Late to the Gold Rush

So much big, early money had been made in mobile-device applications that the industry came to resemble a latter-day gold rush. Sure, it's likely there will be more "killer apps" released in the future, but with low barriers to entry the competition has become extremely fierce.

App development now resembles the entertainment and publishing industries, which have a few enormously wealthy celebrities at the top, a sizable minority in the middle, and the majority at subsistence wages, if that. From a survey of app game developers the NY Times writes:

the app world is an ecology weighted heavily toward a few winners. A quarter of the respondents said they had made less than $200 in lifetime revenue from Apple. A quarter had made more than $30,000, and 4 percent had made over $1 million.

My friend has been working on an iPad app as a supplement to his consulting business. The process is fascinating, but we

lack the technical know-how to build mobile apps on [our] own. The options range from using online app-building tools, to taking crash courses in computer programming and coding languages, hiring a costly professional on contract, or recruiting a full-time developer.

So we've opted to pay for outside help. In the past year all three staffpersons assigned to our project have left (separately) for greener pastures. Partly out of self-preservation and partly out of curiosity we are slogging through technical manuals and code, even trying our hand at simple app-writing.

We're a little late to the party, but the lure of app gold in them thar' hills is irresistible. © 2013 Stephen Yuen