iPhone fart app pulls in nearly $10,000 a day
Apple's App Store is currently experiencing a plague of fart applications. Last week, I detailed one day in which at least 14 new fart apps were accepted into the store. And now, just in a quick search, it looks like there are about 50 apps …
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands at the peak of the first iPhone gold rush: one developer's novelty gag app clearing nearly $10,000 a day while roughly 50 fart apps — at least 14 accepted in a single week — crowd the App Store. The money was real enough that within weeks a coder's half-million-dollar windfall confirmed the rush was no fluke.
But the same flood of clones immediately produced the App Store's first legal fight, when iFart Mobile took rival Pull My Finger to court over naming rights, and later an awkward governance moment when it emerged that Apple's own App Store Director sold fart apps on the side. What looks like a joke story here is actually the founding case study in how Apple would come to police its marketplace.
First-order effects
- Novelty developers are earning real revenue — near-$10K/day for a single gag app — validating the App Store as a genuine income channel for indie coders, not just big publishers.
- Apple faces immediate curation pressure: ~50 near-identical fart apps dilute storefront quality and force review decisions about what counts as spam versus legitimate content.
Second-order effects
- Clone-saturation triggers competitive escalation among the copycats themselves — trademark disputes over names like iFart vs. Pull My Finger show that in a low-barrier market, branding becomes the only defensible asset.
- The embarrassment of junk-app proliferation pushes Apple toward stricter editorial gatekeeping, a posture that later hardened into categorical bans like the removal of all single-station radio apps.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward platform governance as the central tension of app economies: open submission drives supply and revenue, but saturation forces gatekeepers into opaque, discretionary curation rules whose fairness gets contested for years.
- If trivial apps can out-earn serious software, developer incentives tilt toward volume and novelty over utility — a structural dynamic that shapes what entire app ecosystems end up offering.
The trend: This is an early data point in the arc from open app-store gold rush to tightly governed platform, where revenue opportunity and curation control become inseparable.