This post is a follow up to Marketing an iPhone App. Apple approved CastCatcher 1.3. Good stuff for just about everyone involved. r7 gets to sell the latest version of its software, iPhone users get some indication that Apple isn’t just out there to knock off every bit of software that grabs a few KBs off the cell network, and Apple gets to keep making money off CastCatcher. Win. Win. Win.
CastCatcher is selling reasonably well, but it’s no Trism. The press did boost sales for a short period of time, which makes it worth while to invest more time into the application (and I’ve done so — significant time over the past two evenings). Funny: every so often someone wants a refund but doesn’t understand that we haven’t been paid for the sale yet, if we had been paid we’d only get 70% of the total, and even if we wanted to we’d have no way to verify who actually bought from us and who didn’t. It can be amusing 
. It’s rewarding when people do like one’s apps, though. It’s also rewarding to spend a bunch of time on some issue and finally figure it out. It’s kind of like saying “boo-yah” in the 90s after winning a game of HORSE only with more programming and less basketball. I’m better at the former.
No, I didn’t get rich off the App Store. I never thought I would. If you’re wondering how to get rich using the App Store you should stop as you’re already looking at it from the wrong perspective (unless you intend to dedicate your full attention to it). That expectation is just plain dumb. You need not only a solid idea (easy), but solid implementation and solid marketing to make Trism-like bucks. The App Store is saturated with thousands and thousands of applications and Apple’s the little games people could play to bump their sales. Those games included putting spaces at the beginning of an application’s name so it would float to the top, releasing “updates” to jump to the beginning of a category, etc.
We’ve decided to go the low time-investment, crank out as many apps as we can route for a few months. I’ll let you know how it pans out.
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