The $1000 iPhone app: lighten up bloggers, it’s only art
Written on August 6, 2008 – 9:29 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
While European techies were sleeping last night, the American ones discovered a rather absurd iPhone app. It’s called I Am Rich and has two remarkable characteristics. One: it only lets a red diamond glow on your screen - sometimes a secret mantra appears. Two: the price $999.99. Will developer Armin Heinrich make his fortune with this shiny app?
Whether he does or not, he DID get some tech bloggers angry. They think the I Am Rich app is provoking serious developers who don’t manage to get their app in the Apple app store. MG Siegler from VentureBeat calls on Apple to “wake up or grow up”. Dan Frommer from Silicon Alley Insider notes:
The upside for Apple: $300, or 30%, of all purchases. The downside: Good luck enforcing that “all sales final” policy on this scam.
Although I understand where these frustrations are coming from, I’d like to call on these bloggers to take it all a bit more light-heartedly. After all we’re talking about a company here of which the CEO once said experimenting with LSD was “one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life.” Experiments like I Am Rich keep Apple interesting. It’s a form of art, you can interpreter it however you want to.
See it as a protest against the lifestyle IT girls like Paris Hilton. A way to tone down the iPhone fuzz. Or.., it’s a genius parody on all these folks who have been using their iPhone in a somewhat too showy way - waiting for the utter satisfying experience of someone asking… “wow, is that an iPhone…?”
Update: TechCrunch has a confusing update on the story
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[...] all the ‘iPhone apps’ one stands out as a particularly interesting case. This app cost 1K USD did nothing and is probably the simplest [...]