Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoppreH | Hacker News Reader

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  The latest count I've seen is 225,000 total apps on the App Store.
  So if we divide the 1.43 billion dollars cumulative revenues
  earned by those 225,000 apps, we get an average revenue earned
  of 6,355 dollars per app (over 2 years).

But you had just said this:

  Thus free apps would form 85% of all downloaded apps on the
  Apple iPhone App Store, and paid apps only for 15% of all apps.

Shouldn't you divide the revenue only by the number of paid apps? That would surely make the platform much more financially interesting.

And you are assuming too much averages. How many of the apps got this "average revenue", what how many spent the "average" in development?

Numbers, cuts etc etc.

A billion is a big emotional mark. Breaking it down to a per unit, regardless of what is actually given out as revenue, is a fairly traditional means of giving an indication of the per unit revenue (even if unfairly distorting).

Eg: cost of military + war in Iraq (in particular) is often distilled down to the cost born by each man, woman and child in the USA - despite the fact that each man, woman and child does not bear an even cost (nor some would argue an even benefit).

That is perfectly acceptable.

But the author is claiming that the developers are not making money with it and he's using flawed logic to get there. That's not ok.

Also ignores the constantly fluctuating percentage of paid apps to free apps. It's 15% today but was it 30% 2 years ago? 50%?

This calculation also ignores ad revenue (vs. purchase revenue)

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