How much Do App Designers Really Make?

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
75,399
All of those Apps out there created by so many different designers for the different major platforms. Do you ever wonder if it is worth the time to make apps, financially speaking, or does the majority do it for the fun and experience of making an App to have it published? Looking at the figures, if you plan to make a living at this, design for the App Store.

Whether it is gold in the Yukon, websites in the 1990s, or app developers today, larger amount of revenue will go to those who enable development than to those who are doing the development
Click to expand...
 
Alot make apps to compliment another product or act as an extention of their primary product, not really to make money off of the app themselves.
 
It's not clear if this money includes those that get money from in game ads. My guess is that most of the money for apps goes to a very small number of applications and that most of those come from larger companies.

That said, there are also companies that sell very specialized apps that sell for much more than a buck and while they don't sell a lot of apps, they can sell those apps for as much as 40 dollars. The issue with android is that most are unwilling to buy apps and the end result is that many quality apps will never end up on that platform.

I've used both, and I used far more apps on my android tablet than on my iPhone, but I never bought a single app on android (though I suppose Amazon paid for some of the apps that I have).
 
There's a lot of crap out there. How many apps are published for someone to cut their teeth or pad their resume? And some are just crappy because they're crappy.
 
Very boring and pretty much pointless article... They pretty much just took 4 numeric; a=# of devs, b=pay outs to devs, c=downloads, d=# of apps to create a very shallow article and did nothing to explain possible reasons.

They only mentioned one of the keys to understanding the differences in the market... free apps. I short paragraph mentioning probably the biggest factor in discrepancy. The other would probably be advertising, not mentioned at ALL, don't even know if those dollars are included in "pay out" or not.

It is a well known fact that Android has more users but they spend less on apps per user. Also Android has a significant amount of free apps. Does this mean iOS devs are trying to get a pay check and Android devs tend towards "working for the community"? Or is it purely supply/demand causing the difference?

While every article that has come out supports the theory that iOS users will easily pay for apps and Android users will not. I think that explains some difference but there has to be more to the story.
 
nilepez said:
It's not clear if this money includes those that get money from in game ads.
Click to expand...

Unlikely (at least for Android). Play Store sales are one thing, and Google Ads are a completely separate part of the company, with different rules when it comes to paying revenue.
 
faugusztin said:
Unlikely (at least for Android). Play Store sales are one thing, and Google Ads are a completely separate part of the company, with different rules when it comes to paying revenue.
Click to expand...

I would assume the same, this is reason enough to laugh at this article.
 
I wrote an app for Android and Windows Phone. Windows Phone version made nothing at all. For Android I have a free ad supported version and then an ad free paid version. The free version has made me more money, but for both it's still very minuscule. All in all after about a year on the market my paid version has 37 purchases. So 37 downloads. $37. My free version has nearly 5000 downloads. I've made about $80 from it. Not worth all the time I put into it.

But it was a fun project and my son plays it on his Nexus 7 and thinks that daddy making a game is the most amazing thing that's happened in the history of ever. And that's priceless.

Hopefully my next one will be more successful, if I can only stop playing Skyrim long enough to work on the damn thing.
 
Sorry, bad english there. I have a free version with ads and then a paid version without ads.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top