iPhone Development, a bad use of time for a .NET Developer?

OK, so even though I’m a “.NET Developer”, I’m really not just a “.NET Developer”, but at this point it is the technology stack that pays the bills around here, so lets just keep it at that for the sake of this post.

Recently I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro, that had all of the upgrades for the Feb 2008 Rev. (7200 RPM Drive, 2.6 Ghz Intel Peryn Dual Core, 6MB L2 Cache, 512 MB Video RAM, etc).  My main use for this machine currently is for all of my personal software including Cubase SX 4.5 (an audio sequencer), loads of VST plugins, samples, pictures, videos, etc.  In addition to running those apps, I can now run the iPhone SDK.

I have quite a few software product ideas right now, and some of them are iPhone apps, some of them are web based, and some are some cross platform desktop app ideas. 

So without thinking logically about any of this, I started digging through the iPhone SDK and Developer Videos.  I gave myself all kinds of reasons that this would be an ok use of my time, like “hey learning other languages makes you a better developer”, “hey seeing other architectures is good too”, “oh, I consider myself a software designer because I create applications that are well designed that people want to use so maybe I should learn more about Apple”, “ “this iPhone market doesn’t really seem too saturated, and I bet I could compete with a lot of leading apps”, on, and on, and on.

Then reality kicked in and I said to myself, WTF am I doing here?  I’m going to spend my time managing memory in Objective C? I’m going to create an app that sells for a couple bucks and then hope that it sells how many apps to be somewhat profitable? Hmm, umm, and what can I use this Objective C experience for the next time I’m deep in ASP.net, WPF, javascript or CSS?

So I went from one extreme to the other and now I’m kind of sitting in this nice little pocket of gray where there is no clear answer.  I figure I’m just going to finish up some web oriented features that I want to get out onto Vast Rank (internationalization is coming!), and kind of poke around with Cocoa, UIKit, Objective-C, and XTools for fun on the side.  After I play around with the SDK for a little bit, I can see if I want to commit to taking on some of the iPhone app ideas I have.

Are you a .NET or Java developer considering developing an iPhone app?  Do you think it is a good use of your time, if your app does not take off?  I’m still on the fence right now.