How much do applications cost?

How much do applications actually cost - and what makes them develop? Are we too focused today on application monetization? Troed Sångberg, an engineer and researcher from Sony Mobile's Technology office, posted his thoughts on this in a blog post. Below is the full text of the post.

A few months ago, I decided to spend the weekends I had to do something really meaningful. My current work at a research center implies a lot of paperwork, but I always thought that it was the code that was the language that could convey my thoughts.
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Therefore, I made an application. It took me a week to the first version, which was launched the day before Christmas Eve, and already before its first update it was downloaded a hundred or more times.

I wanted to take my vacation to them, but in order to be able to return to it in the future, I immediately decided to do it properly. At home, I started developing documentation that describes the functionality in detail, discusses the forums and places it in the catalogs of similar applications. Being a true supporter of open systems, I also opened an account on Github, laid out the code for new versions and made sure that each feature was developed in a separate branch (version control systems - note.) . After all, many little things that are so simple, you can easily forget if you are only a developer and your only goal is a client.

And they started to download it. Hundreds, thousands of downloads. People contacted me on the forum, sent reports on bugs, there were many requests for additional functions, sent translations to other languages ​​for inclusion in future versions of the application. I found several video reviews of my application in different languages, found its discussions on the forums.

So I continued to work on the application and develop its capabilities that did not benefit me, but, apparently, were very much in demand by other people. I improved the testing environment and updated the database used by the application to make it easier to manage with an increased number of hits. After spending another 2 weeks to get a decent version 1.0, I went back to my main job.

By that time, according to my calculations, the application had about 30,000 users. I spent a good 3 weeks working on the project, and was absolutely pleased with the result.

But I did not receive any money by that moment. Money was simply not needed for the start of the project, and their absence did not hinder the achievement of goals.

Today, version 1.1.6 already has more than 100,000 users, although I haven’t been contacting it for a long time due to cases at the main job. I am waiting for a new vacation to return to further development.

Why have I not yet become another app millionaire? I am sure that many of you reading this article use many applications from different stores and see the potential for money in what I told you.

Minecraft server plug-ins do not bring money, at least to my knowledge. My project is known as Courier , made for Minecraft Bukkit in-game mail system player-player based on items. I estimate the number of users based on the number of downloads, since these downloads are performed by server administrators, and there can be from one to a thousand users on the server (for my assessment, I believe that on average fifteen, in the hope that it is at least close).

So why I still do not see it as a chance to become an app millionaire? If you still have doubts, this is exactly what I wanted to discuss on the forum. Tell me, where did we get that the application, regardless of the time and effort spent on it, should be monetized?

Ultimately, many create much more complex software than mine, in a few days or weeks, just like me, with completely different motivations. I talk a lot about this in my series of presentations on the economy of gold against the economy of gifts. I also recommend reading The Generous Man by Tor Nørretranders. For me, was the discovery of the frequent misunderstanding of the concept of gratuity with respect to open-source development. Not limited to open source by itself, it turns out that people rarely do something for free, but nonetheless produce something that can compete in the market along with what has been done in anticipation of a monetary result.

As I think, this is what makes the difference between the software for mobile and non-mobile platforms.

Proper understanding of motivation plays a huge role in building business models, both for those who develop software and for those who create platforms and are looking for content. Earnings are only one of the motivations for creating successful products, and not the only criterion for their evaluation. Thus, the answer to the question posed in the header consists of several dimensions. What I do not know yet, but what I would like to discuss is how best to determine their meaning.

And of course, the above is my personal opinion, not the opinion of Sony Mobile.