Remember back in the early days of the smartphone where smartphone apps were kind of a novelty? This led to the creation of many weird and fun apps that were designed to basically show off what a smartphone could do. One of those apps is the iBeer, an app that mimicked the action of drinking a pint of beer when you tilt your phone.
Now in an interview with Mel magazine, the original creator of the app, Steve Sheraton, has shared additional details on how the app came about, and how much money it was making at its peak.
According to Sheraton, he revealed that the original iteration of the app was first created for the Palm Pilot, but since the device did not have an accelerometer, it was basically a video that users had to time perfectly to replicate the effect. Sheraton later brought it onto the iPhone where he sold it as a video, and all of this was before Apple had the idea for the App Store.
Once they did, Sheraton said that they saw his video and encouraged him to turn it into an app. “The accelerometer is constantly measuring the phone’s angle versus the horizon. so by tethering the line between the liquid and the foam to the horizon, you can move your phone in any direction and it looks like it’s filled with liquid.”
Sheraton claims that the app shot to first place on its very first day and stayed there for about a year, where at its peak it generated anywhere between $10,000-$20,000 a day. The app is still around but Sheraton has since left its development to the company he helped form.