Safe from the Losing Fight

Can you make a living off an iPhone app?

Andy on Nov 7th 2008

Filed in Career, iPhone | 16 responses so far

16 Responses to “Can you make a living off an iPhone app?”

1. JulesLt Nov 7th 2008 at 02:43 am 1

   Gut feel - most apps are currently selling the most in the first few weeks after launch, because we’ve already hit a point where as a user there are very few ways to find apps in the long tail - so my starting point is :

   Blogs - i.e. read about in on Ars Technica.
   The AppStore front page - the Top 10 seems self-perpetuating as it’s actually one of the best bits of marketing.

   What’s less common is deciding to look for software based on a need (I think e-readers are the only ones so far).

   I think from your point of view you need to presume that a given app has a life-span of 12 months tops, with most of that being front-loaded, but the focus should be on total unit sales - some people have made what I’d consider an annual income in a months sales.

   I was going to suggest you developed Tempest for the iPhone. Then I Google’d to see if it had actually been done. It has (Vector Blaster) yet there is no way I’d have found that via the AppStore itself.

2. Patrick Stein Nov 7th 2008 at 03:17 am 2

   As maker of Smart Sokoban I’ve released my application download statistics in a developer conf in Germany. You can see them at http://www.jinx.de/teclog/2008.10.27.macoun-08_files/TheNextStepToiPhone-1.pdf
   On page 70 and onwards I show the curves you are interested in

   Regards Patrick aka Jolly

   —
   author of: ScreenRecycler, JollysFastVNC, SmartSleep, SmartSokoban and more.

3. Stephen Darlington Nov 7th 2008 at 06:07 am 3

   I think that there are so many variables in play and so little data that it’s impossible to speculate how much you’ll earn in your first year.

   I’m not going to get into the numbers, but my app (Yummy) started well but average daily sales dropped pretty quickly; numbers are now a fraction of what they were immediately after launch. Many developers have seen the same thing.

   What’s holding it back? Lack of marketing? Lack of genuine users? (How many regular Delicious.com users also have an iPhone?) Features? Bugs?

   Worse, even if I had an answer, would any of those constraints apply to your app?

   In summary, I’m pretty happy with the numbers overall but I’m a long way from being able to give up my day job.

4. Chris Ryland Nov 7th 2008 at 08:01 am 4

   Our graphing calculator app, Grafly (which we believe is a revolutionary app, one that really shows off the computing/graphics power of the iPhone/iPod Touch platform) falls into the “big success at first, tailing off” situation, largely because it’s so hard to find things on the app store. I think people are only looking at the first page of apps in each category (whenever we release an update, and get back on the first page, the numbers go way back up).

   So that supports the theory that most people aren’t actively searching for an app (they’d find us if they were, and some do), but rather being somewhat passive about finding new things.

   So any realistic app plan would have to include some serious marketing, both word of mouth and paid.

   Google Adwords don’t seem to do anything, either–people aren’t generally googling for iPhone apps.

   So that leaves targeted advertising on relevant sites or printed publications, not an enticing prospect.

5. Tom Harrington Nov 7th 2008 at 02:57 pm 5

   I’m not selling my own apps in the store– I’m doing iPhone contracting. But the developer of “Mouse House”, a game, has been logging his sales data on his blog every day. It may be hard to draw conclusions because he’s been experimenting with different prices to try and find the ideal level (which so far is looking like a race to the bottom). See http://www.bang2d.com/ for details.

6. Scott Squires Nov 7th 2008 at 08:17 pm 6

   I think you’re being way overly optimistic. Most of the articles are about the people who made it based on some unique alignment, killer app or just being featured on the app store. This is like seeing an interview with a star and assuming anyone can be a star if they move to Hollywood.

   There is a huge difference from free to even getting people to buy 99 cent app. it gets harder to sell as the price goes up. Depending on the app you may be competing with free or 99 cent apps. May people I know never buy iphone apps, they fill all their needs with free apps. How quickly will someone copy your app and sell essentially the same thing for free or 99 cents? Some decent 99 cent apps are getting single digit daily sales now. A number of developers are teens that don’t have to worry about making money from the app. Many are programming for the first time and trying to get an app in the store in a week. Those all fill up space in the app store.

   Most Palm apps go for $15-25 each. There’s a larger potential market on the iPhone but there’s a much larger developer base and more apps at much lower prices.

