Dominique Leca, co-founder of the awesome Sparrow mail client for Mac, tells Business Insider that his team is working on an iPhone version of Sparrow. During the interview, he also revealed that Sparrow has already generated over $500,000 in revenue in the six months it’s been available on the Mac App Store. Available at a price of $9.99, Sparrow for Mac was initially going to be priced at $24.99 but later on they decided to reach more people with a much lower price.
BI: Isn’t one of Apple’s rules for the mobile App Store that you can’t “duplicate functionality”?
DL: Yes, but on the Mac, they can’t really apply it, so you’ve got a way out. You can license your software without being considered a rogue developer, like you might on Cydia [the jailbreak app store for iPhone].
Developers have been selling Mac apps long before the MAS was introduced, whereas for most people, the only want to get content on an iPhone is through the App Store. It was a walled garden from the very beginning.
We’ll see what happens with Sparrow for iPhone. We’re just starting on this, but it’s still far far away. But we’ll give it a try, Apple be with us.
BI: So do you think they’ll approve it?
DL: I think they will. They’re accepting third party browsers, so why not mail? This would be really inconsistent. Opera has a browser out there, and I think Mozilla has one coming too.
You can give the Mac version a swing by downloading the free Sparrow Lite version which allows you to configure a single email account.
