This is the opinion of people who don't try or fail at the App Store.
For a counterpoint, my start-up (me, my fiancée, and my good friend) started an indie GPS app at the tail end of last summer. We worked hard, did many iterations, built up our userbase, and now we have several top grossing navigation apps, and we are piling up cash in the bank.
We don't have a marketing budget. All we do is engineer and Tweet, and we have had steady growth. Now we are also licensing the mapping platform to a handful of other companies, and I'm guessing our revenues will double or triple over the next couple of months, again.
For all those deciding whether to do an iPhone app, it can be done. But pick a niche and plan to work harder than any job you've ever had, or it probably won't pay off. There may be a lot of disgustingly successful Fart apps, outliers in the game section, and the like. But there are also indie devs that make a job of it, and there is plenty of money in it for us too.
People like to say the "App Store" is a bad bet. The truth is, any start-up is a longshot, and the App Store is a fine way to sell software. We pivoted away from the web and Facebook because we found it too hard to monetize, even though we had strong traffic growth and we had won an fbFund grant early on. Different strategies work for different people - you just have to experiment, instead of basing your decisions on bad assumptions and never reevaluating them.
I think you hit the nail on the head here re: people who don't try or have failed as App Store developers.
I was in the App Store Day 1 of the iPad launch with an iPad-specific app. It was my first shipping iOS app and I built it in about 2 weeks in the evenings after work (I already knew Obj-C.) I won't get into specifics, but it's made me thousands of dollars. Apple handles the central distribution, the payment processing, application updates, crash reports, ALL of that, and puts money into my checking account at the end of each month. What more can I possibly ask for?
I have friends that are making serious money from the App Store, tens of thousands per month by themselves or split with a designer/developer friend they're working with. None of them are leaving, none of them are complaining, none of them are turning their native Obj-C apps into web apps.
For everyone out there who hates the App Store because of bad publicity and articles like this, please remember that there are tons of ordinary developers out there making good money doing stuff they love. The App Store and the approval process has a TON of flaws, but all I know is it's the #1 distribution center for apps to mobile devices and it's just getting bigger. Right now there's no better way to quickly build an app and start getting paid. Ranting about everyone moving to web apps doesn't do much to change this fact.
Well, I guess I should say we do a bit more than just Tweet :)
* We also network with companies to get their content in our app (maps and data), which leads to links from their sites. This is a constant activity and we see this as the primary way to create a defensible market position in the category. Not only do we get something to sell, but our partners go out and sell their customers too.
* We have a popular hiking website (that's what we first build before switching to mobile dev) and this provides us with good PageRank for some searches, since we link our app site.
* We also have started to make all sorts of nice PR contacts - this seems to come organically the more you hang around a niche (hiking and backpacking for us). We will probably get our first real write-ups this summer.
* We have tried some Facebook and Google ads but we don't have a good handle on how well they convert, so we pretty much stopped that... just using a free credit to advertise our Android app on Google now.
* Our most effective strategy is we offer the 50 free promo codes we get from Apple for each release on our website, to anyone who asks. This leads to a lot of blog posts and App reviews.
* We also heavily cultivate our beta group, which leads to solid software and word-of-mouth.
Is there any data about success/fail rates for the two paths? I don't mean to sound negative (congrats to you on finding success!), but personal anecdotes really mean very little. If we could say that 5% of web apps gain a following on mobile platforms, but 10% of native mobile apps do, that would be something we could actually use to make an educated decision about which path to take.
Or maybe data on revenue for the types, or something. Although I imagine it's more difficult to make money with a mobile web app than a native mobile app, since the payment processing is built into the native-app system. Perhaps I'm just revenue-generation uncreative, though.
For a counterpoint, my start-up (me, my fiancée, and my good friend) started an indie GPS app at the tail end of last summer. We worked hard, did many iterations, built up our userbase, and now we have several top grossing navigation apps, and we are piling up cash in the bank.
We don't have a marketing budget. All we do is engineer and Tweet, and we have had steady growth. Now we are also licensing the mapping platform to a handful of other companies, and I'm guessing our revenues will double or triple over the next couple of months, again.
For all those deciding whether to do an iPhone app, it can be done. But pick a niche and plan to work harder than any job you've ever had, or it probably won't pay off. There may be a lot of disgustingly successful Fart apps, outliers in the game section, and the like. But there are also indie devs that make a job of it, and there is plenty of money in it for us too.
People like to say the "App Store" is a bad bet. The truth is, any start-up is a longshot, and the App Store is a fine way to sell software. We pivoted away from the web and Facebook because we found it too hard to monetize, even though we had strong traffic growth and we had won an fbFund grant early on. Different strategies work for different people - you just have to experiment, instead of basing your decisions on bad assumptions and never reevaluating them.