iOS Making money from app developing

[PoleDancingdev]

is it realistic to think that your app will make over $1000 in the app store?

Also, does anyone know any stats of how many apps make over 100k or stuff like that
Thanks

 

[firewood]

The median (50th percentile) paid app makes pretty much nothing. Maybe half of all paid apps (over 100K of them) developed won't even cover the $99 enrollment.

The average amount of revenue is skewed by the most popular apps. Apps that stick around the top 15% or so in popularity over an entire year might cover $1k. For $100K, you are probably looking at apps that stay within the top 2% for a sustained period. But given over 250K paid apps, there might be a few thousand of those winners (mixed in with over 100K+ losers).

There seem to be several blogs posts and even an academic paper on this topic: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1924044

 

[robbieduncan]

$1000 in what sort of time frame? A day? A month? A year? Over the entire lifetime of the app on the store?

 

[xStep]

Start with the cartoon and opinion here; iOS Monetization v2.0

 

[1458279]

Just read a study on this. Bottom 80% shared 3% of the revenue. The stats are very skewed. Huge numbers of the apps were not worth the time if you are measuring the dollars.

 

[jonnymo5]

Uploading an app to the app store won't make you any money. You have to market it. Figure that nobody is going to go look for your app so it is up to you to get it in front of them. What are the chances of you randomly buying any one product in a Wal-Mart? What about an item you saw on TV or read about in a blog.

 

[fishkorp]

I recently read a study where over 50% of all games in the App Store make less than $3,000 in their lifetime.

Very, very few people are making big bucks from a single app. And many apps that do sell that well, the budget for the app itself is huge (development costs, marketing, servers and maintenance), that they're possibly not making much profit. Where the real money seems to be (at least by looking at the Top Grossing section) are apps that are free, but where the users pay for content. I personally hate that model, but it seems to be working.

I do know a few people who've started successful businesses developing apps for other people/companies though. They'll charge a 1-time fee (or sometimes hourly rate) to do an app for someone, then move onto the next project. Or have multiple going at the same time, depending on schedules and complexity of the app. If you're good, you can make a decent living doing that.

 

[firewood]

Just read a study on this.

Which study?

 

[1458279]

Which study?

http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2011/09/28/results-ios-game-revenue-survey/

Was run for a short time and didn't get huge sample size, but still gives interesting results.

It's also specific to Game IOS, one of the hardest areas to get to the top.

 

[larswik]

I am slowly learning / planning my app too. I don't plan to make money directly off of my app. I have a visitors channel that runs in local hotels and the app will help reenforce the show and allow people to buy into the app for wine tours, restaurants and so on. It will help make money on the back end and not right from the app it's self.

Not releasing any apps yet but I bet it is tough making money, even breaking even with the $99 yearly cost.

 

[CalWizrd]

I can give you a first hand reply...

I released CalWizrd on June 30th, after spending about a year of night/weekend time designing and developing it (unfortunately, I do have to work for a living). Two months worth of payments from Apple come to just under $2K. I haven't done any marketing or promotion as yet, because I am waiting until my next release, which will contain many user suggested features and improvements.

Is it nice getting the $2K so far? Sure. Does it come close to 10% of the minimum wage for the time and effort put in so far? Not even close. Do I love doing it? Absolutely.