500$/month for an app that took me a month to develop would be OK. Maybe I could earn more as a freelancer, but you also have to take fun into account. It's valid to trade fun for money, otherwise people should never go on holidays.
The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#22from the PDF (downloadable):
"Game design is a highly creative art that takes a lot of practice. Angry Birds was creator Rovio’s 52nd title. It is therefore not surprising to find that those who have shipped a lot of game titles are the most successful. The 3% of mobile game developers who have shipped 50+ titles are nearly 9 times as likely to be earning over $50k per app per month than the 62% who have only shipped between 1 and 3 titles."
I was quite surprised that is was the 52nd game! Wow. That is a lot of persistence!
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#23Looks like income inequality is FAR worse in the app store compared to the rest of our economy. Will the Apple loving leftists speak up about this?
Most apps are terrible and nobody wants to buy them.
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#24They analyze the data on a per app basis, which may not be the best way to do it. Let's take the Facebook developers on Android. The Android Facebook app has been downloaded over 500 million times. Facebook's Android Slingshot app has been downloaded less than half a million times. With the way Visionmobile/Techcrunch break down the data, on an average per app basis, the existence of the Slingshot app drags the achievements of the flagship Facebook app way down - it halves it, basically. This doesn't really bear any relation to how much success Facebook has had though.
HN often contemplates the power law, so it's natural a developer might have one app which is very successful (Rovio released 51 apps before releasing Angry Birds), then another app which is half as successful, then a third app half as successful as the second app, and so forth. This analysis doesn't think in those terms though, they are more of the idea that every app released by a company will be more or less as successful as the other ones it releases.
Also the report sets the bar fairly high. It calls people who make $9000 per app per month "strugglers". I'd be happy with one app making $9000 a month, and wouldn't be struggling making the resulting six-figure salary. Even if I had two or three apps making $9000 a month each I'd be considered a struggler. This isn't really struggling. Maybe for a firm with venture capital that was expected to grow quickly it would be considered a failure, but not for a bootstrapped developer, or partnership of developers.
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#25I 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.
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#26Is it worth it to be an App developer? How about versus working at Google or Apple? From their perspective, the purpose of your work is to enrich their platform. The difference is in the distribution of payout and work conditions. Rather than having a stable 100k salary at said company, you have the chance to earn absolutely nothing, or be an outlier and beat the 100k. Is it worth it, by expected value? Well, accordi…
I think you are underestimating what the really big guys are pulling in. I doubt twice is high enough for the tail end, three or four times is likely better.
I also think we underestimate just how many apps are being created with the intention or desire of generating revenue that fail to do so.
It's a fairly arbitrary calculation anyways, the point is the expected value is on the same order of magnitude as that of a stable company man. The big question is what implications this new "career salary distribution" will have as it becomes more popular.
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#27Is it worth it to be an App developer? How about versus working at Google or Apple? From their perspective, the purpose of your work is to enrich their platform. The difference is in the distribution of payout and work conditions. Rather than having a stable 100k salary at said company, you have the chance to earn absolutely nothing, or be an outlier and beat the 100k. Is it worth it, by expected value? Well, accordi…
> There are few app developers pulling that $100K or so salary.
The article and report (which admittedly are not very clear) says there are very few app developers pulling in over $100k per app. Someone with an app making $250k a year and two more apps making $10k a year each would not be in the $100k-per-app bin as this report lays out the data,
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#28Am I to understand from those charts that over 25% of iOS apps make more than $5,000 per month?
That sounds like great odds to me! Especially given the amount of garbage in the App Store.
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#29from the PDF (downloadable): "Game design is a highly creative art that takes a lot of practice. Angry Birds was creator Rovio’s 52nd title. It is therefore not surprising to find that those who have shipped a lot of game titles are the most successful. The 3% of mobile game developers who have shipped 50+ titles are nearly 9 times as likely to be earning over $50k per app per month than the 62% who have only shipped…
This sounds like the app developer's equivalent to the "10,000 hour" rule of thumb.
Fifty attempts to hit the nail with a hammer is likely to improve your aim.
In addition, anyone willing to try 50 times is likely to be a survivor. Those unwilling to persist will go try their luck elsewhere.
It is oddly inspiring to see the "try 50 times" story and the payoff for the doggedly persistent developer.
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#30Replace "app business" with "musician."