IPhone App Sales, Exposed | Hacker News Reader

IPhone App Sales, Exposed

techcrunch.com

52 pointstransburgh5 comments

Almost every iPhone developer I know makes the bulk of their revenue from contract or consulting work. Since they walk the anonymous clients through the Registered iPhone Developer program paperwork, you would never know they are ghost-coding.

Others have started to get into training. Even eBooks. For example, if you have one sale of a $50 eBook on iPhone programming, it's an order of magnitude difference in terms of profit per unit, compared with a sale of an app.

Yes, my friends have their own apps. And a lot of them have sold over a thousand copies. But it is not the real product they sell- it's their ability to build a polished and useful iPhone app for a Fortune 500 Company - that they sell.

If you still want to make money off your own iPhone apps, good luck. There are people with suites of forty apps that support their family. And these aren't very fancy apps - stuff like currency converters - or even splashed with lots of graphic love. But they sell.

The average consumer could care less about how an iPhone program is produced. They just want something that is either useful or makes them look cool to their peers. The average company wants to make their customers feel cooler -that is a sweet spot.

The numbers are interesting and though they don't look pretty, I'd say that a selection-bias makes the average daily/sales number (from the sample of 94 paid apps) a lot higher than the real average-sales number for the 100K+ paid apps in the app-store.

Even if the sample were random, the numbers could be misleading. It's clear from browsing any category by release date (almost random) that many app store apps have no effort put into them at all. Trying to use a sample of mostly junk apps to gauge the chances of success for an app that has had serious effort put into it is just going to give needlessly discouraging numbers.

The best bet is probably to look at apps with both a similar quality level and a similar amount of marketing behind them.

Great data, but have they never heard of a Histogram?

check this out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1352829 talks more in depth about the number of similar applications on the market.

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