Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#41

Post by marklubi »

a) Two apps in a very niche area (standard and pro versions) at pretty decent price points. The pro version sells for more than $50

b) Both are paid apps, the standard version is in-app upgradable to pro

c) We've put a small amount of effort into marketing them via adwords. Approximately $150/month in ad spend results in more than $600 additional profits. Since it is a very niche market, the ads are highly targeted. We're about to branch into some additional marketing on related sites and should be getting some press soon in a big industry mag. Hopefully they will have good returns on them.

d) Combined income from both apps (including in-app upgrades) has exceeded $1000/month for the last 3 months and is growing at a pretty significant rate. This month has already exceeded last month by almost 20%

The apps did require a pretty significant amount of development (client and server apps as well as the marketing website) and my return thus far comes out to about $15/hour but is rapidly increasing.

We're about to begin development on versions of the app for Windows and Android so that we can extend our potential client base beyond just iDevice owners.

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#42

Post by gojomo »

pz wrote: post #14

(a) 4 (6 if you include the Lite versions) (b) all paid (but 2 have Lite versions) (c) not a whole lot. i ran some ads with admob but they didn't provide very good ROI. i had a little more success cross promoting my apps (d) lived off the income for most of last year. my income has since waned and the death knell came a couple weeks ago when the EFF emailed Apple requesting my app be pulled because it used a GPL libr…

You probably mean FSF, not EFF. EFF has more important things to do than GPL enforcement.

And shame on you for violating the GPL!

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#43

Post by aaronblohowiak »

heat_miser wrote: post #17

(a) 2 (CycleMetrics, Mides IDE) (b) 2 paid (c) Not much, web application, twitter account, getsatisfaction support, a bit of adwords (d) (CycleMetrics) ~ $10 / month, (Mides IDE) pre iPad ~ $200 / month, post iPad ~ $800 / month

Mides is awesome. I like it most for quick code sketches or hotfixes when i just need to tweak something.

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#45

Post by tom_ilsinszki »

macms wrote: post #36
fairlyodd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but that app really blows. Really good on you if you were able to milk 30k out of it :)

i think it's pretty cool

Why did the "No offense, but that app really blows." comment got down voted, and the "i think it's pretty cool" comment up voted? They both voice opinions, only difference: one is positive, the other is negative.

Aren't people allowed to not like an app?

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#46

Post by jerrell »

a) Published: 2

b) Paid/Free: 1 paid, and a free 'lite' version of it

c) Marketing: Fair bit of effort (AdWords, AdMob, traditional + web PR, social media). Have seen little measurable effect.

d) Income: >$50k in year one.

App is for a particular topic in music education. Broadly speaking it's quite niche, but to a musician audience it's widely relevant.

Since it is a specialised education app I priced it at $7.99. I think this is the right choice, but haven't experimented with the price point much.

Income was boosted maybe 40% by being featured on the App Store (New & Noteworthy) for a few days.

About to finally release a second (paid) app - I think it's a stronger offering, but it will be interesting to see if it does anything like as well as the first!

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#47

Post by tunaslut »

tlrobinson wrote: post #23

I spent maybe 5 hours programming Silver Revolver (originally Russian Roulette) http://silverrevolver.com/ and it has made probably $30,000 over the last year, most of which was during a two week period when it was on the top 100 charts. I'd say I got pretty lucky.

that rocks! lucky or not, well done for finding a nice little niche and coding up a cool little game and making money from it :)

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#48

Post by justliving »

drewcrawford wrote: post #25

I'm wondering if this would work better as a Google Apps survey. In particular, there's a big difference between an app that takes one guy an afternoon to write and an app with man-years of development time. To get some insight on that, I've thrown together something here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dF... Please look at it and make suggestions about what I am missing. I will of course publi…

looks quite complete! Did you already publish the results somewhere? I'd be interested :-)

thanks a lot!

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#49

Post by sirrocco »

blumer wrote: post #5

Don't know if Android numbers are helpful to you too (maybe just the contrast will be interesting), but here's my experience in the Android market: a) 1 b) paid c) I posted in a dozen message board threads or so where people were looking for such an app, and I've diligently answered every e-mail I get about it. d) It's been in the Market for about a month and a half, and I've made a little over $2000. Hard to give a…

A link to the app so we can have a look ?

Re: Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

#50

Post by troygoode »

pz wrote: post #14

(a) 4 (6 if you include the Lite versions) (b) all paid (but 2 have Lite versions) (c) not a whole lot. i ran some ads with admob but they didn't provide very good ROI. i had a little more success cross promoting my apps (d) lived off the income for most of last year. my income has since waned and the death knell came a couple weeks ago when the EFF emailed Apple requesting my app be pulled because it used a GPL libr…

this is interesting, how did the FSF determine that an iPhone app violated GPL?
Post reply on HN