I can’t imagine 3,000-5,000 is going to get you all that much sdesign.  $30,000 isn’t ridiculous at all depending on what you are getting out of it.

Check out http://www.PhoneFreelancer.com - its a free website that connects you with iPhone development quotes for your app idea. Most quotes are in the range of $3000-$5000. Definitely not as high as $30,000 that’s ridiculous.

I wonder what would happen if it were free to create an iPhone app!

And how about if you develop it and get apps for Blackberry, Samsung, LG and Nokia too.

Try eyemags.com to create your own apps for free and download them for free too. The apps are content apps and therefore simple, but if that suits your idea then it might suit you.

The Average cost for billing an Iphone app is $30,000?  Where did you get that statistic?

A lot of the apps in the store are built by people in their spare time for free, are those included in your statistics?

Lets say for the sake of argument that thats true, how much does it cost to develop for all the other phones in the world and how much can you make selling on those?

More and more Iphones are bought every day, and as someone pointed out there are also the Ipod touches which can also download the apps.

And yes the guy who made $700,000 likely can't sustain that indefinitely, but unless he's planning to retire and live entirely off his app I don't see the problem.

Man! Martin Hill reminds me of a CNBC host before the stock market tanked. "It's not a bubble" ..."It's different this time"...."This is a new paradigm". Time will tell, and the truth will be somewhere in between Martin's view and the other extreme.  I'll probably see Martin Hill porting his apps to symbian one day.

Excellently said, Mart!!! Great programmers never write on more than 2 to 3 platforms. iPhone Unix is a full blown Unix with the most advanced OS features the world has ever known. While other vendors, especially Rim, convolute themselves with hardware oriented gadgets these vendors are hurting two parties, the customers who are taken for endless rides in disjoint hardware choices without any obvious advantage, and the vendors themselves whose products and services continue to lag further and further because the applications running on their products cannot even collaborate among themselves. Take Rim as a prime example, the applications running on the Storm can't even collaborate with the Bold. It is very important for software that the programs are portable, scalable, extensible, and able to collaborate with external systems/services. That means only one cndidate: the Apple platform, which scales all the Apple platform as well as other mainstream platforms.

Of course in order to target those hundreds of millions of non-iPhone users, you would need to write dozens of different versions of your app and certify it on thousands of different combinations of OS, CPU, screen size, UI, carrier etc and have to write to the lowest common denominator which means terribly constrained resources and quality.

Even just writing for Blackberry, you're faced with multiple versions of processor, some with touch screen, some not, some with accelerometer, most not, most with tiny screens and low resolution, others with bigger screens, most without fast 3G connectivity and all with very constrained space for apps in internal storage.

Contrast that with all 30 million iPhones and iPod Touches sharing the same high level of specs as a base - huge 3.5" 480x320 multi-touch screens, millions of colours, built-in hardware graphics acceleration, gigabytes and gigabytes of storage, 128MB of RAM, accelerometer, WiFi, USB, the same version of the desktop-class OS X operating system etc.

It is not surprising developers say writing and for the iPhone and delivering to users is a quantum leap easier and more lucrative than any other platform.

-Mart

But that 1%of worldwide cellphone owners is one of he most lucrative segments of consumers - 17 million consumers willing and able to spend big bucks on an expensive smartphones and dataplans who buy enormous amounts of content. 

As a developer, which market would you prefer to develop for - a couple of hundred million users fragmented over dozens of OSes and thousands of different models of hardware most of which are crappy free dumbphones and the cheapest possible plan in a third world country or 30 million of the most app-hungry, connected, wealthy users on the planet?

I know which I'd pick.

-Mart

It is all hype. iPhones do represent a lot of mobile web traffic, but its the same 1% of users over and over.

(cont'd from comment above)

In other words, this is no bubble and you’d be mad not to target the 30 million iPhone and iPod Touch users out there that will very soon have downloaded a BILLION apps, 7 times more programs than the downloads recorded by the entire rest of the mobile market in a year.

Just like the iPod's dominance of the MP3 player market and iTunes dominance of the digital music market, all signs point to the iPhone and iPod Touch continuing to have a major impact on the mobile app market.

-Mart

(cont'd from previous comment)
Next is Google’s discovery a little while back that 50 times more searches occur from Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset.  Google “thought it was a mistake and made their engineers check the logs again,” said Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/667f13de-da60-11dc-9bb9-0000779fd2ac.html

Then there is Admob’s latest figures show the iPhone has grabbed 50% of US mobile web traffic and 33% of worldwide traffic:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/24/iphone-now-50-percent-of-smartphone-web-traffic-in-the-us/

Wow, Sarah at Bango continues to attempt to obfuscate the enormous impact and mobile marketshare that the iPhone has captured in order to further Bango's own agenda and product.

