Comments on: Can you make a living off an iPhone app?

By: vasilis

vasilis — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:07:41 +0000

i have a cool idea that i want to develop in an app. where can i find information from scratch of what to do from step 1 in making an app.
also how do you get paid by apple?
do you pay tax?
is your app going to be available in the USA and Europe ie is there a restriction?
how much does Apple make from you?
how do you check if the name of your app is available?

thanx

By: John Wilker

John Wilker — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:03:08 +0000

Have you taken a look at the tap tap tap blog? They do some deep diving on their sales numbers, showing what they brought in for their apps. Might be a bit more data to aid in your analysis.

Great write up though, that’s a question, I’ve no doubt a lot of people are mulling over.

By: Dimitri Bouniol

Dimitri Bouniol — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:29:24 +0000

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.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 07:21:47 +0000

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.

By: Mat Trudel

Mat Trudel — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:33:30 +0000

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.

By: The Evil Boss

The Evil Boss — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:55:28 +0000

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”.

By: Aamir Virani

Aamir Virani — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:34:45 +0000

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.

By: Andy Korth

Andy Korth — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:12:38 +0000

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.

By: Caleb Jaffa

Caleb Jaffa — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:25:09 +0000

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.

By: Neil Inglis

Neil Inglis — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 02:06:56 +0000

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.