Single App Nets $600K in Month

With more than 20,000 iPhone apps available, it seems inevitable that most would make peanuts. But Ethan Nicholas’ tank artillery game, iShoot, raked in $600,000 in one month——$37,000 on its best day—proving the gold rush is on in the App Store, Wired reports. The store provides a platform for selling and distributing software, allowing individual coders to match software giants in their reach, provided their products are good.

When Nicholas launched iShoot in October, business was slow. So he coded a demo version, iShoot Lite, that users could download for free. Nicholas advertised the full $3 version inside it, and within months 320,000 of the 2.4 million demo users had purchased the game, pushing it to the App Store’s No. 1 spot—where it stayed for 26 days. The game is still at No. 6.
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