I don't doubt that iPhone development has the means to make you a lot of money (when reading these "success stories") but I can't help but think "it wasn't 100% certain to make you bags of £££" when I hear these whine stories of "how my app didn't make me rich".

Not to say that's nothing Nokia can fix (since AFAIK they don't have a RDField than can make people pay $10 for what is basically a "wikipedia article with built in sound player" with a nice launcher icon).

Don't give them ideas. Fremantle doesn't spell as Freemantle you know.

Baloo's point is a very good point. How do you make money off a platform where free apps are the only (major) ecosystem as yet. Nokia has to add a means of payment system (as qgill pointed out earlier) to enable commercial developers a slice of the pie .

But till then I think a developer looking for an earning has to choose iPhone or Palm ecosystems as the place to eke out some money off mobile development.

The Zaurus as an example did have some commercial activity, but due to the limited reach of the niche product it didnt really have too much of commercial vendors (apart from theKompany).

I hope Nokia with its biger reach can create such a marketplace, as well as keep its interested open source (and free app) enthusiasts.

The best advice I've been given is to go with the stuff you enjoy. For one thing you'll be much better at it (thus increasing your chances of success), and for another even if you fail at least you won't have had a completely miserable time at it. Good luck in any case!

As others have said, those tend to be the exception rather than the rule. There are ways to make money (regardless of platform, but let's use maemo-specific examples wherever possible):

• Write software in order to sell hardware (Nokia, Hava).
• Write software that brings customers to your commercial service (Gizmo, Fring, Skype, Wayfinder, Boingo, Rhapsody).
• Repackage off-the-shelf devices with your own software and sell at a huge premium (Immunity, Elan).
• Subcontract your services to customers doing the above (any of the companies listed here).
• Get hired by any of the above.
• Be the middleman (various App Stores).

Where you don't want to be is spending months of your time unpaid writing apps speculatively and hoping to earn your bread by selling them piecemeal via a monopoly channel that eats 30-60% of your revenue and can shut you down at any time on a whim. Sure, a few people might get lucky but the odds don't look promising.

I think there will be problems trying to write commercial apps for the Maemo platform until it is used by more "users" rather than developers and power users who can either program themselves and therefore won't pay for an app, even if they don't actually have the time to write a replacement themselves, or know the Linux eco-system well enough that they can trawl around and find something that does the job for free.

Who knows how popular the n900 will be, but Nokia's idea was always to push the devices out to a wider (read not just programmers/power-users) audience so we may find that Fremantle will be the point at which commercial apps make sense.

If that's the case, an iPod-style App Store would be useful; and it would even be useful just for normal apps as it can hold the ratings and descriptions, screenshots and be used easily on-device without needing to use the browser (directly).

the way all major GNU/linux distributions do....

i will pay rather for good commercial apps

than use second rate free apps

anyday

Ah, my favourite meme... my own soapbox at last year's summit was, "for anything that will fit inside an HTML/CSS/Ajax interface : web apps, python, web2py".

While that trilogy is far from universal, when it fits the bill it does solve a lot of problems in one go. Self-hosting, portability, cross-platform development, learning curve, versatility...

OPL on the Psion was a great idea, a terrible dialect, and 100% platform-bound. Qt on the Zaurus was tied to the Qtopia variant. Native maemo apps depend on the Hidon API, a moving target with each Maemo release.

For amateur (non-professional) coders this paradigm gets old after a while. Reusing skills learnt on other platforms, and code after a platform is gone, is important too.

But it was pretty simple to get started and had sufficient extensibility to keep people away from the C/C++ stuff unless they were really hardcore/mad

The OPL language also stayed the same (or at least largely the same, with the addition of extra features) for all of the Psion range (i.e. 1984 till 2000-odd, and even now you can download the OPL runtime for Symbian phones).