A first-year DCU student is earning thousands of euro in sales of his iPhone applications on the App Store. Stephen Troughton-Smith, who is half way through his first year of a Digital Media Engineering course at Dublin City University, has even been featured on the RTÉ news talking about his software creations for the iPhone.
“Fame at last? Not quite, but I was on the national news (RTÉ News on Two) on TV last night at 11.15pm,” he wrote in his blog the next day. “Had a scare after the 9pm RTÉ News on One when I realised I’d been dropped, but fortunately they still ran with it on RTÉ 2.”
Using GPS
Stephen’s first major success came with Speed, an app (application) which cleverly uses the GPS capabilities in an iPhone to tell you what speed you are travelling at.
In the first six days it was available on Apple’s App Store, Speed was downloaded 36,000 times. The application was free at the time, but now sells for €0.79.
While Speed “took an hour to figure out”, Stephen then spent 175 days on his biggest project yet, Lights Off, an update of a simple puzzle game. Just five days after its launch on the App Store last month, he sold almost 700 copies in a single day.
Smart ideas
The App Store is an area of Apple’s iTunes service where free and paid-for applications for iPhones and iPod Touch multimedia players can be downloaded.
It might not seem like a viable business model for big software companies. But Stephen says it is ideal for small groups of programmers and individuals with smart ideas.
Stephen, who lives in Killiney, Co Dublin, was initially self-taught in programming and is a long-time Apple fan.
“There’s no other device like the iPhone,” he says. “Nothing feels like it or is as fluid or responsive. It is a very powerful device because it is the same system that runs on Apple desktops.”
“I’ve thought about working for Apple, but I’m not sure yet,” he says. “I’m seeing how it works out for me on my own at the moment.”
Over 15,000 apps have been created for the App Store. It has seen more than half a billion downloads since the online store opened in July 2008, generating revenues of up to $100 million.
Do your own app
More than 250 new apps are added each day, and if you are thinking of following in Stephen’s footsteps, the SDK (software development kit) you need to develop and debug apps can be downloaded for free.
To distribute through iTunes you pay $99 to join the standard programme that Stephen is on, or $299 for the enterprise one. But remember that as well as taking a cut of your revenue, Apple maintains quality control standards. It employs a strict vetting policy before software is included in the store.
He says his next projects in the pipeline are likely to include a client for Twitter, the fast-growing micro-blogging service.
Learn more
Watch Stephen Troughton-Smith’s interview on RTÉ
Read Stephen’s blog
Learn more about how to develop and distribute iPhone apps using Apple’s SDK
