Society Journal

Not everyone can make $1 million in a few short days; it sounds like a scam but one iPhone app developer did exactly that, well nearly a million dollars, by creating a game that was downloaded 10,000 times a day several days in a row allowing its creator to reach the top spot of the Top Paid Apps Section of Apple’s iPhone app charts.

As of lately, there hasn’t been a method for personal iPhone developers to create wealth on their own developing apps for the Apple iPhone apps store.  Big companies are the ones that dominate the software market and the established delivery routine for self-determining programmers, shareware, is not favorable to hitting the big time money making team.  However, Apple’s iTunes App Store supplies a stage for selling, distributing and marketing software; a programmer desires to provide some working code for a good idea.

The creator of iShoot, Ethan Nichols, proves there is enough possibility to become wealthy with Apple’s App Store.  Just this past September, another iPhone app programmer, Steve Demeter claims to have completed $250,000 in sales within only two months by means of his puzzle game Trism.

Nichols, an engineer, would get done with this shift and work on iShoot for about eight hours each day holding his one-year-old son in one hand and coding with the other.  He had no funds to purchase paperbacks to learn how to code or how to write iPhone apps, so he self taught himself by interpretation of websites.

Nichols said he was inspired by the creator of Trism and his family was in financial crisis with medical bills in addition to his company cutting bonuses; he felt he needed to do something.

In October of this past year iShoot was release with little fanfare and even smaller sales.  Then Nichols finally obtained a little extra time, he created iShoot Lite, which was released in January of this year as a free app and inside that version he promoted the $3 complete edition of iShoot.  Since October he had lowered the price from $6 and added the free “Lite” adaptation.  2.4 million users downloaded iShoot Lite which led to 320,000 satisfied iShoot Lite players who paid for the full version of iShoot.  The game rapidly skyrocketed to the number one spot and remained there for nearly 26 days. 

Nichol’s story conveys how a smart advertising plan could pay off in a monetary way and acknowledgment on the iPhone store, plus he didn’t even have to hire a public relations firm.  The components to his achievement were basically word-of-mouth – you have to try this game – quality of the game, and a bit of luck.