My first attempt at iOS app development

Yes, making money on iOS is an uphill climb, many times more so if you’re not playing the TikTok ads and subscription model.

I’ve been making iOS software independently for almost 2 years now (https://heliographe.studio) and am about ramen profitable.

A few notes in case OP (or anyone interested in making some money in the App Store) is reading:

- you have to make the app free to download, and quickly demonstrate value then show a paywall if you want any purchases. Paid upfront just does not work unless you’re an already recognized product.

I had some apps that were paid upfront, and would mostly get $0 days. Switching to free to download immediately brought me to a slow but steady trickle of daily downloads, and from there you just have to work on your conversion rate.

- but that's still going to be pretty low, if you want any meaningful user acquisition, you're going to have to go look for the kind of people who might be interested in your product. The broader your potential audience is, the harder that's going to be (but that's why TikTok ads can work so well). In my case, choosing to focus on a somewhat niche area (tools for photography) is helpful; there's a strong photography community going on Threads and regularly posting on there yields good results (for now...)

- $2.99 is dramatically underselling yourself, especially if you offer a quality product that you put time to craft to your standards and has no tracking, no subscription, no ads, etc. You should play with pricing to see what the sweet spot in terms of conversion is, but in my experience it's always worth it to start at least at $4.99/$7.99 for these sort of utility apps. Of course, the design of your funnel/paywall will make a huge difference (ie you'll likely sell more of an app marked as $4.99 at 50% off, than just $4.99)

- learn about what makes for good App Store screenshots, descriptions, how keywords work, etc. Ariel from App Figures has some good videos on YouTube about what they see and what seems to work based on their data.

The days where you could make a little app, chuck it on the App Store for $.99, and have it just blow up are well over. If you want to make any money on the App Store (even if to just pay back for your Apple Developer membership), you have to put as much effort, if not more, in the marketing and promotion of your product than you put in the design & development of it. It's a grind for sure — and don't count on Apple to help you in any way (by and large they seemed more interested to promote games and dating apps with $49.99/mo subscriptions than small indies doing interesting things).

Good luck! Eager to try your app :)

The author mentions code signing as a tricky ecosystem thing. Well, wait until the app has to get new assets to be resubmitted with bug fixes for new versions of iOS.

And if they don’t keep updating it, it will stop working and the buy it for life idea commits the dev to maintenance that isn’t paid for either upfront or through subscription.

There are folks who make and give away a lot but some learn their lesson quickly and find ways to get people to put a reasonable amount of recurring payment into the app to make it even remotely sustainable beyond a hobby.

FWIW, AI may make this cost so much lower that this kind of thing can make sense now. Something to consider, I suppose.

Coming from embedded development, where it's mostly crappy SOC vendors providing a barely-working SDK and toolchain they cobbled together from an ancient version of gcc, moving to iOS development / Xcode was in most aspects a breath of fresh air. It does have its annoyances, though. Code signing, provisioning profiles, entitlements, AppStore wizardry... And the developer program fee is a bummer: It means you can't sustainably release free apps unless you're willing to just ignore that you're burning $100 a year forever.

Other frustrations: Apple makes it difficult to maintain support for older devices. They insist you keep updating your tools, but the updated tools tend to drop support for older SDKs and devices. You have to kind of go out of your way to keep your app targeting them. You can see how this plays out by getting a second hand iPhone 7 today and go to the AppStore looking for apps. It will be very difficult to find an app that will run on it. This phone is not that old, but the ecosystem abandons you pretty quickly.

They also deprecate things like crazy, so every time you update your tools, you get more warnings about APIs Apple would rather you stop using. It's tough to just write an app once in 2016 and keep it limping along forever. They clearly favor developers who are 1. doing it for a living, 2. targeting latest and greatest devices, 3. updating their app and their tools frequently, and 4. don't mind doing surgery every year to move away from deprecated stuff.

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Or just developing in Apple's crappy ecosystem.

eg Apple publishes a new ios rev; debugging on it requires upgrading xcode; and that requires updating your OS.. Good thing you don't mind wasting a full day or more reinstalling every other devtool you may happen to use. Or xcode just doesn't connect to your ios device because reasons. (The reason is apple writes shoddy slapdash software because monopoly.)

So now you're spending another $1500+ on a studio so you can do all this in VMs and see how bad the damage will be to avoid blowing up your main devbox. etc etc.