   The only time your app will show up in the App Store is when it’s first released. (Unless you’re one of the chosen apps) So that’s when you’re likely to get the most downloads. Almost all (all?) apps have taken a big drop off because there was an initial demand and because the 700 apps is now close to 5000 apps.

   The problem is the App Store release date may or may not mean anything. Recently the release date means submission date so your app is 3 or 4 pages deep if someone opens up a category by release date. How many people will find it there? The shear number of apps now being released everyday makes it very unlikely people will even know your app exists.

   How will people find your app? The App Store search is nothing like a Google search (you can’t specify exact phrases, etc) Even if they were to search specifically for something your app does your app may be on page 5. You have no control over keywords. If you have an original app then it’s even more difficult to get the word out since people won’t be searching for that.

   Some of the App Store lists are limited to the top 100 in that category. How is your new app going to be on that top 100 list?

   The App Store has New category which shows a range of apps, some that were released in July(!?)
   They also have a What’s Hot category. There’s also a Staff Favorites. The criteria for many of these is unknown or questionable. If an App is in one of those categories then they’re likely to be in another (such as Top Paid Apps) Which makes them best sellers which in turn keeps them on the list and around it goes.

   There are review sites but most of them are poor and even the better ones are only going to connect with a tiny fraction of App Store users. They’re running behind just trying to keep up with the apps that are being released. If a reviewer spends more than a minute or two with your app it’s a success. The App Store is the one thing that everyone in the world sees. Probably only one in 1000 (10,000?) go to iPhone review sites. That great review probably won’t make a huge difference.

   All updates are free. No matter how many new features you add you won’t get any more money from people who already bought it. Compare that to most software which is updated each year with an expected return on investment. Will an update increase sales with new features? Will it be seen or reviewed again? Will you want to spend time working on an update?

   How many developers will be improving their 99 cent apps a year from now? How many will even be answer support email?

   Will there be 10000 apps in a few months? how do you get someone to find your app and buy it then? In traditional software you have potential for different distributors, bundling deal, trials, etc. None of that exists in the iPhone market.

   iPhones are easily cracked and usually available within a day or two of release. Not sure how large of ‘market’ that is but obviously that doesn’t help.

   It would be great if the App store had a Random list occupying some of the front page. That way developers would get a chance worldwide to be seen and users might spot an app they didn’t think about before or didn’t know existed.

   At the end of the day most of these people diving in hoping to strike it rich will be sorely disappointed.
   (i.e. don’t quit your day job until it’s been selling well for at least 6 months)

7. Kenneth Ballenegger Nov 8th 2008 at 03:08 am 7

   I shared sales numbers on the iphonesb list: http://groups.google.com/group/iphonesb/t/6aa2618735288404

   You’re welcome to use them in your statistics. I believe a couple other devs have been sharing as well in different threads on the same list.

   -Ken

8. scott Nov 11th 2008 at 02:54 am 8

   Have a look at
   http://larsbergstrom.wordpress.com/2008/09/
   the second article for sale figures over time

9. Neil Inglis Nov 15th 2008 at 07:06 pm 9

   I just regenerated my stats so I’ll share…

   Escape Pod has been out for just under 11 weeks at $1.99. In that time it’s sold 5088 copies.

   Alphonetic has been out for 9 weeks at $0.99 and has sold 605 copies.

   Sleeps to Christmas has been out for just over 4 weeks, has been downloaded 123,946 times, is free but has generated $3200 in advertising revenue.

   Escape Pod I’d consider succesful. It’s paid back the time I spent on it at a decent rate. It’s caught some breaks like being well reviewed and was featured in BBC Focus Technology magazine.

   Alphonetic pretty much wasn’t worth the implementation time. I guess it’s a bit of a niche app. If I add support for more phonetic alphabets than just NATO then I could probably price it higher.

   Sleeps to Christmas is an interesting one. It has one advert along the bottom of the screen and despite a really poor fill rate (only 60% of users actually see an ad, since my ad provider is struggling) it’s generated an exceptional return. It took me 4 hours to implement the first version, with maybe another 6 hours on updates. It’s absolute crapware though. I’ve had lots of debates with people about whether I sacrificed professional integrity for it and whether it was worth it. I did and it was, but only because I work for a BigCo by day and don’t have to maintain a reputation. If I was an indie mac dev I either wouldn’t have released it or I would have spent more time on it. I saw a gap, targetted it at the right market and it’s been fairly successful.

