I find this to be the best suggestion thus far. iPhone apps are making more and more money each day. I believe the percentage is 70/30 nowadays. So If you sell 15,000 copies of your game at a price of $2.99 a piece you will bring in 70% or $31,395 which will be pretty close to bringing you to your goal (still have to pay taxes.)
Problem with iPhone dev is that there's a lead time to ramp up. It takes time to learn Objective C, learn the various SDKs, build your app, get it into the app store, and get people to buy it. By then, the iPhone craze may very well be over.
I'd do this only if you already know Cocoa/Obj-C development and don't have to ramp up your dev skills, or if you're planning to get in it for the long haul and actually build a real business around iPhone apps.
Incidentally, I ran into this same thing with my startup and FaceBook apps. When it came out, I was like "Wow, this is cool, we can surf this wave and get instant adoption." But I was still at my day job, and by the time I'd quit and really had time to devote to it, the Facebook app market was saturated and all my friends were like "Get these damn zombies and throwable sheep off my page!" I ended up not learning the platform, which turned out to be a smart choice in retrospect, since only the Slides/RockYous made appreciable money off it (and I'm not even sure about them - what's Slide's valuation now? It isn't still $500M, is it?)
I think the problem is that there actually is a lot of lead time on this. I think a lot of the explosive apps you see were people that started early and had a lot of failures before they finally got a win. Still a bit of a gold rush going on, but it is a gold rush. Most people strike out.
I've been making iPhone apps for about 7 months now. My third app was approved less than 2 days ago. Here is a brief summary of my experience:
First app
- a 0.99 cents novelty app
- 1 month dev time
- 3 months wait for approval
- sold about 1500 copies to date
- received about $300 from Apple (more on the way)
- sales are down to about 10 copies / day
Second App
- simple, innovative 0.99 cents game that wasn't polished
- 1.5 months dev time
- 2 days wait for approval
- sold about 150 copies in the first few days
- received small amount of money from Apple
- sales immediately dropped to < 1 copy / day after the first week
- app removed from store 3 weeks after release
Third app
- super-simple free noise making app a la sound grenade, ifart etc
- 5 hours dev time
- 1 week wait for approval
- 250 downloads the first day (today is the second day)
- no money yet... an ad-supported version is awaiting approval into app store
