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Chapter 1: Introduction
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WHY I WROTE APPILLIONAIRES
As you prod deeper into the world of the Appillionaires, the water gets
increasingly murky, and that’s precisely the reason I set out to write this
book. Many of the people I’ve interviewed for Appillionaires have expressed
confusion about the reality of the App Store, despite their massive successes.
First, this book sets out to answer the biggest question on the technology
scene today — What does it take to make a million dollars on the App Store?
However, I also wanted to discover more about the other side of the App
Store: ose who have struggled to nd success.
It’s this other side to the Appillionaire story that is almost more intriguing:
e strange disparity between the amount of money actually made on the
App Store and the public perception of the App Store as a goldmine. I
wanted to discover, rst-hand, if the Appillionaire dream was as widely
realized as it appears to be. And, if it is indeed a rarity, how has the illusion
of probable success been so widely and e ectively spread by the mainstream
media?
is impression of easy riches has been bolstered by newspapers and
magazines, which seem to lap up every minor App Store success story with a
mesmerizing eagerness. Apps have gone mainstream, pop-culture even: e
masses have heard the apocryphal tales, the rags-to-riches stories, and they
want to live the dream too. ey wear Angry Bird T-shirts, and they tell each
other increasingly ridiculous stories about the lavish houses of the program-
mer who built the wildly successful iShoot app. ey draw game plans for
world domination using Sketchbook on their iPads. But what is o en
forgotten, in the telling of these capitalist parables, is that few Appillionaires
were true overnight successes.
As Mills tells me of Angry Birds, “People say it was an overnight
success. Well, yes, it was an overnight success a er 52 other failed
attempts.”
WHERE WILL THE MARKET TAKE US?
en there is the new wave of app makers. ey’re thinking bigger and
they’re better nanced — some might say ridiculously nanced. Apps like
Color, which cost $41 million to launch, shocked the industry by demon-
strating just how much raw cash investors were willing to throw at the
mirage, but it was just the beginning. By April, the creators of an iPad app
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