By Ewan MacLeod in 3.5 months — Oct 17, 2008

Starmap for iPhone makes $336k in 3.5 months

Ahhhh fantastic. This is what mobile innovation is all about. It’s why I’ve been so delighted with the launch of the iPhone platform.

Frederic Descamps has a day job working for for neutron science/technology specialist ILL. And he’s got a big interest in stars.

So when the iPhone development kit was released, he set about creating a starmap map for the device.

Woosh. Within a week he had a working prototype. Within 4 months his application was complete and uploaded to the iTunes store. It uses the device GPS to display a starmap for your location.

And in 3.5 months (that’s my rough calculation – the app release date was 28th June) he’s knocked back 28,000 downloads! Now, assuming each download was a purchase at $11.99 what was the total revenue? A smidgen under $336,000.

Now Apple will take a percentage of course. But still, that’s a rather good return for Frederic.

If you extrapolate that out across the year — in fact, let’s do that.

So 28,000 over 3.5 months. Roughly 8,000 sales per month. Now let’s adjust that down to, say, 4,500 to allow for ups and downs. Multiply that by $12.

That’s $54k. A month. Or $648k a year gross revenue.

For everyone who sat staring at the iPhone launch with their arms folded, saying all manner of negative things — I say this: Eat dirt.

Apple — and this is one of the reasons we voted the iPhone our Best Handset and Steve Jobs as our top geezer in the awards — have got it right. Apple have given independent developers the tools and the platform to make software. Apple have sorted out the whole end-to-end process to make it work properly. So that people like Frederic can conceive an idea, run with it, get it out to the masses and be appropriately rewarded.

Fat lot of good Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and the others have done for the industry recently. I’ve been banging on about this sort of open (ish) innovation for ages. I was delighted when it looked like Apple were going to encourage it — and I’m even happier to hear about the successes occuring as a result.

I recognise the issues with Apple. The apparent app censorship. The lack of total access to the device and so on. Still. It’s embryonic. But we’re getting there. Frederic is doing very well.

And you can too. That’s the brilliance of this new renaissance in mobile development and application innovation. Got an idea? Get it live. Done.

Let’s here from Frederic himself:

“Many planetarium applications exist, but who wants to carry a laptop into the garden to observe the stars?” said Descamps of his inspiration to develop the Starmap. “I wanted a simple map on my iPhone(TM), to use by simply sliding my finger tip on the screen.

“My 4-year-old son and I love this application; a great bonding moment,” commented one user on the App-Store.

Starmap Pro is coming your way soon too at $20.

You can get Starmap in the UK for £6.99.