“To the iPhone’s extensive résumé, add magazine cover illustration. Artist Jorge Colombo recently drew widespread attention for creating the image for The New Yorker’s June 1 cover on an iPhone using Brushes, a $3.99 mobile application,” Arik Hesseldahl and Peter Burrows report for BusinessWeek.
“Brushes was designed by Steve Sprang, a 32-year-old programmer who lives in Mountain View, Calif. Brushes simulates the experience of painting on the iPhone screen. Users select from a set of brushes and paint colors using their fingers directly on the screen,” Hesseldahl and Burrows report.
“More than 50,000 iPhone owners have downloaded it from Apple’s iTunes Store since Sprang released it in August 2008, and the pace quickened with publicity from The New Yorker cover. Under Apple’s rules, Sprang gets $2.80, or 70%, of each purchase, meaning Brushes has earned him about $140,000 before taxes,” Hesseldahl and Burrows report.
“There is, as Sprang’s experience proves, money to be made selling software applications for the iPhone and other wireless devices. Apple’s iTunes Store [App Store] has led the way, providing the official channel for software that runs not only on the 21.2 million iPhones it has sold, but also an additional 16 million iPod Touch devices. In less than a year of sales, Apple has reported more than a billion downloads overall. Some apps are free, while many cost 99¢ to $9.99—and higher,” Hesseldahl and Burrows report.The most expensive iPhone app, IraPro, at $899.99, is a remote surveillance controller for businesses.”
“And while Apple has led the way by distributing applications it approves via iTunes, wireless rivals have followed Apple’s model,” Hesseldahl and Burrows report.
MacDailyNews Take: Minus approximately 40,000 apps, of course. It’s one thing to set up empty stores with Byzantine payment hoops through which people are required to attempt to jump; it’s quite another to have a real platform, with actual developers, and, oh, by the way, 75+ million credit card accounts safely stored with which customers can seamlessly download apps if they’re not – as many thousands are – free.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]
