14 Years Old Kuwaiti Achieves 800,000 Downloads for His iPhone App

http://arabcrunch.com/2010/08/the-youngest-arab-entrepreneur14-years-old-kuwaiti-achieves-800000-downloads-for-his-iphone-app.html

by ArabGeek • 16 years ago

59 36 16 years ago

arabcrunch.com

ArabGeek11• 16 years ago

Kuwait is on the richest countries in the world in terms of GDP, so not everyone is spoiled do not u think so?

csomar2• 16 years ago

I think here you mean the per capita and not actually the global country GDP. However, there is no relation. Having a higher per capita or GDP doesn't relate to luxury. It's the amount of work a nation has made over a year.

For the game, I think it's more about the idea than the coding itself.

ArabGeek11• 16 years ago

yes per capita, and the idea played a big role yes :)

ecargnfx• 16 years ago

This is awesome. I've always learned by doing as well. Thanks for sharing!

ArabGeek11• 16 years ago

welcome, i got some people to help in some coding and then the rest by my self :)

wallflower• 16 years ago

Congratulations! Your results make older developers feel like excuses are just that. How did you do your marketing? Do you feel you benefitted from the rapid rise in popularity of physics-based games?

Timothee• 16 years ago

I'm confused: are you or are you not the 14yo talked about in this article? In other comments, you say "he".

fictorial4• 16 years ago

This is great. Congratulations!

FWIW I am a 35 year old New Yorker has 3,000,000 active users for his iPhone App (Darts). I am embarrassed by the advertisements but it pays the bills. sigh.

ArabGeek11• 16 years ago

it is ok, there was no iPhone 21 years ago :)

fictorial4• 16 years ago

True! I did play around on a Commodore 64 though!

dpcan• 16 years ago

Just curious, does 3M active users generate a lot of ad revenue? One of our games is just about to go over 250k and I'm thinking of putting Admob ads in it or Google Adsense (they've approved us for beta).

fictorial4• 16 years ago

Yes, it does work quite well for me. I could easily be an outlier and got lucky because of the name (literally "Darts").

Note that I am not using iAd (yet?). I started with Admob, then moved to Adwhirl and noticed that Quattro worked out the best. Now Quattro is Apple.

I am kind of an ass about the ads though since they are always present, in menus and during gameplay alike. If you read any of the reviews, my users hate me and it (used to) keep me up at night. sniffle. But, it helped me bootstrap a consulting business for mostly iOS work so I have taken a pragmatic view.

sspencer• 16 years ago

Very cool! When I was 14 it was all about hacking apart QBasic. Strangely no one wanted to buy my Gorillas clone...

Congratulations!

fictorial4• 16 years ago

My first program was a curses-like Yahtzee written in QBasic when I was 16. I recall learning about particle systems about that time. If you got a Yahtzee in the game, gratuitous explosions congratulated you. It was utterly ridiculous but fun as hell.

cj• 16 years ago

[...] and Yes, and Yes, and Yes he is impressive. I love the self-starter type kids who have cool interests and do projects like these.

Side note: is this article a translation?

ArabGeek11• 16 years ago

the writer is 32 years old and not translation

ergo982• 16 years ago

I wish I wasn't the one to play the skeptic, but I'm naturally skeptical about stories like this. Kids are often used as fronts for adults looking for a promotion vehicle.

ArabGeek11• 16 years ago

the story was picked up from Kuwaiti blog i do not think his father is the developer using his kid's age!

ArabGeek11• 16 years ago

go to the app profile on iTunes it got his name

kranner2• 16 years ago

If you're interested in this theme (adults using kids as promotional vehicles), I can recommend a sharp satire I'm reading at the moment:

http://www.amazon.com/Serious-Men-Novel-Manu-Joseph/dp/03933...

Blurb from that page: "... a subtly wicked satire of subterfuge and ambition that bounces between the Mumbai tenement where low-caste Ayyan Mani lives, and the esteemed research institute where he labors as the assistant of top researcher Arvind Acharya. Forever spiteful toward his privileged superiors, Ayyan is deviously mischievous and pulls off a stunt that ends with his half-deaf (but otherwise ordinary) son being proclaimed in the local news as a boy genius. Meanwhile, Arvind is obsessed with proving his theory that extraterrestrial microbes are raining down on Earth from the upper atmosphere. "

ArabGeek11• 16 years ago

so u r saying that kids at 14 can not code? he is not the first one to be an entrepreneur at his age in the world

skowmunk• 16 years ago

Thats a pretty awesome achievement, I hope he keeps it up and does some good with it. Goes to show what 2 weeks of complete absolute immersion into something can result in.

There's always a chance that such a thing could be a fake claim, but I do think its definitely possible.

whatwhatwhat• 16 years ago

did anyone else think this was really smirky at the end?

eingko• 16 years ago

Anyone else notice the uncanny resemblance between "doodle destroy" and "doodle vanish"?

KeithMajhor• 16 years ago

I've read several stories about kids like this but I never seem to hear about them later on. Were there any kids back in the 90's that are still active and somewhat popular today?

ig1• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jez_San (started as a games developer in his teens, now better known as the founder of pkr.com)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twins

imran• 16 years ago

v ery inspiring!

14 Years Old Kuwaiti Achieves 800,000 Downloads for His iPhone App

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