Starting an iPhone App Business

The book I read to research this post was Starting an iPhone App Business for Dummies by Joel Elad et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. An Apple iPhone App Developer subscription costs $99 per year which you need if you are going to do an iphone app. In addition you need the iPhone App SDK or software development kit which is a free download. It's relatively easy to learn to write an iPhone App compared to for example learning Visual Basic. If you already know Java you have a headstart because iPhones can understand that. Stanford University has written a course in writing iPhones which can be found on iTunes. Many Apps are free, often because someone is new to programming & wants a good job so does it to show how skilled he is. Some people give Apps away because they sell advertising space on it. Others do a limited version free & offer a premium version for a fee. Yet other Apps are free but charge a subscription for a service which is a part of it. The vast majority of Apps are either free or only charge a small fee. Interestingly the ones that are expensive tend to be ones aimed at medical professionals, who if they had to buy special equipment to do the same job it would be quite expensive. If you can get a software developer interested in your App, you can make money without the hassle of promoting it. If you've an idea for an App but don't want to write the code you can get a programmer at a site like
http://guru.com/
They might do a simple App for around $500. A more complex one could cost from $1,000 to $5,000. You might be able to get it done a bit cheaper if you agree the programmer can reuse the code. This book also tells you all about how to promote your App but I think it would make this post too long if I went into all that.