   I’ve mailed you details of the trends day by day if those are of interest to you. I’m quite transparent with this stuff as I recognise it’s helpful to share.

10. Caleb Jaffa Nov 16th 2008 at 01:25 pm 10

    To answer the subject of this entry, I think the answer is generally no. You can’t make a living off of just one iPhone app. I think that the type of application you are developing greatly changes things though and you can’t generalize too much all iPhone applications.

    I’m transitioning to an indie iPhone developer (Mac too if I have ideas for that platform). The two ideas I have I don’t see more than a month full-time to take the concept to version 1.0. Granted as I add applications to my offerings, support, maintenance and new features will eat into other development time, but I want to have at least a handful of apps if at all possible selling in the app store in 2009. Coming up with good ideas will probably be the biggest hurdle and hopefully I can continue to make my applications interesting and better for current and future users.

    Sadly Apple doesn’t have much in the way of robust features for developers to charge users. Fieldrunners to me in its current incarnation is a $5 game to me. Their stated plans for versions 1.1 and 1.2 would make it a $10 game. However how do they deal with that? They can’t give me an upgrade path if I want more features and give them the $5 difference for it. I get grandfathered in or else orphaned.

    Steve from Demiforce has stated on his blog that through his Onyx platform he’ll be able to have a paid holiday level pack for Trism. Not sure exactly how that will work with Apple, but it could be important to see, especially for games the paid add-on pack can be an important revenue stream that also increases the value of your game.

11. Andy Korth Nov 17th 2008 at 02:12 pm 11

    ScribBall’s sales stats are here:
    http://howlingmoonsoftware.com/wordpress/?p=9

    It’s a small game that Scott and I developed fairly quickly, but I think ti came off really well. We’ve sold it at $3.99 since release, hoping to avoid the “rush-to-the-bottom” pricing. We had a good launch week, but without constant press, it faded out pretty quickly.

12. Aamir Virani Nov 17th 2008 at 03:34 pm 12

    Hey Andy - this is really useful data to look into - if you get more info I’d love to see it and help analyze it.

    One thing I’ve been thinking about is the market penetration part. If there are 10 million iPhones out there and you sell an app for $0.99, the best you can do is basically make $10MM. (Awesome, but look at what that requires!)

    Any ideas on what *percentage* of iPhones download non-gaming apps?

    At times I feel like the smartest developer of all was the one who made that I’m Rich application.

13. The Evil Boss Nov 17th 2008 at 05:55 pm 13

    I published my first three weeks of sales for my two applications at http://www.theevilboss.com/2008/10/analyzing-app-store-sales-data.html

    I plan on publishing a follow up post in early December, which will show that there has been a significant drop in sales per day since the initial “spike”.

14. Mat Trudel Nov 18th 2008 at 07:33 am 14

    Although both of my apps to date have been rather obscure niche apps, I’m particularly surprised at the low level of sales to date. In particular, the mediocre launch of OHai — which was accepted into the store by Apple on a Sunday in North America / Europe and hence had long dropped off the ‘What’s New’ list by the time people started work on the Monday — was more than a little disappointing.

    My past 30 day sales numbers are up at:

    http://consolidatedopcode.com/appstats/SuperSubnet%20Calculator.html
    http://consolidatedopcode.com/appstats/OHai.html

    and automatically update at 1400 GMT every day. Note that there’s some data missing in October from when my web hosting provider went down.

    I agree with the general sentiment that launch time exposure contributes to a very front-loaded sales history. Also, I’ve noticed that being really careful about having relevant keywords in your app description helps as well. Selling a subnet calculator without the word ’subnet’ in the app description makes it difficult for prospective users to find your app, particularly on the iPhone App Store interface.

15. Andrew Nov 21st 2008 at 12:21 am 15

    Apple should change its rankings to be based on turnover. That way a $5 game selling 1000 units would rank the same as a $1 game selling 5000 units.

16. Dimitri Bouniol Nov 23rd 2008 at 02:29 pm 16

    As you posted in http://www.losingfight.com/blog/2008/11/15/how-to-price-your-iphone-app-out-of-existence/ , raising the price of an app doesn’t necessarily mean that its sales will fall to 1 or 2 a day. I’ve been selling EleMints, a periodic table sold at $4.99, for 45 days, and have sold 3982 copies to date. Even a periodic table, not necessarily a product with a very large market, can be pretty profitable at a higher price. I’ll be increasing my price to $7, then to $10 for my next updates to see how it will sell at an increased price.

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