Camera+ does $500k net sales in 2 months

It's very likely that the AppStore market follows a power-law (or Zipf or Pareto) distribution of some sort. That is, the top 10 take 10% of the revenues, the next 100 take 10%, the next 1000 take 10%, etc. What the scaling exponent and constants are is anyone's guess without detailed sales data.<p>This is similar to how most unregulated markets work. Consider restaurants. There are a handful of massive international chains, a small number of medium size chains and a huge number of mom &#38; pop eateries, some of which do quite well (relatively speaking) and some of which just fail.<p>Final analysis: you won't get rich on apps unless you're either A) very lucky or B) efficiently create quality apps at good prices with good marketing. I'd hope that most people on HN would opt for B :-).

The thing is, Camera+ frankly isn't that impressive. It has a cute but useless SLR animation but there are better camera apps out there (Hipstamatic, GorilllaCam or just the built-in app). I'm actually disappointed that I bought Camera+ and can't help feeling it's hype (marketing) over functionality.<p>Having the pretty Lisa (<a href="http://mostlylisa.com" rel="nofollow">http://mostlylisa.com</a>) as spokesperson can't have hurt either (yeah, I'm cynical like that)

I'm sorry. I can't really relate to tap tap tap. They're amazing at what they do (and proof you need a custom UI to deliver some user experiences best).<p>I really like Andrew Johnson of TrailBehind, Inc. He's active on HN and succeeding in the competitive iPhone market.<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1495153" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1495153</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=835433" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=835433</a> (iPhone Ask HN launch)<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355093" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1355093</a> (Android launch)<p>&#62; For a counterpoint, my start-up (me, my fiancée, and my good friend) started an indie GPS app at the tail end of last summer. We worked hard, did many iterations, built up our userbase, and now we have several top grossing navigation apps, and we are piling up cash in the bank.

I know jealousy is wrong, but damn I wish I had created an app like this ;)

The link appears to be dead? (404 on blog)

A friend of me showed me the app on his new iPhone 4 and my immediate thought was "what an incredibly cheesy app". Putting a fake SLR viewer on the screen, at a time when even real SLR cameras don't have that kind of viewer anymore? Come on...<p>More power to taptaptap, though - they clearly have their market cornered. It is just sobering, because I personally would never have created that kind of app.<p>Psychologically, it seems to be a very interesting case. I guess iPhone people really buy into a fake reality and manage to live in it, more or less (that is now they feel like they have a sleek SLR camera). As long as money doesn't run out anyway.<p>I seem to have a similar reaction to all the Appleish design as the girl from "Pattern Recognition" has to the Micheline Man.