I'm struggling a little with how to word this comment. The straightforward way is "If people off oDesk are paying Americans $150 an hour for iOS development, and people on oDesk are paying Americans $30 an hour for iOS development, then American iOS developers should probably not source clients on oDesk."

Odesk and the others aren't a good indicator of the average hourly rate for this sort of work.

Someone charging a freelance rate of $30/hour in north america for iOS work is either not invested much in learning the platform in-depth and therefore won't be able to do much more than populate table views and wire up transitions, or they'll tackle a complicated project at that rate and make a mess for someone else to clean up.

ODesk and Elance are an absolute joke. I'll give up software development entirely before I'll join the nickel & dime circus on those sites.

Yeah, I mean if those were the market rates, programming would be the worst career choice. You'd be better off as a manager at Macy's.

Wake up and smell the coffee .. this is about what the rest of the world pays for programming hours, and it should be so: programming is overpaid in the US.