How about mentioning a few other statistics like:
NetApplications in Feb 2009 found that compared to all other mobile platforms, the iPhone had a web browser marketshare of about 66% or 10 times greater than Windows Mobile/WinCE, 10 times greater than Nokia’s Symbian and about 30x larger than RIM Blackberry.  No other mobile platform comes close.  The iPhone is even thrashing non-mobile platforms such as the Nintendo Wii (36x greater), PS3 (16x greater) etc.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/03/01/apple_iphone_controls_over_66_of_all_mobile_web_use.html

(cont'd next comment)

The Bango stats come from the month of February when we had 1.1 million unique visitors browsed to mobile websites and buy mobile content and services.  The reason why we decided to publishing this data is we have come across brands and businesses who genuinely believe that having an iPhone optimized site is all they need to have a mobile strategy.

With global penetration of the iPhone at 1% according to Gartner, you can clearly see why a strategy like this is flawed. We wanted to add weight to argument that you are missing out on the mass market if you just focus on the iPhone.

Wow, you picked some selective stuff there. Bango measures what? The iPhone goes to the real web, not the mobile web. Anyone looking at Bango's results will laugh.

Are you interpreting Lowenstein's comments as bad? I would think his comment is good. It means that the app market is still just starting if success is still just 1% attachment.

Burry's comment is self-serving, isn't it? And, does his comment about the music industry make sense? With all that capital behind the label, it's struggling, right? So, how is that capital helping?

Clearly, Blum and Sharma don't have the intelligence or skill to come up with a solution do they? Who's gonna hire them?

Excellent point about the iPhone Touch - and why I don't own one, but rather an iPhone. - I wouldn't take the iPod everywhere and wouldn't always be near wifi.  The always-on internet of the iPhone is perhaps its greatest asset; and clearly apps that hit the internet often are of much more use on the iPhone than an iPod touch. 

So why would someone develop for the iPhone rather than other devices?  As I said - consistency of target device - if you write for the IPhone OS ... pretty much all those devices have the same features (GPS vs. no GPS, 3G vs. EDGE, granted that's true).

There may be a subset of developers who would be better off targeting another platform, or other platforms first… but there is also another group of developers who will only target the iPhone - a lot of these are Mac developers - because only the iPhone draws their interest and use due to its design, OS abilities, and interface. 

All this said, there are almost too many apps on the app store and plenty of complaints from independent developers of price-pressure; i.e. they can't sell an app for $1-$2 and live on that.  If anything those cheap or free apps that are simple can potentially crowd out a lot of more interesting / complex apps; I think that's the potential biggest problem with the app store.

Marcos, this is a great point. There are about 30 million iPod Touch users. Probably for games and similar apps, this is a valid point, and those users should be counted. But at the end of the day, it requires Wi-Fi to be connected. What happens when you have more connected features/apps going forward? Will people be in Wi-Fi range enough to be such active/engaged users? Plus, they likely don't carry their Touch with them wherever they go, unlike the phone.
Just a thought,
Tricia

You're forgetting the iPod Touch.  There are 30 million iPhone OS devices out there; all with basically the exact same screen and abilities - it's quite a platform; unlike other mobile OS's which run on a multitude of different phones with a multitude of button, keyboards, and other hardware - (and almost all OS updates are controlled by the carrier)

I'm also not sure what this means "the iPhone is the 24th most-popular handset for browsing and buying mobile content on the mobile web."  Does that mean buying ringtones?  Other "mobile" products that are carrier-specific?  Because the iphone is blowing away everyone in terms of web usage:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8

Yep, it's a bubble and merchandising within the Apple Appstore is challenging :-).

For all the hype about the mass-market being ignored, let's be clear—it is not!  Publishers have been working very hard for many years in these channels and carriers have been working equally hard to make it a pile of crap ;-).

Right now, content consumption on the iPhone indexes very high, as it does on Bberry and some other platforms.  It's also a great platform in terms of the experience it can provide for the user and there's only 1 port to build, not hundreds.

Whether one publishes on carrier decks or via App storefronts, it's a "hits based business" either way.

So, you can force the content to the masses or focus your efforts where it matters, just depends on how much leverage you want to bring to the party.