Fierce Developer posted an interesting piece on another blog’s post. Specifically, a professional iPhone developer crunched the numbers on how much money was involved in putting together a really complex iPhone app and determined that it was completely unworkable with the $0.99 apps crowding out the expensive apps. With over 10,000 apps now, the store is already pretty crowded.

I look at this development as just another software cycle in the life of a new platform. After all, the apps are becoming more complicated because the software and interfaces are getting easier to program and to interface. At the same time the market is growing. These complex programs that require several manhours and $100,000 would have required several times the effort and money just a couple of years ago. They would have been almost impossible to get enough of a market to make the development worth the cost.

Even today in the life of the PC, free software is everywhere, but people still buy complex, expensive software when it is justified by the price and usefulness. After all, Oracle sells multimillion dollar databases even though there are many high quality free database easily available.

In a related story, the iPhone apps store was just about the only site that actively advertised that you could get iPhone apps at their store. Oh, sure. There were sites where jailbroken phones could get apps, but those don’t count. Now the monopoly has been shaken by Mobile Distillery, which is heavily promoting their site to developers. But will they come?