81–90 of 90 posts
"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 $500,000 per month." I think these percentages are not low at all. In fact, they're almost pretty good. This is how success is distributed in almost any profession.
A majority of today's small businesses are not sustainable either. Isn't it something in the range of 85% of small businesses fail after a handful of years?
So would a company which was set up to operate, say, a restaurant. If the company sold the assets (lease, fixtures & fittings etc.) to another individual or company, so that the owner could move to another country or start and run a different business, that would also look like a small business failure, even if the guy lived well for those years and came out on top before moving on.
Looks like income inequality is FAR worse in the app store compared to the rest of our economy. Will the Apple loving leftists speak up about this?
Most apps are terrible and nobody wants to buy them.
I built apps for android, iOS, windows incarnations, and even bb10. In aggregate maybe 25-30 branded apps on the iOS store could make 10k per month. The rest were garbage. The most I ever made was 1m over a year on 7 BREW apps we made. That's right, those old dead handsets had only 20-30 apps in their store and we owned about 20% of the market. What made that possible is that the ecosystem was so bad and it was so ha…
Quoted for truth and that it bears repeating. When anyone can do it, anyone will. And if `$your` specialty becomes that easy, it won't be in high demand. This is something that we must be on our guard against, as professionals, and to continually self-improve our way such that it keeps a competitive moat between us and the hobbyist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a handful that seem to get touted as the poster children for viable Windows app developers. Atley Hunter who has 500+ apps in the ecosystem (currently all phone targeted but a recent podcast mentioned he was moving to Universal development so that they can run on Win 8 too), he looks for trends (like "Don't tap the white tile" type stuff) and then implements them in the Windows Phone store. Then there is Ru…
Sounds very much like the German brothers who go round making French German Spanish language versions of bi popular sites. Nothing particularly wrong but just odd the innovation stays on the iOS / android areas
>Nothing particularly wrong but just odd the innovation stays on the iOS / android areas
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.
Paid advertising is not possible when you make 70 cents per sale. It costs more to advertise a copy than you make from a sale.
A way around this is to increase your lifetime income per download, which is where IAP comes in, which is where candy crush etc show the way.
If Apple don't want the store to only be that, they've got some work to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This 10000x. It is incredibly hard to compete today when there are 10 apps for every idea. Most of them suck - but it is damn near impossible to charge from day one and be successful unless you have a very large platform to advertise or are a prominent figure (something like Vesper from John Gruber). We're in it for the long haul with PaperBox (gopaperbox.com) - we intend to be the best app and continue to iterate fo…
"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.
Are these figures net of both the App Store's cut and paid ads?
I may be wrong though.