What you need to know
- iBeer was a classic iPhone app that let you "pour" a beer and drink it on your iPhone.
- It made the developer an absolute fortune.
- The creator has now revealed that some people who downloaded the app would get 'super angry' that the app didn't actually let you drink beer out of your phone...
The developer of the multi-million 'iBeer' app for iPhone has revealed that customers would get "super-angry" that real beer didn't come out of their phone. Seriously.
Steve Sheraton, the mastermind behind one of the oldest and most popular apps in the history of the iPhone, took to Reddit Thursday for an AMA session with MEL magazine. Sheraton revealed in that interview earlier this year that the iBeer app had made him millions of dollars, generating $20k a day during its heyday. Answering one question, Sheraton confirmed he made "a few million dollars" that mostly went back into other projects and lawyers. But that wasn't the biggest revelation from his answers...
Asked about some of the difficulties creating the app, Sheraton revealed the seemingly unbelievable. Some people who downloaded the iBeer app thought it would actually somehow let them drink beer from their iPhones...:
We had to create our own fluid simulation engine with the help of physicists. Apple kept rejecting updates because of the burp. People kept getting super angry because no real beer came out. Seriously!
This might sound like some sort of parody, but Sheraton doubled down on his comments in response to another question, telling one commenter who said the app made them fall in love with the iPhone "But you were smart enough not to expect real beer to come out. Oh the fun we had with those app store and YouTube comments..."
The only possible explanation Sheraton gave came as he explained that he thought a similar concept would still work today:
Yes. So long as it (also) adheres to the oft cited law by Arthur C. Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". When the iPhone came out people had NO idea what this thing was and what it could do. Fake-splaining it with "it makes beer" hooked right into that.
"What do I know," Sheraton said on the burp ban. "One day the whole app store farted and burped, the next day a mere sneeze got your app pulled." He also joked that he was "too classy" to be jealous of all the money made by the iFart app on the App store, and quipped that Apple had taken 30% of all his App Store revenue but 100% of his nerves.
The full AMA continues on Reddit.
