Unusual hype around the App Store
The hype around the iPhone App Store does not subside. The gold rush, stories about lone programmers and teams receiving hundreds and thousands of dollars every day for their programs on the App Store worry many people. But what does this information mean to you personally if you want to join the game? Let's evaluate the real state of affairs.
First, as you heard there are 60'000 or 600'000 (I heard both numbers) registered iPhone developers: I personally have about 20 programs in the App Store at the time of this writing.
Five of them are on the charts:
• Zen Jar # 34 Social Networking (Paid)
• Zen Jar Lite # 54 Social Networking (free)
• Spirit Board # 36 Board Games (free)
• Spirit Board Pro # 95 Board Games (paid)
• PhotoZen # 31 Photography (free)
You can assume that with two paid programs in the charts, I became rich. In the end, it's the gold rush, right?
')
The reality is more striking. In order to take 34th place in the top category of social networking, the application must be sold 30-35 times a day. With a standard application price of 99 cents and an Apple commission, the program should bring a little more than $ 20 per day in order to be on this place on the chart. And this is despite the fact that social networking is quite a popular category.
Perhaps you expect the game charts to be more profitable. Board games are not a very popular category, but nevertheless you will be surprised to learn that 6-8 downloads per day are enough to get into the charts. In other words, if you earn $ 4 per day, you will be in the top 100.
What does all this mean? Do not forget that in the App Store now more than 36'000 (55'000 at the time of translation of the article) programs. If applications in the top of a certain category make such sales, how do you think the rest of the programs are sold?
No Absolutely nothing. They are not sold at all.
This is the problem I encountered. Any normal business not related to software production or the Internet is measured by its average performance. For example, if you want to open a coffee shop in your city, a part of your preliminary research will be to find out how profitable other coffee houses are located nearby and perhaps research on how the same restaurants feel in other areas similar to your districts.
You will learn the average performance of such establishments and find out whether the opening of your new cafe is worth a temporary and monetary investment.
As IT entrepreneurs, we repeat one mistake from time to time. We rate the market for its greatest success. It's like opening a Joe Coffee and Cakes cafe only after studying the Starbucks quarterly report and expecting to quickly grow to the level of a multinational corporation. Rational entrepreneurs, small business owners, unless of course they have enough resources to start, do not try to compete with huge, well-established corporations. They also do not expect that their success will be at the same level. Joe will look at Sue's coffee shop in order to understand what his business can become.
After several years of working in the Web industry, I still can not believe what people think that way. How many startups started thinking about profits only after they gained traffic?
It always seems that successful Internet projects are buried in gigantic cash flows. Imagine what it would be like if the real sector played by the same rules - what would you invest in a coffee house “Joe's Coffee and Cakes”, which brings several thousand dollars a month or MegaCoffee 5000, which operates all over the world, but suffers losses in a couple of million a day?
But back to the App Store: I published these numbers so that people understand how this mechanism works. The App Store is not a healthy and well-established market, rather, it looks more like a lottery. When you send your program to Apple, you buy a lottery ticket. Perhaps you will become one of the few who will quickly earn a couple of hundred thousand, but most likely you will be another close-minded developer who, when developing his program, knocked his fingers into the blood and shed sweat and tears for the program that no one needs.
After all, in the Internet industry, when we imagine how rich and successful our new web applications will make us, we focus on examples when people earned hundreds of millions of dollars. On the iPhone market, the most successful projects brought $ 500,000-600,000.
Does anyone want to calculate the expected price of this lottery ticket?
Continuation
I can't believe that I have to do this. Although a very small percentage of readers could not understand what I wanted to say in this article, the popularity of this article is so high that even this small percentage transformed into a huge flow of letters, so here are the answers to the most common comments I received via email:
“But people really make money! Just look at ______ ”
Yes, some people earn. The purpose of this article is to show how few such people really are. I heard them say that this is a tough game, but if you hit the charts, then you got rich. Well, I hit the charts. Now I have five programs in the tops in different categories. My programs are fairly stable in the lists of popular applications. But this does not mean that I earn at least so much to live on these incomes. That's what I want to explain. Yes, people make money, but don’t expect to be one of them. Even if your application is successful, it must become very successful in order to bring you a lot of money.
