Sometimes I feel like I passed up a big opportunity not getting in on the iPhone market. Other times, I feel like the app market is like very packed concert where people get crushed and trampled, and avoiding it was a good move.
edit: I'll add too that "real money" does not mean riches. I make an adequate salary making apps and am very happy.
Getting into the paid mobile app market was never a viable long-term strategy, but it was certainly capable of making someone extremely wealthy for a while.
Repeated past observations imply that years after the bubble pops they'll still be .edu's offering classes to prepare noobs into the bubble, which no longer exists anymore.
- much lower barriers to entry (Apps are much less complex than websites that need to work on many different browsers, especially with iOS)
- micropayments are built-in, users will pay for additional content/features much more often
- scales much better (most of the functionality is in the client)
On the other hand, it's relatively unlikely that an App released today will work or be useful in 10 years - so it's an even faster market than websites.
I can't really agree with this. I did web dev for ten years before I got into iOS and iOS development is far more difficult. You have to deal with threading, pointers, tight resource limits, crufty persistence APIs, flaky network connections, etc etc. A typical web app is far easier to build and maintain.