Ask HN: What are app developers buisness models?

Which languages do you prioritise? How many do you need to cover to get the double/triple benefit?

Me too apps are the least-risky way to make money. You are going into a known market with little technical risk. All that remains is to beat the other guy, and the smaller the market, the bigger the chump the other guy is likely to be.

Want to make a billion dollars? Don't make the 100th bible app.

Trying to pay rent? Don't make your new creative photo-sharing app.

We released Mega Jump for iOS just over two years ago. This was after a couple of paid games that didn't really get traction. The first version was developed in about 5 weeks by one engineer and one designer.

Initially, it was priced at $0.99, but then the price was dropped to free for a weekend, to do OpenFeint's free game of the day. That weekend, the game got about one million downloads, but there was no in-game store nor ads to monetize that at the time. However, that experience caused the founders to change to a freemium model.

We currently make money with in-app purchases and voluntary ads-for-ingame-currency. We've done 17 updates to the game, and it's currently approaching 30 million downloads, split about 25 on iOS and 5 on Android. After two years, we still get about 400 thousand daily active users.

We released Mega Run for iOS on May 30, and it was designed to be freemium from the start. It's possible to play the entire game without paying anything, and we shipped with 4 themed worlds (we seem to have erred on the side of giving away too much). In any case, the game blew through 5 million downloads in a couple of weeks, and currently has over 500 thousand daily active users. We were #1 on the iTunes free charts for about a week.

Mega Run was a long dev cycle -- about 18 months total. Initially, it was just one engineer and 1.5 artists. I joined on contract for the second half of development, and by the end the whole company (3 engineers, 3 designers, 1 producer) were working on it.

In terms of conversion rate ( people who spend $ > 0 / all downloads ), we're at the high end of average. An often quoted average is 1% conversion. We find that historically Android has converted at about 1/10 of iOS, but that's changing, and we're seeing strong Android growth after just being featured in Google's staff picks. Historically, we've outsourced all Android development.

The company started with 4 active founders. About a year and a half ago they hired an intern for community support who's now gone on to do level design and artwork, as well as a producer. I came on board on contract about a year ago, and started full-time in Jan. We've just hired engineer #4.

All of the engineers we've hired so far (as well as the founders) are lead-programmer quality. The expectation is that any one of us can do any engineering job within the company. The two founding designers are brothers and did some work on Counterstrike back in the day. Several of us have taught game design and/or programming at local community colleges.

This is the best environment I've worked in. Dual 30" monitors and beastly machines all around. All expense paid GDC and WWDC conferences. Beer. No dress code (wearing flip-flops right now). Very low-ego co-workers and founders who are actively involved in production. No comment if I come in at 10:30 (but maybe if I come in at noon :). The occasional crunches are not nearly as bad as the rest of the game industry, and it's not expected. I've worked on a weekend once, the week before release.

We're completely self-funded, and growing organically as we find great people. We're in Toronto, Canada, easily accessible on foot or by public transit. We're always on the lookout for great people that we can work with, although we're not hiring for any specific roles right now.

Also, we do a lot of cross-promotion with other indie devs with high-rated games that we like.