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Comment by alextgordon | Hacker News Reader

This is an incredibly one-sided view. Clearly if you're a Mac developer, you switch to iPhone development and you start receiving truckloads of cash, you're going to think Mac developers would be stupid not to do the same. However:

1. Most iPhone apps are not incredibly successful.

2. Taptaptap has the full weight of the MacHeist marketing machine behind it.

Even if a swathe of Mac developers did move to iPhone, it wouldn't be long before the majority moved back to the Mac when the iPhone Dream didn't materialise. Indeed, if Mac development was going to die, it would have done already.

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I think the point is that given a set of skills and resources (i.e. Cocoa & great design skills) it's way more profitable (5x in TapTapTap's case) to direct them towards iPhone development.

There are different opportunities on the two platforms, but the difference in profitability will absolutely draw some people away from Mac development: it's drawing people away from everything — I know at least 5 ex-Java or .Net guys doing iPhone development full time now.

> it wouldn't be long before the majority moved back to the Mac when the iPhone Dream didn't materialise.

It might be less competitive, but it's not like Mac development is a sure bet that you can just fall back on.

neither of your points matters if you believe his assertion that (roughly) the 1000th most popular iPhone app generates 5x the revenue of the 100th most popular Mac shareware app.

Not entirely a fair comparison. It's comparing shareware apps to the entire iPhone market. I'd venture to guess that nobody would call anything put out by Microsoft, Adobe, EA, or hundreds of other companies shareware, but those same companies are all in the same iPhone market.

Having some knowledge of practical shareware economics, this seems to me to neglect that the 100th most popular Mac shareware app will have significant revenue next year barring black swans or the programmer removing it from the market, but the 1000th most popular iPhone app is at the mercy of a hideous sales trajectory.

The main drivers of sales in shareware all get better with age, which is the exact opposite of the main drivers of sales in iPhone apps.

Top 300 apps make $700-$1000/day, so what they're seeing isn't at all outside the norm for folks with reasonably popular apps. #1 Books = #260 overall, as a reference point.

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