According to many, the game Snake, build-in the 1997 Nokia 6110 phone was the initial mobile app. Now, twenty-five years later, Google Play is home to almost 2.9 million apps, and the Apple App store has 1.96 million available for download. 49% of smartphone users open their favorite at least eleven times a day, and 70% of all US digital media consumption originates from mobile software. Hence, it would be an understatement to say that this software does not play an integral part in most people’s lives. Consequently, app development has become a massive industry, causing millions of laypeople to be on the prowl for quality app ideas. In 2018, the mobile app economy had a value of $106 billion, and projections are that this number will increase four-fold by 2026, making iOS and Android app development a big business. Thus, this is an excellent time to look at ten people who became filthy rich via software development for mobile phones. We rattle off their names below.
1. Changpeng Zhao
Crypto exchanges became a thing in 2010 when a trailblazing Web hub showed up that allowed people to buy Bitcoins and democratized the value of one BTC unit. Currently, around three hundred and eighty such platforms live on the internet, and without a doubt, the most famous one is Binance, which has the largest daily trading volume. Chinese computer programmers Changpeng Zhao and Yi He created went live with it in 2017, and as of May 2022, Bloomberg ranks Zhao as the 13th richest person in the world. Going by a projection from this top publication, Zhao boasts a projected net worth of almost $15 billion. Crypto exchanges such as Binance significantly boosted the expansion of several sectors, including mobile gaming, retail, and hospitality.
2. Tobi Lütke
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that many retail point-of-sale and online businesses utilize. It is the brainchild of Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake, who came up with it after trying to develop an online store that would sell snowboarding equipment. Lütke, a computer programmer by trade, decided that instead of purchasing a pre-made software solution that would handle his business’ online transactions, he would build his own. He did so, and in 2009, Shopify launched an App store and API platform that allowed developers to create apps for Shopify online stores. The net worth of this German-Canadian entrepreneur now stands at $3.7 billion, and he is still the acting CEO of Shopify.
3. Travis Kalanick
Canadian entrepreneur Garret Camp gets credited for coming up with the idea for the global ride-share phenomenon that is Uber. However, Travis Kalanick mainly gets associated with it, seeing as he co-founded the Uber brand and acted as its CEO from 2010 to 2017. In 2019, Kalanick sold off precisely 90% of his Uber shares and turned a profit of $2.5 billion on his original investment in the software. Before he gained mainstream notoriety for pioneering ride-sharing apps, he was primarily famous as the man behind Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer file-sharing company.
4. Kevin Systrom
Instagram is the world’s largest photo-sharing platform. It got founded by Kevin Systrom, a computer programmer, an alma mater of Stanford University, who co-created it along with Mike Krieger, another Stanford alumni. In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, now Meta, bought Instagram, a company with only thirteen employees, for $1 billion. The platform now generates around $20 billion per year to Meta’s annual bottom line. Going by a recent Forbes estimate, Systrom’s net worth is around $2.4 billion.
5. Whitney Wolfe Herd
The earliest dating site, Kiss.com, popped up on the World Wide Web in 1994. Match.com followed a year later, and eHarmony debuted on the relationship internet scene in 2000. Bumble is an online dating app launched in December 2014 that is now super popular and often gets described as a feminist dating platform. Its creator, Whitney Wolfe Herd, was only twenty-five when the services got up and running and have gone down in history as the youngest person to take a company public, at the age of thirty-one. 6. Matt Maloney Grubhub is a food ordering and delivery platform based in Chicago. It got established in 2004 by Mike Evans and Matt Maloney but did not rise to mainstream prominence until the early 2010s when the company started accumulating annual revenues of over $100 million. In October of 2021, Maloney stepped down from the board of Just Eat Takeaway, an Amsterdam-based conglomerate that bought Grubhub, in June 2021, with a net worth of $150 million.
7. Nick D’Aloisio
Nick D’Aloisio is a British internet entrepreneur and mobile developer responsible for the mobile app Summly, a news summarizer that Yahoo bought for $30 million. More recently, he founded Sphere, a tech startup that Twitter acquired in late 2021 for an undisclosed amount. D’Alosio’s software development portfolio also includes a famous iOS app named Trimit that condensed text.
8. Chad Mureta
Chad Mureta is a blockchain gaming investor, app mogul, and bestselling author. Mureta has a diverse professional career that started in the real estate industry. Over the years, he re-oriented to the app sector and has managed to build and sell eight companies in the last decade and change. Mureta has also led the creation and monetization of over one hundred and fifteen apps, including the first Emoji iPhone application.
9. Brian Wong
Kipp is a mobile advertising network renowned in the Android gaming sector. It is a rewards platform through which gamers attain real-world prizes from in-game accomplishments. In 2010, at the age of twenty, its founder, Brian Wong, became one of the youngest CEOs to get venture capital funding. A year later, in 2011, he made it onto Forbes 30 Under 30 Social/Mobile rankings.
10. Robert Nay
Robert Nay is a name that often emerges on lists depicting – Which Entrepreneurs Have Made the Most Money from Their App Idea at a Young Age? When he was only fifteen, Robert programmed Bubble Ball, a physics puzzle mobile game that gathered two million downloads in two weeks (2010) on the Apple App Store. Bubble Ball got substantially promoted by active users of social media platforms through the magic of social networking. In 2012, a Community Levels mode got added, boosting the app’s appeal by allowing users to create new levels via a web interface.
