Magician creator of 'iBeer' app made £15k per day when iPhone first launched

dailystar.co.uk:

iPhone would be getting an App Store in 2008, tech nerds everywhere were excited for the infinite possibilities mobile apps could bring.However, the noughties were simpler times, and the likes of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and Pokemon Go were still a twinkle in Silicon Valley's eye.The first 500 apps to launch on the App Store were largely quite basic and designed to show off some of the iPhone's high-tech features at the time, such as the touchscreen, GPS, and more.

The king of all early iPhone apps, though, truly blew peoples' minds: the iBeer app.As the name suggested, this app made it look like you were drinking beer from your phone and even included a mutable burp sound.When loaded, the screen would fill up with a golden lager, and as you tilted your phone, it would slowly 'drain' into your mouth using the iPhone's accelerometer.

You could even shake it to get more foam. Although the app was about the price of a London pint at the time (£2.99), it was such a success that its magician creator, Steve Sheraton, became a millionaire almost overnight.It started when he shared a YouTube video of himself pretending to drink a beer on his iPhone by syncing his movements with a video on the screen.“I was dead broke, just trying to get by, living on a friend’s couch, and suddenly, the video was getting millions of views, which was a lot in 2007,” he says. “People were begging me to get this ‘thing’ on their phones — they didn’t even have a word for ‘app’ yet.” Apple soon approached Sheraton and asked if he could make an app based on the video.

He called it iBeer and put it on the App Store, where it quickly shot to first place on the first day the store was available and stayed there for about a year.“The amount of money.