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Creating a residual income from iPhone apps

For someone who considers themselves a tech-head, I lagged way behind where the Apple iPhone is concerned. I convinced myself that the screen-based keyboard was too fiddly for my large fingers, and created a whole heap of excuses for not getting one.

Last month, when I lost my trusty Nokia, I figured it was time to go out on a limb and jump into the iPhone revolution...and what a revelation that proved to be...I fell in love with technology again.

Anyway, this isn't about how wonderful the iPhone is, how easy it is to use, how seemless the integration between WLAN and 3G networks is...this is about how you can make money developing iPhone apps (and now iPad apps, too!).

Apple provides a host of free development tools to help you create the apps, but joining the developer program as an individual or company costs $99/year.

Once you've developed your new app, you get to set the asking price, of which you'll receive 70% (paid monthly). Apart from the subscription costs for the developer program, selling the app via the Apple App Store is very cheap as there are no credit card, hosting or marketing fees.

Let's do the sums...at the time of writing, the #1 App is a game called "Angry Birds". I can confirm that it's very addictive, having downloaded it myself, and, though I finished it quite quickly, at just US$1.19 it's great value for money - the kind of game you could play through a few times.

There's no way of knowing how many people have purchased this game, but according to this news article, the game was downloaded over 500,000 times in "less than one month " around Feb/March 2010. The developers were working in conjunction with a specialist App Store publisher, but that's still over US$400,000 revenue to share.

It's difficult to find accurate stats on the total number of downloads, but with 1.5 billion downloads in the first 9 months after launch, it could reasonably be assumed that there are tens of millions of downloads every day.

So...you get the idea. This is a gold mine. Now you just need to have an idea for a new app!

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