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The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

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41–50 of 90 posts

Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

#42

The app store that came with iOS6 totally destroyed the income of developers on iOS. Many developers pointed out the problems, many left the platform. With iOS7 apple plainly ignored the problem. With iOS8 some changes are coming which might help. Apple did it. They had better undo it if they don't want their iOS devices to be nothing but ad display machines or in app purchase tricks.

IMO, if you're relying on the App Store app for all your marketing and discoverability, you're probably doing something wrong.

Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

#44

These numbers are actually quite rosy in my opinion. When I built PaperBox (www.gopaperbox.com), our chief competitor was getting about 50K downloads per day - this compared to maybe 50 a day for us back then. We knew we had a better offering - but we also knew that charging right off the bat would shoot us in the foot. Instead, we've opted to go the free route to build our user base & brand, and figure out the busin…

What about Paper? Not only did they charge from the start, they charged a rather high price, and entered a market full of existing competitors, some free.

Sometimes ... just sometimes, a fantastic product, and good lifestyle-type marketing (at least, from the videos on their site) can make all the difference. Paper is just leaps and bounds better than any other similar app ;)

Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

#45

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 ha…

I wonder what is the admixture between

- hobbyist apps getting better

- vc funded businesses willing to lose piles of money for a shot at winning the app lottery introducing apps/services far below cost

- deliberate deception on the part of app store owners about true prices of apps leading to very heavy use of iap and deceptive business practices

Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

#46
post #34
post #18

Releasing apps seems increasingly pointless. Unless you get featured, there is pretty much no visibility and almost 0% chance of discovery. At least with web based apps your ranking can improve overtime for a variety of keywords and traffic can begin to find you. I have not had a similar experience with development for the app store.

I see that I am getting down voted for my sentiments, so perhaps I should better explain my experience. I programmed an app that was featured in several publications including the Washington Post and coverage by one of the writers for the Guardian. These favorable reviews led to a handful of sales. If this were a web app, these valuable links would have given my product a real boost. With the app store, there's almos…

What app did you made?

Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

#47
post #28

Am 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.

That seems like a convenient average skewed by the top 1% of apps

Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

#48
post #31

I feel like to a large extent this is just techcrunch being techcrunch and writing link-bait articles. My thoughts on this: 1) Just about everyone is "interested in making money" from their apps. I'm not sure how they're filtering the developers in the survey, but I'm willing to bet the amount of effort put in, and the actual methods used to "make money" differ wildly among those developers. Apples to oranges. 2) 5-1…

Can't see your email mate... Put it in your "about me" field if you want peopleto see it, the email field is private.

Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

#49
post #28

Am 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.

Not so great if it took 10 employees to create it.

Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

#50
post #10

On Windows Phone / Windows 8 this problem is even bigger. No matter how much effort you put in to build the best app in its genre, earning even $100 per month is extremely hard. I know a lot of Windows developers who are serious about building apps for those platforms, and none of them makes $100 per month or more from those apps.

Have you more on this - I assumed winphone would be so limp in the market that no one would develop for it, leading to the big wins for the few that bothered.

I am assuming I have been proven wrong by the market. But would like to know

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