Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Number of iPhone apps you published & income you get from them

73 pointssendos51 comments

It would be useful to see the level of success HN'ers have had with iPhone apps. Several articles mention general statistics, but what is the level of success for a population with the background of people who read HN?

So, if you have published iPhone apps, can you tell us

a) How many apps have you published?

b) How many are paid vs free?

c) How much effort have you put into marketing them?

d) What is the level of income you get from them?You can simply use one of the following levels: negligible, small, decent, large, or huge, or you can provide more details or actual numbers if you'd like

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

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I spent maybe 5 hours programming Silver Revolver (originally Russian Roulette) http://silverrevolver.com/ and it has made probably $30,000 over the last year, most of which was during a two week period when it was on the top 100 charts. I'd say I got pretty lucky.

that rocks! lucky or not, well done for finding a nice little niche and coding up a cool little game and making money from it :)

No offense, but that app really blows. Really good on you if you were able to milk 30k out of it :)

His app may be a silly toy, but it's still more useful than "blows" is as a criticism.

What's wrong with it? (not that I care, I haven't touched it in year)

Why would you not care? If someone thought that an app that I wrote sucked, then I would definitely want to know why. I would strive to write only quality apps and I could use the feedback to make my next app NOT suck.

Well yea, that's why I asked, but I'm not going to bother fixing it at this point.

You made 30K; good for you and congrats. Why all the snark here?

Simple and mindless(pardon not meant negatively) sells. Make apps for the audience who buys apps; males 18 to 34(though 34 might be a bit high) if you aim is to money. Something that makes people laugh and want to share it with their friends who buy it and share it with their friends and so on. iFart & Fat Booth(though idea is mindless but tech isnt) are further examples.

Your demographic may be off. I sell apps on Android, and I am pleasantly surprised by the number of women who buy my sports related apps.

i think it's pretty cool

Why did the "No offense, but that app really blows." comment got down voted, and the "i think it's pretty cool" comment up voted? They both voice opinions, only difference: one is positive, the other is negative.

Aren't people allowed to not like an app?

It is downvoted because it's a useless criticism with no value to anyone. Original poster "put himself outthere" in a way that is helpful to the community, and that guy was just trying to be mean and probably hasn't done anything himself. Downvoted to show original poster that we appreciate his response and do not support troll-like behavior.

Pointless negativity is generally much worse for a community than pointless cheerfulness. You're allowed to dislike anything at all, but this community requires that you express that dislike in a way that's a little more thoughtful than "Your app blows." fairlyodd's comment was wildly inappropriate for the context it was in.

Don't know if Android numbers are helpful to you too (maybe just the contrast will be interesting), but here's my experience in the Android market: a) 1 b) paid c) I posted in a dozen message board threads or so where people were looking for such an app, and I've diligently answered every e-mail I get about it. d) It's been in the Market for about a month and a half, and I've made a little over $2000. Hard to give a per-month answer as I don't know if it will taper off and run out of customers. ;)

A link to the app so we can have a look ?

Sure--here's its profile on cyrket, though the number of downloads cyrket reports is incorrect: http://www.cyrket.com/p/android/com.blumer.bb643/

Published two apps. One is quite broad in its potential user base. I spent a reasonable amount of time using Twitter, forums, talking to bloggers, answering emails etc.

I also vary the price a lot and VERY REGULARLY, although only since it's slipped from the charts. Varying from £.59 to £2.99. You might be surprised at the effect this has... The higher price tends not to affect the number of sales too much so I try to keep this as high as possible.

The second app is a little more niche. The only advertising (after an initial flurry of tweets) has been via links on my website (just for promoting my freelance work) and the website of the content owner.

So... A) 2 B) both paid C) see above D) £2500 - £4000 per month

(a) 4 (6 if you include the Lite versions) (b) all paid (but 2 have Lite versions) (c) not a whole lot. i ran some ads with admob but they didn't provide very good ROI. i had a little more success cross promoting my apps (d) lived off the income for most of last year. my income has since waned and the death knell came a couple weeks ago when the EFF emailed Apple requesting my app be pulled because it used a GPL library. Prior to that I had settled into an equilibrium of about $10k/year.

You probably mean FSF, not EFF. EFF has more important things to do than GPL enforcement.

And shame on you for violating the GPL!

this is interesting, how did the FSF determine that an iPhone app violated GPL?

This could be interesting if enough folks post. Here is my info.

I've published 2 apps, one paid (Whiteboard Capture Pro), one free (Picture Me). Picture Me code is open sourced as well (http://bit.ly/7rmKdT). Originally I did some marketing with Google Adsense but it's too hard to track its success so I stopped. I've had some free marketing thanks to mentions in blogs, etc. Recently Apple even made a super awesome video about one of the apps (http://bit.ly/cbtkg3).

Income wise, it's decent. Surprisingly stable at it's current level. Let's just say it's paid for a WWDC trip, three iPhones and 2 iPads and there is plenty left over, plenty.

Has anyone republished your free app as a paid app? If so, how do you feel about it?

No one has that I'm aware of. At least not just taking the code and submitting it as-is. I've had many people email me about the code because they were trying to use it for their app.

If somebody did just re-submit it as a paid app I'd be fine with that. It is open source after all. I do think that's unfair to end-users though who probably wouldn't know it's free and it would add to the clutter of the App Store.

I'm wondering if this would work better as a Google Apps survey. In particular, there's a big difference between an app that takes one guy an afternoon to write and an app with man-years of development time. To get some insight on that, I've thrown together something here:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dF...

