Hoping to make iPhone toys as a full-time job

Jenna Wortham

Is there a good way to nail down a steady income in this economy? Try writing a successful program for the iPhone.

Last August, Ethan Nicholas and his wife, Nicole, were having trouble making their mortgage payments. Medical bills from the birth of their younger son were piling up. After learning that his employer, Sun Microsystems, was suspending employee bonuses for the year, Nicholas considered looking for a new job and putting their house in Wake Forest, NC, on the market.

Then he remembered reading about the guy who had made a quarter-million dollars in a hurry by writing a video game called Trism for the iPhone. “I figured if I could even make a fraction of that, we’d be able to make ends meet,” he said.

Nicholas, 30, had never built a game in Objective-C, the coding language of the iPhone. So he searched the internet for tips and used them to figure out the iPhone software development kit that Apple puts out.

Nicholas decided to write an artillery game. He sketched out some graphics and bought inexpensive stock photos and audio files. For six weeks, he worked “morning, noon and night”. After finishing the project, Nicholas sent it to Apple for approval, quickly granted, and iShoot was released into the online Apple store on October. 19.

On the first day itself, iShoot sold enough copies at $4.99 each to net him $1,000. He and Nicole were practically “dancing in the street,” he said.

In January, he released a free version of the game with fewer features, hoping to spark sales of the paid version. It worked: iShoot Lite has been downloaded more than 2 million times, and many people have upgraded to the paid version, which now costs $2.99.

To people who know a thing or two about computer code, stories like his are as tantalizing as full of promise. But the chances of hitting the iPhone jackpot keep getting slimmer: The Apple store is already crowded with look-alike games and kitschy applications, and fresh inventory keeps arriving daily. For every iShoot, which earned Nicholas $800,000 in five months, “there are hundreds or thousands who put all their efforts into creating something, and it just gets ignored in the store,” said Erica Sadun, a programmer and the author of The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook.

The rush to stake a claim on the iPhone is a lot like what happened in Silicon Valley in the early dot-com era, said Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who oversees the iFund, a $100 million investment pot reserved for iPhone applications. “It’s still early days for mobile development, but those days are coming.” NYT NEWS SERVICE

IDEATING: Vassilis Samolis (left), Kostas Eleftheriou and Bill Rappos (right) wrote a program called iSteam, which fogs up the face of an iPhone like a bathroom mirror. They made $100,000 from the program