IPhone Game iShoot earns the Developer $600K in a month

I wonder if he gets a lot of support email.<p>Anyone on HN have an iPhone app out there with a low price point? It already takes a lot of time working on a desktop app and answering support emails. I'm wondering if it takes even more time with a low price product and tons of customers.

One thing I don't understand:<p>&#62; After getting off his shift as an engineer at Sun Microsystems, he worked on iShoot eight hours a day, cradling his 1-year-old son in one hand and coding with the other. He didn't have the money to buy books to learn how to write an iPhone app, so he taught himself by reading websites.<p>I think there's one or 2 main books on writing iPhone apps(both by OReilly) and they're like $35 at Borders(so probably cheaper online). If you're an engineer at Sun, and spending 8 hours a day on this app, how could $35 be stopping you from buying a book?

so...does anyone else see the smart phone as a reboot for consoles? all these games doing well are the kind of games that could have been run on an NES. As we get more and more powerful smart phones will we see the same things?

i'm going to say that the app looks harder to build than it appears. i haven't messed much with open gl or any low-level stuff, but based on what i've heard/seen, it's pretty complex to build graphics/animation-driven apps.

Good for him. It sounds like he really had a rough go of it before he released iShoot. Stories like this always inspire me.

What's interesting is this is one of the top iPhone games, if not the top. Compare it to one of the top Facebook games. Mob Wars makes 2x that much money every single month, and unlike iShoot, it won't fall off of the store and into oblivion very soon. It probably took far less work to launch too.

You've gotta be kidding me.<p>I'd totally build one of these things if Apple would ever actually <i>respond</i> to me. It's been almost a month - anyone else experience this kind of delay?

But now, everyone will start making "Lite" versions of their apps, and the same trick will not work as well as it did for this guy.