Developer Calls His Own Application "Crap"
January 24, 2009
A 22-year-old software engineer has called his own hit application "crap." The application, Sound Grenade, was written in about 20 minutes with around 10 lines of code and is currently the top downloaded free application at the App Store. The developer, who is going by the pseudonym High Gloss, attributes Sound Grenade's sudden popularity to a young user base.
"From reading a number of reviews, it seems fairly obvious that the majority of people are high school, college-aged people," he wrote. "A lot of them mention wanting to play pranks on teachers (and) classmates."He goes on to say that even though the App Store contains oodles of low quality applications, there are still some gems out there. Gloss aims to profit off of what the download numbers say consumers want from the App Store. This wouldn't be nearly as big of a story if the application wasn't such a hit. As of Tuesday, the application has had over 200,000 downloads. Sound Grenade has since rocketed to the top of the free applications so these numbers are only the beginning of the story. Even though Sound Grenade is a free download at the App Store, Gloss is still profiting from it. The original application was absolutely free until it reached the top 50. Gloss decided to include advertisements to take advantage of his unique situation. The application is now generating over $200 per hour in click-through revenue. From a quick glance at the App Store page, it looks like the application may not be ad based for much longer. The App Store page now includes "free for a limited time" in the description section. [via AppleInsider]