressing over an icon just wasn't doing anything. Eventually it did it, but I have no idea how I did it. In between this, in standard movement control it seemed to scroll one pixel per second
- Playing the game in hybrid or touch mode it just wouldn't move to where I wanted half the time and pressing seemeded to scroll the screen a few pixels instead

btw, When I first started (ipod touch) the music started but all I got was a corrupted bitmap (of nothing, just random yellow mainly) and had to restart. It worked ever since though.

Congrats on your position Trent. Afterwing HD (the ipad one) has been free for its second day and I hit #8 in action. I'm waiting for it to slip before I set it back to paid. The ipad market is alot smaller though, so I'm not expecting much.

You should have a real nice boost in sales when you set it back to paid though.

For the app store, Apple's whole system and algorithm for apps is effectively the perfect marketing team. Many businesses try to apply traditional marketing to iPhone, waste tons of money on it, and get nowhere doing it. The more I study successes the more it is clear to me the app store is about making quality apps people want. If you can do that you will find success.^[1]

Let me reiterate that for emphasis: The app store is about making quality apps people want.

The sales cost varies from industry to industry. By industry I mean some very specific industry (ie. talking about 'software' is too big of an industry. Think more like software to run a parking garage).

Every industry has some kind of sales to work out. And that is the natural order of things. People have their own lives, their own businesses to worry about. And you're worrying about yours. To connect your business to your customer's business there must be some translation of mindsets that makes your value clear.

People often complain about how hard it is to do sales and also complain about how people selling to them don't 'get it.' I find this very humours because they're the same problem. You should "get it" when it comes to your customers just like people selling to you should "get it."

A lot of engineers are black on and white on sales issues. They imagine a world of perfect information where everyone researches every exact detail of everyone else's work and picks the best one. The cost of this is too high to be a reality. It would be economic suicide to aim for it!^[2]

I still don't get the Screen Spy app store entry. You click to go to the home page for more information and end up at Dusty's food emporium.

This is the wrong way to look at the market. Every market attracts people that don't figure it out. The iPhone app store, while not an exception, probably has a much better success rate than any other software venture.

The right question you should be asking is: Can I figure this out?

In the majority of cases the reason smart people can't figure it out is because they've convinced themselves of some stupid reason not to.

Apple requires a webpage. I don't care to build a webpage until I have serious traction. dustytech.com is another one of my businesses.