“Well, your applications are trash, so they are not for sale”
My apps are sold , that's what's up. Four of them are in the top 100 in their category and two of them are in the top 50. Zen Jar at the moment, when I write these lines, is in 35th place in the category of paid programs for social networking. My applications are exactly the type of software that is sold. The point is that it does not guarantee super-profits. In practice, this means about $ 20 per day.
“You need to be promoted!”
What for? In order to raise revenues from $ 20 to $ 30? The problem is that a “race down” was constantly going on, ending in the fact that a price of 99 cents was established on the products of this category. How to promote a product worth $ 0.99? Have you ever seen an advertisement of non-essential products with the same price? Of course not, and the reason that you have not seen such advertisements is that the seller will never cover the costs of promotion.
Here are the reasons:
The program costs $ 0.99. Apple takes $ 0.30. You have $ 0.69 per sale (in fact, a little less due to exchange differences, etc.). One ad transition will cost you about three to twenty cents, leaving you with $ 0.49 to $ .66. We can assume that you will be $ 0.60. This scheme would work perfectly if the advertising conversion was 100%. In reality, the conversion does not exceed five percent . This means that the conversion price ranges from $ 0.60 to $ 2.50. Thus, at best, you will remain without loss, and at worst you will have to spend two dollars in order to earn sixty cents.
“ But if you get to the top 10, you will become a millionaire!”
In fact, you’ll rather earn hundreds of thousands , but you are right. The problem is that only a small percentage of developers will be able to get into this number. That is why I am comparing the App Store with the lottery. And let's be honest, in order to win a million in the lottery you do not need to do any work. To get to the moon you have to shoot at the stars.
“If you earn nothing, why are you still doing it?”
Who said I do not earn anything? Read the article again. I have almost 20 programs in the directory. Some of them are sold, some are made to support sales. They are all in different categories of games, lifestyle, social networking and photography. My strategy has always been diversification and volume, I decided to adhere to such a scheme because at the very beginning I realized that all this hype around the App Store is too good to be true. Instead of a single application, for earning millions, I made several programs that bring me additional income.
I am also very lucky, because my Zen Jar program has gathered over 12,000 very loyal users to whom I can report new software releases. A novice developer will very soon realize that there are practically no opportunities for the promotion of new applications. It remains only to cross your fingers and hope.
“Why do you hate Apple / America / Freedom / etc?”
Actually, I believe that the iPhone is undoubtedly the best device of those that I have ever had and the best $ 200 I have ever spent.
As a developer, I love this platform. I have millions of ideas for new applications. My new program, PhotoZen, breathed new life into my photo-site glowfoto.com, six months ago I thought that it was impossible to do this.
Nevertheless, Apple continues to make decisions that sometimes do not fit in my head. Either they have a general captivity, which none of us can understand, or they really do not understand what they are doing. I am writing this article just because I want this platform to be successful. I have invested quite a bit in iPhone development and I cannot afford to just sit still and let Apple fail. For many months I wrote that I didn’t understand why Apple makes such decisions and only now people are starting to join me in a big, collective “huh”?
"The quieter you go, the further you'll get! / The road will go by walking! ”
Not if you are collecting $ 0.99 per download.
You can earn money by developing for the iPhone. I earn enough to justify the fact that I continue to do this, but these earnings for me are not the main source of income. Once again I want to say that this is not a goldmine and to have a good idea for the application is not enough. You also need to have a lot of luck, patience, and invest a lot of strength in the development - just like in any other software market. The huge difference is that in other program markets you are likely to rate your product more than a dollar and some other company will not take away 30% of your income.
- Do you like the article? If you have an iPhone, buy one of my programs. I will accept any help I can get.