Please look at it and make suggestions about what I am missing. I will of course publish all the data.

looks quite complete! Did you already publish the results somewhere? I'd be interested :-)

thanks a lot!

Only got one response. My comment didn't get enough upvotes for enough people to see it. Considering reposting as a new submission, but I suspect one app survey on the front page is enough for this week.

A) I currently own three apps.

B) All are paid.

C) Zero.

D) Almost $5000 between all three. When you consider it took me maybe two weeks worth of work, it's decent pay. If you factor a percentage of the pay from all of the contract leads those apps have generated, we're talking about serious money.

How long have they been available? Are they iPhone only? What are the prices? Can you tell us the category? :)

Really appreciate the sharing!

Is that $5000/mo or $5000 total?

$5000 total.

I've never published an iPhone app personally, but at my last job we hired TakeFiveLabs to make an app for us (Veritas Prep GMAT app), and though it was completely free, it brought in $10,000+ in signups for our $1500+ course and tutoring

How much did you pay to have this app created?

Also, by $10K in signups, does that mean seven or so signups for a $1.5K course?

I meant to say $10K in signups per month

They charged us in the neighborhood of $10,000 to program the app and submit it to the store.

That is to say people who checked "iPhone app" in the "how did you hear about us" section during signup. It was about 6-7 signups per month, and I believe it's still bringing in signups (I no longer work there).

(a) 1 (Puppy Pals), (b) free, (c) excluding a tweet or two, this is the first public mention of it (d) $10 over 2.5 months from ads

(a) 2 (CycleMetrics, Mides IDE) (b) 2 paid (c) Not much, web application, twitter account, getsatisfaction support, a bit of adwords (d) (CycleMetrics) ~ $10 / month, (Mides IDE) pre iPad ~ $200 / month, post iPad ~ $800 / month

Mides is awesome. I like it most for quick code sketches or hotfixes when i just need to tweak something.

Thanks for posting this! This is something I've been wondering myself.

I'm particularly curious because I recently started a mobile contracting company for iPhone and Android applications, as well as websites. We've only been doing fixed price contracts so far, but we've been wanting to try our hand at writing our own applications too. We're just about done with our first three applications (in the process of getting one into the App Store, and two more are ETA to be done by the end of the week).

In case you're wondering what normal costs are for mobile application contracting: For simple apps, a fixed price would be in the $500 to $2000 range; something moderately complicated - say, an interface to a social network - would be in the $4000-6000 range; after that it usually goes on a case by case basis depending on what the customer wants.

(By the way, completely shameless plug: we're going to be done with our currently running contracts soon... so if anyone happens to be interested, contact info is in my profile. We build websites, Android, iPhone, and iPad apps, mostly.)

a) Routesy b) 100% paid c) Very little marketing. Some free blog coverage. d) Anywhere between $450 and $2700 per month, depending on the release schedule and blog/press coverage.

a) 2 (Good Word - Words With Friends word checker/dictionary)

b) 1 paid, 1 free (ad-supported)

c) none, other than a blog post

d) small (~$800 total sales, ~$30/month from ads)

a) 2 (Meter Maid and QuickPic) b) both paid c) zero marketing d) small (~$5k/year)

I wrote a post with some more detailed stats on Meter Maid sales: http://blog.zachwaugh.com/post/558531800/metermaid-sales-sta...

a) Published: 2

b) Paid/Free: 1 paid, and a free 'lite' version of it

c) Marketing: Fair bit of effort (AdWords, AdMob, traditional + web PR, social media). Have seen little measurable effect.

d) Income: >$50k in year one.

App is for a particular topic in music education. Broadly speaking it's quite niche, but to a musician audience it's widely relevant.

Since it is a specialised education app I priced it at $7.99. I think this is the right choice, but haven't experimented with the price point much.

Income was boosted maybe 40% by being featured on the App Store (New & Noteworthy) for a few days.

About to finally release a second (paid) app - I think it's a stronger offering, but it will be interesting to see if it does anything like as well as the first!

a) 1 (Grafly) b) 1 paid c) zilch d) small ($5k/year), but it's all passive income

a) One app, basically a dedicated RSS reader for a client's blog. b) Free. c) My client has promoted it on a weekly radio show. d) I was paid by the client for developing the app. I think I made about $1500. I consider that pretty good for subsidized Objective-C training.

The app has had a few thousand downloads, so it's one of the more visible things I've been able to work on and is rewarding in that way. (most things I do at my day job are for a handful of users at most.)

Suggestion: For all of those with ad-supported apps: would you please include CPM/CTR data and tell if it turned out a good income vs web ads (ie. adsense for web)?

a) 1 (Audio Footnote, http://audiofootnote.com) b) 1 paid, 0 free c) ~$200 on Google and Facebook ads. Plenty of emailing to blogs. Small email list. A few reviews on app blogs but nothing huge. d) negligible income, but I am still in the red on development and marketing costs so I would not call it income. Here's hoping something positive happens;-)

I'll update this thread in 3 months. After we launch our Android and iphone app in coming weeks.

a) Over a dozen

b) 7 paid, 1 ad-supported, the rest free

c) Very little

d) Total: large. Some do quite poorly, some do well.

These are on Cydia Store. I've also released a single App Store app that did alright.

a) 2 apps

b) all free

c) zero

d) negligible (< $100)

Do you mind revealing what apps you have?

a) 2

b) 1 paid, 1 free (ad-supported)

c) some adsense, twitter, blog posts, Web site

d) ~3k over 3 months, almost nothing from ads

  a) 0 
  b) 0 and 0, respectively.
  c) none
  d) $0 per payout.

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