Top 20% of iPhone devs make 97% of the category revenue

Numbers are interesting, however it's a small, non-representative survey.

This is also just for games, not for other apps.

Also, I'd probably consider this not very useful at all due to a survey defect that caused strange numbers:

>"One of the things I really wanted data on was a snapshot of what the last 12 months have looked like for game developers on the App Store. However, the questions I created to gather this data clearly confused respondents. The intent was that devs enter only revenue from games released within the last 12 months, but many developers provided revenue from the last 12 months for all their games. This made the data I collected for these questions largely useless for the purposes I wanted. Further, most people didn’t understand the instructions and didn’t match the sales revenue to the non-sales revenue in the two questions, making drawing conclusions there impossible, also. You’ll see later on that I did manage to get some basic data from it, but couldn’t do the detailed analysis I had hoped for."

Additionally:

  The top 1 percent of iOS game developers earn over a third
  of all that cold, digital revenue.  In contrast, the bottom
  80 percent of iOS devs are splitting a mere 3 percent of 
  all App Store game revenue between one another.

The parallel with the current state of wealth in America[1] is interesting. I feel like there is something, sociologically, to be said there but I have no idea what it is.

Put another way: "This behavior of the top 1% capturing a huge portion of the environment to themselves is mirrored in our wealth as well... why does this pattern re-occur?"

[1] http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

I'm actually surprised that this isn't even more pronounced.

Zero marginal production cost, while the long tail is very long. If I'm buying 10 apps, I'm just gonna buy the best 10 and ignore the rest.

20% seems way too high to me. I bet if you took a truly random sample, it would be less than 5%.

But per app or per developer statistics don't really tell you anything except that the app store is saturated with junk. It's just noise, and there is a world of mechanisms to filter it out.

The real interesting stat would be revenue per talent-hours or something, but obviously that is hard to measure objectively.

The more interesting question here isn't "what % take in the most money" but what kind of money can you expect to see? As in, if you write an iphone/ipad app, what are the maximum returns you could see? It'd also be interesting to find out how much money has angry birds, or fruit ninja made off just the app store?(not counting merch sales) Additionally, how does it break down? (in app purchase/initial purchase, ad revenue, etc)

Overall reports are interesting, but not that useful, since there is a ton of crap that no one in their right mind would buy...and if you're doing it as a business you wouldn't produce a product that low quality (we hope)

How does this differ from other software markets?

Not surprising. The 80-20 (or 90-10) rule (top 10 to 20% of paying customers account for 80 to 90% of your revenues) applies to all sorts of businesses.