"While I know that there are thousands of apps you can buy for your iPhone/iPod touch, I've never actually met anyone who's ever bought one."

Did you forget about 1 Billion+ App downloads? Sure, a large portion of them are free. Those free apps can make money with ads+incentives for a freemium upgrade to the "Pro" version. Yes, Apple is harsh with developers. Yes, the iPhone app game is way harder than it seems. I'd rather deal with Apple's process as a small dev, than dealing with carriers and their nonsense. Do they even want to deal with someone making a game on the weekend for fun? Probably not. GTFO and don't come back.

Here's the longer version:

I've been a mobile software developer for 6 years. I've written software for BREW, JavaME, Android, to name a few. I've also published a book about Android (msg me if you want to know the title) so I have a little experience on the subject.

What we're seeing, essentially, is new money vrs old money. In the old way, one's relationship with the carrier was valued above all things. They were the gatekeepers of their respective markets. What they said went, and that was final. But it wasn't always this way.

In the beginning of the BREW and j2me world, it was a free-for-all. Anyone could get rich with a ring tone or wallpaper app. Over the years, however, the big players crowded out the amatures and what's left is a pretty stable system where only the well connected can make any serious money. Deck placement and promotion matter above all else and it's through these two things that the carriers control their app stores.

Fastforward to today, and what you'll see is what was happening in the early days of the GetItNow/MediaMall. A few amatures are getting rich and the big guys have to slug it out with every nerd in his or her basement...The lesson, however, is that it won't always be this way. So make you're money, corner your market, and build your start up right now. The market is, in my humble opinion, stabilizing away from the basement programmer and back to the big guys.... The days of fart apps at #1 are passing, but that doesn't mean you can't make money on it in the mean time.

What's your medium-term view of the market, over the next 1-3 years? iPhone is the buzzword now, what about the potential of BB/Pre/Ovi/Windows Mobile?

In short:

Win Mo: Stable, no big wins or losses

Brew: uh, yea no comment (I think the developers conference was canceled)

Java ME/BB: Blackberry needs to innovate towards the pre/android or it's going to stagnate and die. Java ME needs to die. Haven't had time to look at Java FX yet.

Pre, I think, will go like Android did(except it looks a lot better) there's HUGE hacker appeal but it will probably take 2 years or so to take off.

I also get the feeling that there were some fake accounts involved in getting this to the homepage.

"If my publishers aren't making [enough] money [to pay me], I'm not making money."

"Instead, EA had to sell it to me for $5.99. What a shame."

Yea it's a shame consumers are benefitting from competition and getting higher quality software in the process. I would think by now software developers would understand if you don't offer me a good product at a good price I will just steal it and you will get $0. Be happy with my $5.99 because you could have much less with this attitude.

I was confused by that statement to. I personally don't know any iPhone users who haven't bought at least one app. Okay maybe some were bought with iTunes gift vouchers around Christmas, but still, the app was bought by somebody.

Your $5.99 isn't enough to support developing anything but a cheap, top-50 hit of an application. Thanks to remarkably steep price competition and remarkably poor discoverability, the app store very much lacks anything resembling a long tail.

We sold a small app for $1.99, just to compete with similar apps in the space. If we'd sold our app for $5.99, we would have made a tidy profit on solid initial sales and moved on to make another application. However, at the $5.99 range we're competing with much more polished and comprehensive applications. This left us barely covering our development costs at the $1.99 price, with our sales rapidly declining after the first month.

I can hear traditional airlines grumble: "For 50 USD/EUR we can't even serve proper meals, assign seat numbers or use central hub airports"

"The bar is set too low. Anybody can play in the iPhone space. All it takes is an idea and few thousand dollars to pay someone to build it. The entire process, from idea to launch, takes only six weeks.

In my world--the Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T world--a game costs $50,000 to build and $100,000 to port."

I'm just not sure if the price for the user has actually dropped or just shifted towards paying Apple.

True, you're always going to have people playing Scrabble. But in this brave new world of accelerometer ___location-aware streaming video social network 3D compass games, Scrabble simply can't command the $25 it used to.

Developers are just scratching the surface of what can be done with the hardware in a latest-gen smartphone. 2D bitblitting and 16K WAV SFX aren't going to pull in millions anymore. Sorry to crash your monopoly.

As for EA's pricing, there's no rule that says you need to make a profit off every product you put out. It wouldn't surprise me if a big games company made free iPhone versions of there games to drive interest in the console/ PC versions.

As @jasonlbabtiste points out, there are over 1 billion apps downloaded. Yes, the majority of those are free but many, many, many are not. Even if only 20% of all apps are paid for, at the minimum of $0.99, that's over $200 million dollars. That number is of course much greater, considering that apps for more than $0.99 DO sell, and quite frequently.

So this guy's rant is just that, a rant. Completely unfounded and only based on personal opinion.

People need to realize about the iPhone is that while the App Store is great, in some regards it makes people think it's the end-all-be-all cure. That there is no need to have a polished well designed application and that marketing will just take care of itself. I think the race to the bottom will be solved once the gold rush is off and developers realize they still want to be able to eat. Right now cause too few knew what the market would look like priced their apps too low and it was a snowball effect. The market will rebound, users will either pay for quality or go without.