I built apps for android, iOS, windows incarnations, and even bb10. In aggregate maybe 25-30 branded apps on the iOS store could make 10k per month. The rest were garbage.
The most I ever made was 1m over a year on 7 BREW apps we made. That's right, those old dead handsets had only 20-30 apps in their store and we owned about 20% of the market.
What made that possible is that the ecosystem was so bad and it was so hard and expensive to get apps reviewed and built for multiple handsets, you could make money as long as you just got on the device.
The relative ease of launching has made a plethora of nice but unprofitable apps on the other ecosystems... And it points to what happens in any work economy when the barrier to entry becomes hobbiest-level easy. Happened to photography, writing/publishing, and others. There are too many people relatively skilled enough to do an average job and give it away for free for anyone but the best marketed and connected to make money.
Pages 4/5 of the Stardock 2014 report have a couple of graphs on mobile revenue and PC game revenue vs. sales ranking, https://hackernews.hn/item?id=8092753
"Once a game of piece of software leaves the very top of the sellers, the income fall-off is severe. Our poorest selling DLC for PC games generates more income than nearly every iOS or Android developer app we've gotten numbers for."
> The relative ease of launching has made a plethora of nice but unprofitable apps on the other ecosystems... And it points to what happens in any work economy when the barrier to entry becomes hobbiest-level easy. Happened to photography, writing/publishing, and others. There are too many people relatively skilled enough to do an average job and give it away for free for anyone but the best marketed and connected to make money.
Quoted for truth and that it bears repeating. When anyone can do it, anyone will. And if `$your` specialty becomes that easy, it won't be in high demand. This is something that we must be on our guard against, as professionals, and to continually self-improve our way such that it keeps a competitive moat between us and the hobbyist.
The "labor supply" side isn't the only factor in downward pressure on the value of apps--it's also the quality of the demand side. People tend to the cheap side when it comes to paying for apps. The result is that each marginal increment of "value" in an app comes with a geometric increase in cost to produce it. It's also a feedback loop: people aren't willing to pay (very much) even for good apps because there are a sufficient number of developers doing it "just good enough" and giving it away for free, and so developers who could make an even better app shy away from doing so since the prospective benefit doesn't merit the risk.
The most I ever made was 1m over a year on 7 BREW apps we made. That's right, those old dead handsets had only 20-30 apps in their store and we owned about 20% of the market.
What made that possible is that the ecosystem was so bad and it was so hard and expensive to get apps reviewed and built for multiple handsets, you could make money as long as you just got on the device.
The relative ease of launching has made a plethora of nice but unprofitable apps on the other ecosystems... And it points to what happens in any work economy when the barrier to entry becomes hobbiest-level easy. Happened to photography, writing/publishing, and others. There are too many people relatively skilled enough to do an average job and give it away for free for anyone but the best marketed and connected to make money.