[nicpottier]

They also forgot the part where no-one is making any money on it. I know two of the top developers personally, and we ourselves have a pretty successful app in there. But there is nowhere near enough sales to make a living, even for the top selling apps.

It's unclear why the Android market is so much worse in this respect, I suppose having 50x less users is part of it, but I suspect there is something about the Android user which makes them less likely to buy. Downloading and installing cracked versions of the apps (and they are all cracked) is also dead simple.

In summary, great platform for users, terrible, terrible platform to make money on.

[sukuriant]

Perhaps it could be thought of as the Open Source phone, then. Developers in the OSS community may well prefer to develop for it, because getting your app listed in the market is much, much easier than getting it added to Apple. Also, out of the box, it's vastly more customizable than the iPhone. These two features, to me, make it a definite phone to buy and develop for. When I fully understand how the camera works, I'm intending to develop an app to enhance its functionality :) I wouldn't be doing that for the iPhone!

[djb_hackernews]

But there are other ways to monetize, right? Have you tried anything else?

I think it's also a testament to how easy it is to develop on. Admittedly I've only developed one trivial app for the emulator, but I jumped on the bandwagon way early, and it's only gotten easier. It's a tight little platform and anyone with an idea, an email address, and a couple hundred bucks to send to the Philippines will come out with a useable marketable app.

[waterlesscloud]

Order of magnitude, what's a top app make in a month?

[nicpottier]

Thousands.

[flamoot]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1053831

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