• BusinessWeek, Thursday, June 4, 2009 1:01 PM

Steve Sprang, a 32-year-old programmer, created Brushes, a painting simulator for the iPhone, that has been downloaded more than 50,000 times and was used to create last week's New Yorker cover. The $3.99 app, of which Sprang keeps 70% of the revenue (per Apple's agreement with developers), has netted approximately $140,000, proving that there is money to be made selling software applications for the iPhone and other wireless devices, says BusinessWeek.

Apple's App Store has paved the way for competitors like Google, Research in Motion, Nokia and Sony Ericsson to follow up with their own application stores. Many of these apps are games, like Tapulous's popular Tap Tap Revenge, which requires clicking on moving lights to the beat of a particular song. This particular game has been downloaded more than 10 million times. Tap Tap Revenge is a free app, although users can also download a paid version which comes preloaded with music. Tapulous' best selling app, Tap Tap Coldplay, has sold more than 150,000 copies. "That would be pretty decent success for an album these days," says Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem.

Other apps focus on productivity. Viigo, a free news and information app sold on BlackBerry's App World and Microsoft's Windows Mobile, has been downloaded more than 450,000 times since App World's launch a month and a half ago. It plans to make money in one of three ways: by selling highly targeted advertising, by causing users to make transactions inside the app itself, and by selling a corporate version to large companies. Says the company's CEO, "We really felt that the winning strategy has yet to be revealed and we weren't going to make a Hail Mary play against one particular approach."

But that's what makes the mobile software business interesting says BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl and Peter Burrows: "No one is quite sure exactly how much money can be made, but given the market, the potential is enormous."

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