The author of the article stromdotcom.
Original article
Do you like the translation? Visit appdev.ru website in the FAQ section - there are many more interesting things for developers.
First, as you heard there are 60'000 or 600'000 (I heard both numbers) registered iPhone developers: I personally have about 20 programs in the App Store at the time of this writing.
Five of them are on the charts:
• Zen Jar # 34 Social Networking (Paid)
• Zen Jar Lite # 54 Social Networking (free)
• Spirit Board # 36 Board Games (free)
• Spirit Board Pro # 95 Board Games (paid)
• PhotoZen # 31 Photography (free)
You can assume that with two paid programs in the charts, I became rich. In the end, it's the gold rush, right?
')
The reality is more striking. In order to take 34th place in the top category of social networking, the application must be sold 30-35 times a day. With a standard application price of 99 cents and an Apple commission, the program should bring a little more than $ 20 per day in order to be on this place on the chart. And this is despite the fact that social networking is quite a popular category.
Perhaps you expect the game charts to be more profitable. Board games are not a very popular category, but nevertheless you will be surprised to learn that 6-8 downloads per day are enough to get into the charts. In other words, if you earn $ 4 per day, you will be in the top 100.
What does all this mean? Do not forget that in the App Store now more than 36'000 (55'000 at the time of translation of the article) programs. If applications in the top of a certain category make such sales, how do you think the rest of the programs are sold?
No Absolutely nothing. They are not sold at all.
This is the problem I encountered. Any normal business not related to software production or the Internet is measured by its average performance. For example, if you want to open a coffee shop in your city, a part of your preliminary research will be to find out how profitable other coffee houses are located nearby and perhaps research on how the same restaurants feel in other areas similar to your districts.
You will learn the average performance of such establishments and find out whether the opening of your new cafe is worth a temporary and monetary investment.
As IT entrepreneurs, we repeat one mistake from time to time. We rate the market for its greatest success. It's like opening a Joe Coffee and Cakes cafe only after studying the Starbucks quarterly report and expecting to quickly grow to the level of a multinational corporation. Rational entrepreneurs, small business owners, unless of course they have enough resources to start, do not try to compete with huge, well-established corporations. They also do not expect that their success will be at the same level. Joe will look at Sue's coffee shop in order to understand what his business can become.
After several years of working in the Web industry, I still can not believe what people think that way. How many startups started thinking about profits only after they gained traffic?
It always seems that successful Internet projects are buried in gigantic cash flows. Imagine what it would be like if the real sector played by the same rules - what would you invest in a coffee house “Joe's Coffee and Cakes”, which brings several thousand dollars a month or MegaCoffee 5000, which operates all over the world, but suffers losses in a couple of million a day?
But back to the App Store: I published these numbers so that people understand how this mechanism works. The App Store is not a healthy and well-established market, rather, it looks more like a lottery. When you send your program to Apple, you buy a lottery ticket. Perhaps you will become one of the few who will quickly earn a couple of hundred thousand, but most likely you will be another close-minded developer who, when developing his program, knocked his fingers into the blood and shed sweat and tears for the program that no one needs.
After all, in the Internet industry, when we imagine how rich and successful our new web applications will make us, we focus on examples when people earned hundreds of millions of dollars. On the iPhone market, the most successful projects brought $ 500,000-600,000.
Does anyone want to calculate the expected price of this lottery ticket?
Continuation
I can't believe that I have to do this. Although a very small percentage of readers could not understand what I wanted to say in this article, the popularity of this article is so high that even this small percentage transformed into a huge flow of letters, so here are the answers to the most common comments I received via email:
“But people really make money! Just look at ______ ”
Yes, some people earn. The purpose of this article is to show how few such people really are. I heard them say that this is a tough game, but if you hit the charts, then you got rich. Well, I hit the charts. Now I have five programs in the tops in different categories. My programs are fairly stable in the lists of popular applications. But this does not mean that I earn at least so much to live on these incomes. That's what I want to explain. Yes, people make money, but don’t expect to be one of them. Even if your application is successful, it must become very successful in order to bring you a lot of money.
