Think your brilliant app idea will earn some big bucks? HAH. You fool

But the real issue I face...

... is that it's impossible to find any apps that let me share voice, photos and text with my friends. If only someone would build that kind of app, and then do it again, and again and again.

odds and earnings

one in ten thousand

That's still WAY better odds than playing the lottery then.

Also - make less than $1,250 a day

That's 760 quid a day. (don't scoff, we're not all big bucks consultants y'know)

Three or four months of that and i wouldn't need to earn anything else for the rest of the year. very nice thank you. and still, better odds of achieving it than spending £2 every week on the lottery.

Dead Givaway

"Furthermore, of paid applications, about 90 per cent are downloaded less than 500 times per day and make less than $1,250 a day."

So, the Gartner consultant that wrote the report is on $1250 per day, then, I take it? Anything under that isn't worth bothering with.

Call me extravagant but I could probably manage to live on USD 1250 a day ....

The dirty secret of mobile apps - they don't make any money

Mobile apps have been a race to the bottom for a while now - and it's getting worse. Users have become accustomed to highly polished and functional apps, and then not paying anything for them. The resources required to build a professional app are already pushing beyond the limit of what a one-man band can achieve - consider the app itself, artwork, not to mention the development, hosting and support of back-end services that are commonly required by apps.

I have published two mobile apps across several platforms (iOS, Android and Windows Phone) and I can confirm the work involved is immense. And for all that effort, my apps generally bring in no more than £5/day on average. When you look closely at the stats though, it turns out that my apps are doing better than 90% of what is out there. This is the dirty secret - the very long tail of apps and profitability. The 90% below me make no money worth mentioning at all, and the next 5% (Top 10%-5%) make slightly better pocket money - say £100 per day range. I would be ecstatic to even be in that range. It's only the chosen few in the top few percent to make any 'real' money at all - i.e. enough to replace the day job

1,250

Quite a lot considering most apps seem to be created by 1-man companies.

Discoverability is the problem

As pointed out in the article, now there are over a million apps in these stores, it's really hard for anyone to find anything worth bothering with.

I think the best solution would be for the store managers to drop apps that are unpopular after a while. No downloads in a month? Delist the app. It sounds harsh, but it would be easy for any developer who cared to make sure they downloaded the app now and then to keep it listed and you'd probably find many don't bother to do that for apps that aren't performing at all anyway.

Having your app in some app store is seen as a badge of honour by some people.

I suspect $1250 a day is a slip - he probably means $1250 a month or maybe a year?

It's not a Store, for God's sake

The issue is in understanding from the (newbie) developers. An app store is about making your executable (.EXE) available for download. Now, as with any other website, no website will be visited ONLY if either of the 2 happens:

1. A search engine points to it when user asks. Monetary investment needed.

2. A community or group has been notified about it by other advertisement means (TV, brochure, enterprise rules). Investment needed or you have already invested money in your enterprise.

Now, the majority of apps are being developed by indie developers who are new to business or just making it after the office hours and they perhaps miss the point. None of the store managers (Apple, Google or MS) admit this upfront on their site. All they suggest is make something wonderful.

I'll however give credit to Microsoft which used to its store "Marketplace". But, not anymore. :(

Seems that Apple, Google et al love to trot out how many apps they have in their stores whenever the situation allows, what a skewed measure of success! This is then further compounded in the general media by stories of the "successful Apple having over a million apps", while also ran's e.g. MS, BB have only a couple of thousand.

So no incentive to employ any kind of quality control really while this KPI is king. The real measure of an app stores value would be something more like number of apps above a threshold of downloads, say 10 a day on average over the past month.

Only 100 apps make a profit?

So... there are 1,000,000 apps, and 1 in 10,000 will make a profit. 1,000,000 / 10,000 = 100. So are they saying there are only 100 apps making a profit? Sounds a bit low to me.

Filtering through the crap

Filtering through the crap is by far the biggest challenge facing anybody using any App Store. There are plenty of great apps that just fall to the bottom because they cost a little bit. People will take free but crap apps in favour of good but cost a couple of quid apps.

As an example I've been looking for a suitable calculator for my iPad. Sure there are plenty of free calculators out there that do the job, but they were all basically simulating a traditional calculator. Up until recently the best I could find was the TI-nSpire app which was more of a CAS app than a calculator, meaning it can be heavy going. Then just after the new year I noticed something in the iTunes app store as a new addition called Tydlig which has now replaced all calculators on all of my iOS devices. However it costs around 3 quid which means it'll probably and undeservedly fall out of sight because people are too tight arsed to pay for a bit of quality and innovation.

Check it out, just google Tydlig - it's probably the coolest calculator for iOS out there.

By the way I'm in no way associated with this app, although I did have an email conversation with the author regarding a very obscure and minor bug that I found.

Especially young people are brainwashed by corporate propaganda: "if you work little bit harder you could be a King of UK someday". No way man. The idea of becoming IT-millionaire is just a fantasy. The truth is that IT jobs, just like industrial jobs are moving to developing countries and will never come back here. You'll more likely become a new Beatles or Rolling Stones than IT-millionaire. One doesn't have to be even a good singer or guitar player. Just act pervert enough.

marketing, marketing, marketing

I'm a one-man-band and I've written a number of iOS apps. I may as well have thrown them straight into a skip rather than publish them in the App Store. If no one knows they are there, no one is going to buy them. And the chances of anyone stumbling on them decrease each day as more apps are published. It doesn't matter how good the app is.

I used to pour scorn on marketeers but now I realise that unless you have a serious marketing budget and marketing know-how, forget writing apps for anything other than fun.

you only need 2 things...

A huge marketing budget or...

A pre-made audience of 1000s of eyeballs you can tell about your app

Otherwise your app will drop like a little stone into the middle of the pacific ocean.

People forget you don't have a technical issue building apps because even if you can do it yourself you can hire someone to do it. You have a marketing issue - unless you have deep pockets.

The days of launching an app and just getting sales are gone. I have had apps on the appstore for 3+ years and they derive a modest income which has steadily declined.

It's a shame they didn't bother to include Windows Phone

Where they will have seen how developers make much more money since the apps-to-users ratio is much much better. The Android store is *so* broken now because it's impossible to charge for anything. I don't know why developers even bother with it.