Dapple developer reveals iPhone losses (so far)

Streaming Colours Studios spent $32,000 making its Dapple puzzler for iPhone. Despite glowing reviews, it's sold... 131 copies in 24 days, according to a post on the company's blog.

Developer Owen Goss estimates that he needs to sell about 9,150 copies in the US to break even, so suffice to say he's not about to buy a speedboat and retire on the proceeds.

"I hope that this article might serve as a counterpoint to the articles that seem to go around the web about devs making hundreds of thousands of dollars off an iPhone app," he writes.

"Everyone within the dev community understands that the odds of that happening are very slim, yet those are the stories that people like to hear."

His blog post is well worth reading - it shows the spike in sales when Dapple was reviewed on Kotaku, but also when Goss spoke at a conference, for example.

And he's not giving up just yet - Dapple Lite is due to go live on the App Store later this week, and past success stories indicate that Lite apps can suddenly send the paid versions shooting up the charts.