With stories of earning thousands of dollars within days of launching an iPhone app becoming a common event, the iPhone developers are increasingly becoming a most precious commodity in the tech circles. According to Daring Fireball:
The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The going rate for iPhone developers, at least the developers I know and trust, is $125/hour and up. I have some friends who are booked out at $200/hour for the next few months, although $125/hour seems to be the going rate in my network. At that rate, a full-time contract iPhone developer costs $5,000/week and it may take four to six weeks for an application to be developed. Sometimes it will take less and sometimes it will take more. Add to development the other costs – project management, design, QA, and marketing, to name a few. It’s not uncommon to spend $30,000 and up on an iPhone development project. iPhone applications are not cheap.
Enjoy it till it lasts mate, like RoR developers this would also slow down one day, but there’s no harm in riding the tide till than.
At least in Seattle, there’s still a very hot market for Ruby people, at least according to the recruiters I’ve been talking to. The take was that people are moving away from proprietary technologies to cut down on expenses, so they’re seeing much less demand for Microsoft developers and much more demand for people with experience in open source technologies.
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