Apple’s new App Store has proved to be a great opportunity for developers to make money for their applications. Although a large number of applications are listed under free, I propose someone make an application that’s not free. Something that carries a marginal price tag (say $4.99) and brings some kind of joy to the buyer. I’m envisioning an application that delivers a comic strip to the device every day, like an RSS feed would. And the best part – give all the proceeds to some kind of charity.

The original idea was thrown out by @charris1980 while we were at work a few days ago. At first, I passed it off thinking he was just being a nice guy. After further deliberation, it began to sound like a great idea. Looking solely at the number of iPhones sold (between 11 and 12 million), that presents a fantastic opportunity to raise some money. Even if only 10% of the people buy the app, we’re still looking at around 1 million sales. At $3.75 per sale (after Apple tax), that comes out to over $3.75 million raised for charity. If you could get Apple to waive the tax for charity-based apps, you could add $1.25 million to that total.

If anyone has the knowledge to create iPhone applications or knowledge in dealing with Apple, a team of a few members could knock this out fairly quickly. Hopefully whoever receives the donation would be able to accomodate the funds (hoping to avoid another disaster). There would also be some potential royalties to whatever comic strip(s) get used, but maybe the author would be generous as well. Everyone wants to make money from the App Store, and they are – but charities aren’t when they very well could be.