[andrewljohnson]

Most people don't try and build apps that they know will suit an audience, and most people don't try for long enough (as with anything).

I believe that anyone who works on an iPhone app in their spare time for a year, and who picks a known winner category (GPS tracking, bible app, free book downloader, offline city maps, etc.) can make a living.

Remember - most people who try at everything fail. Right now, the mobile market is red-hot, and it's a good way to make a living. It's got to be the easiest way to sell software and make money, with a much higher success rate than making a website or a Facebook app.

Moreover, you can command ridiculous rates as a contractor right now for iOS expertise - much better than for JavaScript programming on average.

[chc]

I don't mean to be argumentative, but I still think you're making it sound a lot easier than it is. For example, I know more about iPhone dev than most people who aren't full-time iPhone devs, but I have no idea what is a "known winner" category or even how I'd go about guessing. AFAIK, Apple doesn't release the kind of numbers I'd need to figure out what categories are profitable. With a web app, we can use analytics, keyword tools, A/B testing, etc.

This feeling — that releasing for the iPhone is a crapshoot and that anything I release would probably be crowded out by the absolute flood of junk in the App Store — is why I've never bothered with the iPhone, despite having done Cocoa development since the early days of OS X.