If found this blog discussing the hype of iphone developments and deriving a high likelihood for single developers to actually fail. The blog of Kevin C. Tofel is actually based on an earlier blog from Tomi T. Ahonen. As he is a former Nokia guy it is quite understandable that he is not very excited about the iphone but nevertheless the numbers he is presenting, 80million iphones are still just 13% out of all smart phones, or only 4% out of all 2.1 billion phones in total.These numbers are indeed good to keep in mind: if you want to hit the masses, the iphone is not the right thing - you may hit the media, which just suggerates you had hit the masses...
Nevertheless, as many readers already have posted on this site: How many of the feature phone users have ever thought about downloading an application? How many would know how to do it? How many would be willing to pay? How could that even established without a mechanisms as Appstore/Google Marketplace provide?
Furthermore, dividing the overall revenue by the overall downloaded apps yields increasingly low revenue per average. But following this argument, you can almost deny any effort: divide university degrees by population, divide accepted papers by submitted papers, divide total number of blogs by blogs people read...fortunately, we don't have gaussian distribution in every situation but can improve our chances by special skills in niches accordingly.
Anyway, it's good to recall: despite it's hype and success, there are much more phones out there than iphones...
