I came ready to hate, but it's actually a good idea presented well and simply in the blog post. The one statement I (slightly) disagree with:
"Strike that. You will know that you passed the class when you recoup that investment tenfold. How many other classes you took offer such direct, undisputable grades?"
I doubt you'll make $1k, or even $100, but even if you don't you'll still learn a hell of a lot, so just by doing it you pass the class.
Maybe I was just lucky (though not that lucky), but it should be pretty easy to make back that $100 even without any marketing.
My opinion is that if your app does something slightly useful and basically works, you should be able to make back that $100 easily. Ideally, you'll make more than that especially over the course of a year.
Did you know that a lot of apps on the App Store are the sample projects from Apple themselves with just some images changed (almost all the level apps for instance)?
Some didn't even changed the images.
And, since the people approving the apps are a completely separated department, they couldn't know and they even featured some of them.
I don't know about the getting featured part but the apple sample code is provided for developers to use as they wish. I agree though that simply putting up the sample code is not very cool. There are not a huge amount of these as far as I can tell.
How do you know if you haven't tried? What does it take to make it to $100?
The App Store solves a very nice problem for learning sales: every product is put on an equal footing on the App Store, unlike the wild, wild Internet.
> every product is put on an equal footing on the App Store
This is not completely true since what Apple decides to promote in the "what's new", "what's hot", "staff favorites" etc spots makes a huge huge difference.
Out of curiosity, how would one go about bringing their app to Apple's attention to be potentially listed there? Or is that process, as well, completely opaque?
And that equal footing is pretty shaky. Simply put, without great luck or some intense marketing, your app is just one of thousands, only to be buried in the App Store after a day or two.
"Strike that. You will know that you passed the class when you recoup that investment tenfold. How many other classes you took offer such direct, undisputable grades?"
I doubt you'll make $1k, or even $100, but even if you don't you'll still learn a hell of a lot, so just by doing it you pass the class.