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…
The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#52I 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
#53These 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.
I know this because I downloaded it because it was free and then bought the tools. I wouldn't have tried it if they wanted the (I think) $4.99 up-front.
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#54I 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…
What's "BREW"?
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#55I 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…
What's "BREW"?
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#56I 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…
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#57"Monument Valley costs $6 less than it's own soundtrack. That’s how dysfunctional app pricing is."
https://twitter.com/gregmaletic/status/493430279122350080
It really can't continue like this. What comes after, who knows.
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#58A majority of today's small businesses are not sustainable either. Isn't it something in the range of 85% of small businesses fail after a handful of years?
Edit: found the stats. Seems the number of companies have only grown by 10% in total or so in six years [4]. So maybe you are right then.
(all references in Swedish, sorry)
[1] http://www.tillvaxtanalys.se/sv/publikationer/statistikserie...
[2] http://www.tillvaxtanalys.se/sv/publikationer/statistikserie...
[3] http://scb.se/sv_/Vara-tjanster/Foretag--och-myndighetsregis...
[4] http://www.statistikdatabasen.scb.se/pxweb/sv/ssd/START__NV_...
Re: The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable
#59Am 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
#60On 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
Then there is Rudy Huyn, another full time Windows Phone dev that targets the "flagship" type apps that MS is dinged for not having on their platform, think Instagram or Vine before they finally released an "official" app and now Tinder. His MO seems to be reverse engineering the HTTP apis and delivering a client app that works with those services.
I'm not aware of any Windows Phone app developers like iOS's Marco, where a single well executed app was enough to sustain a developer over a long cycle. But I could be missing somebody in one of the other markets, Windows Phone does well in GB, France and Italy among other non-North American markets.