Vancouver iPhone App Developer sees green
CBCnews.ca profiled local iPhone App developer and UBC Student Hendrick Kueck and his ColorSplash App today online. Kueck spent his free time creating ColorSplash - an app that lets people play with the colour in their digital photos.
"What the application does is loads up the image and then converts it to black and white. You can use your finger on the screen to paint back the original colour of the image."
The program, which iPhone owners can download to their phone for $1.99, got a big boost after it was featured on a popular Mac blog the day after its launch. Since then ColorSplash has been in the top 50 iPhone downloads, and even reached the No. 3 spot on the sales chart.
Kueck won't say how much money he has made, but under Apple's standard agreement, he would keep 70 per cent of all sales revenue. And ColorSplash was not his first hit. He already had one mildly successful app, called Juxtaposer.
While stories like Kueck's have triggered a gold rush mentality among programmers, Smartful Studio's Parveen Kaler - the first instructor to teach an iPhone app development course at BCIT - compares the App gold rush to the tech stock bubble of 10 years ago and says companies that set up shop to develop only iPhone apps are struggling.
"There are about 80,000 different applications on the iTunes store, and I would say the top 100 in each category generate revenue. Everyone else is struggling," Kaler said.