“Well, your applications are trash, so they are not for sale”
My apps are sold , that's what's up. Four of them are in the top 100 in their category and two of them are in the top 50. Zen Jar at the moment, when I write these lines, is in 35th place in the category of paid programs for social networking. My applications are exactly the type of software that is sold. The point is that it does not guarantee super-profits. In practice, this means about $ 20 per day.
“You need to be promoted!”
What for? In order to raise revenues from $ 20 to $ 30? The problem is that a “race down” was constantly going on, ending in the fact that a price of 99 cents was established on the products of this category. How to promote a product worth $ 0.99? Have you ever seen an advertisement of non-essential products with the same price? Of course not, and the reason that you have not seen such advertisements is that the seller will never cover the costs of promotion.
Here are the reasons:
The program costs $ 0.99. Apple takes $ 0.30. You have $ 0.69 per sale (in fact, a little less due to exchange differences, etc.). One ad transition will cost you about three to twenty cents, leaving you with $ 0.49 to $ .66. We can assume that you will be $ 0.60. This scheme would work perfectly if the advertising conversion was 100%. In reality, the conversion does not exceed five percent . This means that the conversion price ranges from $ 0.60 to $ 2.50. Thus, at best, you will remain without loss, and at worst you will have to spend two dollars in order to earn sixty cents.
“ But if you get to the top 10, you will become a millionaire!”
In fact, you’ll rather earn hundreds of thousands , but you are right. The problem is that only a small percentage of developers will be able to get into this number. That is why I am comparing the App Store with the lottery. And let's be honest, in order to win a million in the lottery you do not need to do any work. To get to the moon you have to shoot at the stars.
“If you earn nothing, why are you still doing it?”
Who said I do not earn anything? Read the article again. I have almost 20 programs in the directory. Some of them are sold, some are made to support sales. They are all in different categories of games, lifestyle, social networking and photography. My strategy has always been diversification and volume, I decided to adhere to such a scheme because at the very beginning I realized that all this hype around the App Store is too good to be true. Instead of a single application, for earning millions, I made several programs that bring me additional income.
I am also very lucky, because my Zen Jar program has gathered over 12,000 very loyal users to whom I can report new software releases. A novice developer will very soon realize that there are practically no opportunities for the promotion of new applications. It remains only to cross your fingers and hope.
“Why do you hate Apple / America / Freedom / etc?”
Actually, I believe that the iPhone is undoubtedly the best device of those that I have ever had and the best $ 200 I have ever spent.
As a developer, I love this platform. I have millions of ideas for new applications. My new program, PhotoZen, breathed new life into my photo-site glowfoto.com, six months ago I thought that it was impossible to do this.
Nevertheless, Apple continues to make decisions that sometimes do not fit in my head. Either they have a general captivity, which none of us can understand, or they really do not understand what they are doing. I am writing this article just because I want this platform to be successful. I have invested quite a bit in iPhone development and I cannot afford to just sit still and let Apple fail. For many months I wrote that I didn’t understand why Apple makes such decisions and only now people are starting to join me in a big, collective “huh”?
"The quieter you go, the further you'll get! / The road will go by walking! ”
Not if you are collecting $ 0.99 per download.
You can earn money by developing for the iPhone. I earn enough to justify the fact that I continue to do this, but these earnings for me are not the main source of income. Once again I want to say that this is not a goldmine and to have a good idea for the application is not enough. You also need to have a lot of luck, patience, and invest a lot of strength in the development - just like in any other software market. The huge difference is that in other program markets you are likely to rate your product more than a dollar and some other company will not take away 30% of your income.
- Do you like the article? If you have an iPhone, buy one of my programs. I will accept any help I can get.
The author of the article stromdotcom.
Original article
Do you like the translation? Visit appdev.ru website in the FAQ section - there are many more interesting things for developers.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/63127/
All Articles