One of the earliest winners in the iPhone apps sweepstakes was a guy named Steve Demeter. He made a cool US$250,000 in just two months for creating a gaming puzzle called Trism. More recently, a nine-year-old boy in Singapore made several thousand dollars by selling a doodle app he created for his baby sister and Ethan Nicholas, a struggling programmer at Sun Microsystems, made $800,000 in five months writing his iShoot app — an artillery game — in his spare time.
The extraordinary success of the iPhone and Apple’s revolutionary online distribution system have created a vast eco-system in which developers, even rank amateurs, can take a shot at fame and fortune. India, with its large developer community, probably, has been a trifle slow in capitalizing on the opportunity but Sourcebits, a three-year-old software company with offices in Bangalore and Atlanta, has ratcheted up three big hits on the iPhone app store and some others are fancying their chances.
“SnakeXT, Night Stand and PocketBracket, our three iPhone applications and games are rated among the Top 100 in Apple iTunes Store,” said Rohit Singal, a Director at Sourcebits, which was among the first 3,000 developers across the world to get an iPhone developer license.
At one point, Night Stand — a simple bedside clock — was among the Top 3 apps with over four million downloads in four months. Together, Sourcebits earned over $200,000 for its
three applications.
“It turned out there was no application like this — simple, stylish and uncluttered,” Singal said of Night Stand, released last November. Over time, the company has added features such as time zone switching, screen dimming and vintage themes like Flip Clock, Classic LCD and Binary Clock.
Creating iPhone apps doesn’t come readily to all developers and poses unique challenges of working with the programming language Objective C.
“iPhone is a mobile platform but users expect desktop-like performance from the device. So memory and application size optimization for the applications are big challenges,” said Singal.
Expectedly, many more developers are eyeing what can be very lucrative opportunities. Endeavour Software Technologies, which specialises in developing mobile applications, is making an app that will enable golfers download performance data straight from golf courses. It’ll hit the market by October, according to PD Sreenivasan, Endeavour’s Product Manager.
Robosoft Technologies, an Udupi-based company, has
developed a religious app targeting Indians worldwide. “Shri Vishnu Prarthana and Shri
Durga Prarthana…allow users to pray while on the move, on their iPhones,” said CEO Rohith Bhat. “The apps enable you to listen to Chalisa and chant. It’s a virtual pooja room experience, as consumers perform aarti and light incense sticks.”
Bhat is now developing an app to display New York train timings, expected to be ready later this year.
—Kavita@epmltd.com