Appillionaires: Secrets from Developers Who Struck It Rich on the App Store

Chapter 1: Introduction

They are the Appillionaires: Smart, ambitious dreamers in bedrooms and garages across the world, plotting the future of mobile apps. Their tools are inexpensive — a MacBook Pro and an iPhone — but overnight the Appillionaires can amass a fortune from selling software on the iTunes App Store. They lead a revival of the hobbyist programmer. Not since the days of the Commodore 64 and Atari 2600 has indie software been sold by such tiny teams of programmers to such massive numbers of consumers.

The money flows to the Appillionaires even as they sleep. While they dream their Angry Bird-dreams, invisible electronic transfers push money into the Appillionaires’ bank accounts from App Stores in over 80 different countries. As much as $250 million gets spent at the App Store in a single month. Over 10 billion apps have been sold on the store to date and it’s estimated that Apple has signed up at least 79,000 software publishers to the iOS (iPhone and iPad operating system) club.

What’s remarkable is that Apple’s credibility was bolstered so much by the success of the iPod and iPhone that the rise of the iPhone app was widely predicted. Even before the launch of the App Store back in 2008, Wired magazine speculated, “iPhone software development may spark a software gold rush not seen since the heyday of PC-platform development in the 1990s.”

There’s Gold in Them Hills

It’s this label “gold rush” that has been most often applied to the App Store. The potential for ...