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Appillionaires: Secrets from Developers Who Struck It Rich on the App Store
THERE’S GOLD IN THEM HILLS
It’s this label “gold rush” that has been most o en applied to the App Store.
e potential for success, and risk of failure, is so great that in many ways the
App Store has provoked a gold rush among developers. Although the
successes are spectacular, the failures are apocalyptic.  e mainstream press
focuses on the glorious few and gives very little attention to the money being
lost on the App Store — a problem compounded by the embarrassed silence
of those struggling to turn a pro t on their work. In a climate where
approximately 540 apps are submitted for review every day, its easy to see
why the Appillionaires are an exclusive and rare breed.
Back in the 80s a catastrophic failure to sell so ware was a more obvious and
public humiliation. Take Ataris E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), a failed
videogame which le the company with losses of over $100 million and the
embarrassing problem of what to do with 3.5 million unsold E.T. cartridges
(the answer, apparently, was to bury them in a New Mexico land ll). But
today such failures are even harder to see with the naked eye. For every
Appillionaire, there are several thousand invisible, failed app developers.
ese developers have had their dreams of app superstardom cruelly
smashed into a million little pixels. More humbling still is the realization
that, despite everything the App Store has done to democratize so ware
development, ultimately success may come from more unpredictable forces
than basic hard work. Most indie developers struggle to get any attention for
their apps — they simply dont have the marketing clout of giant corpora-
tions and must rely entirely on their placement in the App Store. For many,
the only real chance of success is to be featured by Apple in one of the highly
desirable iTunes banner adverts.
As iPhone developer Sean Maher points out, “you cant put ‘get
featured by Apple’ in your business plan any more than you can
put ‘win the lottery’ in your personal budget.
e Appillionaires are engaged in trench warfare against each other, and
against the traditional publishers of corporate Americas vanguard. App
development has become a cut-throat industry where an increasing small
number of independent players battle it out for the attention of over 180
million iPhone and iPad owners, each of these owners downloading around
ve apps per month.  e competition is so intense that the App Store is
scarred by the Appillionaires rivalry. Shills have been known to clog up their
rivals apps with bad reviews on iTunes, while writing positive reviews for
their own apps. Apples Phil Schiller has gone as far as to remove a developer
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