I agree, but I can never get over the fact that selling picks and axes to gold-rush miners is selling services and products to people who are chasing unrealistic dreams and are statistically pre-dispositioned to fail. And is just a way to take advantage of the situation to your own gain.

Fully knowing that, at the end of the day, I can't feel proud of that ... unless I also increase the success rate of those miners.

So the moral of this is - don't just sell those picks and axes, but improve and progress the process of finding gold.

Not necessarily, unless you are misrepresenting something to your own advantage I don't think you would have acted immorally.

You can sell your services to somebody who has better odds of success than you would alone because of finance or other skills experience they have etc.

As I have mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are a lot of perfectly valid reasons to hire a mobile developer other than "I want to be an appstore millionaire".

Thinking about it only in this way might suggest an over-exposure to HN-think.

I wonder how long is this going to last. Lately I been hearing more about startups that provide tools and services to make apps than about startups that make actual apps.

I think that might be a sign that this gold rush it's on its last legs. Too many devs got tired of trying, so the question now is how long until the vast infrastructure of app-dev startups starts to crumble due to the old offer>demand imbalance.

Pickaxes sure got a lot cheaper when nobody was looking for gold anymore...

All business people chase unrealistic dreams since most will fail. Providing the best services and products you can only improves their odds. The mining supply company that gets a great bulk deal on high quality pickaxes and sells them for a modest profit is doing a good thing.

I thought you were describing me, right down to the sales numbers.

Agreed that the real cash here is in contracting. Use appstore apps as exemplars of your work, make your actual $ consulting.

I actually took a course on iOS programming from the guy discussed in the article, 1 day, $350, though there was another instructor. So he was doing that to some extent.

What does that simile mean here? Build other people's apps?

Contracting is more akin to mining for (high) pay. A better simile would be something like RubyMotion (http://rubymotion.com) by my friend Laurent Sansonetti. That's selling pickaxes (and excellent ones at that). Training for iOS developers would qualify as well.

As a fellow tool builder (albeit in a different domain than mobile), i'm repeatedly impressed and awed by how well RubyMotion is done + how they've grown a nice community around it.

(I can only hope I encounter remotely as much success as they once I launch! :) )

When you build other people's apps you are still digging for gold, you just get paid to do it, hence eliminating the risks (and the gains too, if the App becomes popular). But what I think meant with this simile is that instead of being an app developer you can be a service provider to app developers. In his case, he became a consultant, in my case, I develop APIs and other server-side code for App developer, and sometimes also manage the whole setting up of servers for them. My guess is that after the first wave of success, many people without software development background joined the gold rush and only focused on learning how to write apps and later they found out there is more to it than that.

There is an exception though, which is building apps for some established brand who's business is not selling apps.

Even some fairly small companies now want their own 'app' in order to seem hip and modern. This could be anything from a spammy push notification thing to a crappy game that has been rebranded.

The purpose of these apps is not to have millions of downloads, but to have enough customers put it on their phones so that it helps them sell X more of Y where X is some number higher than what it cost to produce the app.

I assume he is referring to Apple making tons of money selling app developers the tools they need to make apps. Iphones, macs, developer licenses, etc.

Indirectly. He's referring to developers, like you and me. But, Apple, being one of the smartest businesses on the planet, is playing the exact same game. If you actually strike gold with your app/unicorn, they win. If you don't, they're still getting paid. This is just smart business.