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The Majority of Today’s App Businesses Are Not Sustainable

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

#61

Post by walterbell »

tsunamifury wrote: post #25

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…

Pages 4/5 of the Stardock 2014 report have a couple of graphs on mobile revenue and PC game revenue vs. sales ranking, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8092753

"Once a game of piece of software leaves the very top of the sellers, the income fall-off is severe. Our poorest selling DLC for PC games generates more income than nearly every iOS or Android developer app we've gotten numbers for."

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

#62

Post by danbucholtz »

thrownaway2424 wrote: post #39
danbucholtz wrote: post #37

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.

Good example definitely. I wonder what kind of money they're making. I also wonder if they would be able to do the same thing in 2014 that they did a few years back when they launched. I perceive the landscape as far more competitive, but I could be wrong.

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

#63

Post by eclipxe »

dredmorbius wrote: post #51
tsunamifury wrote: post #25

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…

What's "BREW"?

Be thankful you never have to write for BREW.

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

#64

Post by billions »

dredmorbius wrote: post #51
tsunamifury wrote: post #25

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…

What's "BREW"?

Before iPhones the battle was between Java and BREW for the language of mobile apps. This was 2000-2005 when Motorola and Nokia were heavyweights.

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

#65

Post by snowwrestler »

Donzo wrote: post #34
Donzo wrote: 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…

Did you have a website to promote your app?

Edit to add: no judgment implied; I'm just curious.

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

#67

Post by chrishallquist »

I find this completely unsurprising. Maybe because I'm someone who used to (kinda sorta) make a living as a writer?

Writing software is more profitable than writing prose (or poetry), because fewer people can do it, but at the end of the day the economics are the same: the fruits of your labor are easily copied, so making something that 10 million people read or use is not inherently much more expensive than making something 100 people read or use. Under those circumstances, it's easy for everyone to read the best content, and use only the best apps. People's differing tastes, need for variety, and imperfect awareness of their choices means the authors of the "second best" thing aren't completely screwed in either case, but it's still pretty close to winner-take-all.

(Also, social proof—people's tendency to use what other people are doing as a proxy for quality—amplifies winner-take-all tendencies, even when there are no obvious network effects.)

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

#68

Post by chrishallquist »

r_singh wrote: post #15

"However, states the report, only the top 1.6% of developers make more than $500,000 per app per month, but of those who do, some are earning tens of millions per month. The next 2% – those who make between $100,000 and $500,000 per month." I think these percentages are not low at all. In fact, they're almost pretty good. This is how success is distributed in almost any profession.

"This is how success is distributed in almost any profession."

No—only in professions where the marginal cost of serving an additional customer is low.

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

#69

Post by megablast »

Bamafan wrote: post #49
chasing wrote: 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.

The top 25% of apps did not take 10 employees to create them, unless there are 2.5 million iOS app developers running around.

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

#70

Post by LunaSea »

Donzo wrote: post #34
Donzo wrote: 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…

A few month ago someone introduced me to appstore SEO which basically is old-school key word optimization and other tricks but for apps.

So in a way you can improve your discoverability.

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