Don't quit your day
job
Despite the success stories and the attractive business model
offered by Apple, Australian developers warn that building an
application is no guarantee of financial success.
"I feel I just got lucky," Yates says. "I wouldn't recommend people quit their job and do it. It was quite easy to make a fair bit of money early on, and that's why I was in a rush to get into it, but it drops off over time. Some people make it big, but it'd be wrong to expect it to be the norm."
Dawson agrees, saying that it's becoming increasingly difficult to become known as a quality developer among the crowd. "With there being thousands of apps out there, there are a handful that have hit the big time, but they also get the most publicity, so people get the impression anyone can do that," he says.
"It needs to be balanced," Ahern says. "Everybody loves a story about who had a laptop, spare time and is now a millionaire, but not everybody is getting the million-dollar applications."
Ahern says good ideas will work if executed properly, but it's just not enough to have the tools available to you. "Novelty apps have done very well, but follow ups have had no attraction whatsoever," he says. "We've made apps that are more impulse buys, and we're being very careful to spend a week or two on them, not three months or so because the risk is far too high.
"It's not a sure-fire recipe for success, but I encourage anybody to try it ... just don't sell your house in the process."
The future
But despite the drawbacks, these developers and analysts predict
the application market will eventually become a major industry in
its own right. "Application stores means people need to have a rethink about
how their business is going to market," Fawkner says. "The industry
is going to be huge. I suspect we'll see a lot of changes over the
next few years."
Ahern predicts that as more, smaller developer houses enter the market, larger companies will be eager to work with them and create new content. "Funnily, the big players are excited about that," he says. "So these big players are distributors; when they see a small house get something out they can talk them out and help them out. It's fantastic and everybody is happy with that."
Dawson says that the industry hasn't even begun to explore everything that is possible with application development: "It's all happening very quickly, it's taken on a life of its own. Nobody can be actually certain where it's going, but it's exciting and evolving rapidly."
"This is definitely becoming a market in its own right," Burley says. "There's a lot happening for developers."
This article by SmartCompany.com.au founder and publisher Patrick Stafford is replicated on ZDNet.com.au courtesy of a reciprocal publishing agreement.
God i hope the iPhone dose not become like Facebook. Full of useless childish crap apps. Apple should vet what gets released on the Apps Store.