Valid point though, if you have a small part of a large graph for a new product it somehow always looks like a hockeystick.
But if he can maintain this for even three weeks or more then he's on to something. Stranger things have happened.
A word of advice for the OP: keep it quiet. Bragging like this is going to bring copycats and unwelcome attention in large quantities. If you're making 'easy money' keep it to yourself.
One thing I've learned about the app ecosystem is that when your app gets attention and becomes popular, the copycats come out in full force - relentlessly, shamelessly, and often fraudulently.
My organization doesn't develop mobile apps, but we provide APIs that power many of the top apps in the "News" categories on the various app stores. We've seen apps that are solely designed to just consume our API reach #1 in categories a few times. And we love to see that.
But, when an app gets popular as described above...? Copycats come out in full force, stealing API keys, decompiling apps for data and info, and other completely nefarious techniques with zero innovation. And they release exact copies of competing applications.
No doubt about it, while "controlled", the app stores are still a wild-wild-west.
Wow how awful. I guess I always wanted to believe that people bright enough to be programmers would create things instead of shamelessly ripping off other stuff. But I guess that was horribly naive of me.
Most software is built by people being employed by someone who has enough money to pay for them to build whatever they want. If that person with the money wants to build a shitty ripoff then a shitty ripoff is being built.
The only thing Apple's control of the app store achieves at this point is keeping out blatant malware. Maybe that alone is worth it but scams and cheap clones abound.
To be fair, everything is a repost of a repost. The App stores are a copy of previous app stores, running on a gui, the concept of which was 'borrowed' from Xerox.
Copycats are the best (and worst) form of flattery, but it's a service problem. On the front page of the Mac App Store (here in the UK) there's a tool called Yoink which seems to be a similar product. If the author can compete with the attention the product will only get better for users.
I agree in principle. However, it's not "easy" money, he produced a quality, well thought out app and then got lucky (or executed a well thought out strategy) with marketing.
Forgive my pedantry, but I hate to see a favorite quote of mine used with the wrong context for the word "steal":
"One of the surest tests [of the superiority or
inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal..." [1]
Valid point though, if you have a small part of a large graph for a new product it somehow always looks like a hockeystick.
But if he can maintain this for even three weeks or more then he's on to something. Stranger things have happened.
A word of advice for the OP: keep it quiet. Bragging like this is going to bring copycats and unwelcome attention in large quantities. If you're making 'easy money' keep it to yourself.