Windows Phone is currently five times more profitable for us than the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Windows Phone is currently five times more profitable for us than the iPhone

blog.anlock.com

76 pointskenjackson33 comments

I am quite sure that, for every company that claims WP7 is more profitable than iOS, there will be more than five companies saying otherwise.

As was pointed out to me a couple weeks back, the plural of anecdote is not data. And this one isn't even a plural.

They had had microsoft people helping them, including helping to code. Who knows what sort of other help they got from MS? An average developer may not get that help, which might make the difference between doing well or not.

The article states that the people merely worked at MS. It's a big company, we the reader have no idea which product group they work in or if it's even related to WP7. I feel like the content of your comment is misleading.

Yup, this is a blog post from a clear outlier.

there is fierce competition and a LOT of noise in the App Store, making it extremely difficult to stand out

With 500k+ apps in the store, what are the chances that a user is even going to see your app at this point? Without a ton of marketing muscle or the good graces of the kingmakers at Apple just hanging your shingle out in the App store doesn't get you anywhere.

I think a better comparison number is [grand total of all apps sold per day] / [total number of apps in store].

When the customer base is 20 times larger, even 10 fold competitors still keeps the market twice as attractive.

That would be true if sales went down linearly when you get farther from the top spot. But the reality is much closer to a "top X take (almost) all".

Sure. Like any other piece of software, you have to do your own marketing. Unless you hit the lottery, you can't rely on Apple doing it for you.

Getting people to your app via searches on the app store can be part of your marketing, though. There are still some good niches to be found there with little serious competition.

It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand you have a strong possibility of being lost in the shuffle (unless you have VC funding). On the other hand, there are a lot more eyeballs that could find you.

My own personal experience is that getting in early is huge. I was in the Chrome Web Store before it officially launched and always got a lot of traffic despite barely working on the app and it being designed for Chromebooks (used a feature only available on Chromebooks) and almost no one owning those. My second app in the store got much less traffic. I had similar experience on Android (perhaps it's a Google problem). I'm trying to get into the Windows 8 market early for the same reason.

"With millions of apps on the PC, what are the chances that a user is even going to see your app at this point? Without a ton of marketing muscle or the good graces of the kingmakers at Microsoft just hanging your shingle out on the Internet doesn't get you anywhere."

Funny how that sounds ridiculous now, no? The larger the audience the greater the potential. Successful software has always been equals parts technology and marketing.

Sure, but I think there's still this lingering perception that just being in the App store at all buys you some attention. It doesn't. My most popular app has even been featured several times but it's still bringing in chump change.

I remember seeing similar posts... Oh yes, Angry Birds at one point was more profitable on Nokia N900 than on iPhone.

Make of this what you will.

This makes sense as while the WP7 market is a lot smaller, a far greater percentage of people looking for Educational games are being exposed to it.

Now I guess it all depends on how much competition there is on WP7, also being at the top stop gets you more sales which helps to keep you there. If you don't get some initial good sales to put you there results could be vastly different.

A better comparison would be an app that hasn't got any help from top lists on either platform.

A lot of nonsense here. They claim to have been "featured by Apple". This was most probably just in the "What's Hot" section buried under 5 levels of clicks on the iTunes desktop app. The rankings they claim are actually pitifully small. Selling 5 times as much wouldn't be such a big deal.

The apps themselves appear to be yet another bunch of spelling apps for young children. This has been done to death in the app store. Unless the app is spectacular, it's no shock that it didn't do so well.

I have an app that apparently is doing far better than this in the young kids iPhone space. I didn't spend any money advertising it. However, it is something that hasn't been done 1000 times already by everyone else looking to cash in.

Without any sales numbers, this post is meaningless. You could have at least given an indication.

I would like to know what the development time difference is between these platforms. Also, what is the WP7 SDK like?

For a single developer this could be a good time to write WP7 apps. But iOS is so attractive because of its SDK and the wealth of third party libraries available for developers to leverage.

     For a single developer this could be a good 
     time to write WP7 apps

Personally, I doubt that.

In my circles I have a lot of non-technical and technical people. I don't live in Silicon Valley, or in the US, so the echo chamber that a lot of people from this community does not apply to me.

I see a lot of iPhones and Android phones. Galaxy S and S2 were huge hits. Low-end Android phones were hits too, like LG Optimus One - great value for the price. I see my friends and acquaintances with these phones, like a friend of mine who's a taxi driver has a Galaxy S in his pocket. But I know NONE with a WinMo 7 phone. Its market share is completely abysmal.

Now, this company may have had the first mover advantage. Cool for them - however, personally I want a smaller piece of a bigger pie. The reason for that being that this pie is growing, exponentially even. Competition may be fierce and you won't get rich over night, however the 700 million users that Facebook has will be nothing compared to the number of people carrying Androids in their pockets, 3 years from now. A lot of people have ridden the first wave, especially when it comes to Apple's App Store. However a bigger wave is coming and I don't want to invest the limited resources I have in Microsoft's me-too-me-too platform.

Another problem is one of trust - WinMo 7 is the successor of WinMo 6, but it's a completely different platform. This is understandable, as WinMo 6 simply sucked and in my view it was the same story as with IExplorer 6 - they got something working, then they reinvested resources in the latest fad du-jour, leaving customers and developers disappointed, WinMo 7 being their latest attempt at preventing irrelevancy. I have no trust left for Microsoft to do the right thing in regards to its developers or customers, fucking with their learned knowledge all over again, or leaving them in the dust. I mean - they are discontinuing Silverlight for Christ's sake.

On WinMo 6, I think you are skipping over the history with that one. When it was released (WinMo 2,3,4,5,6,6.5) the hardware was too expensive for the consumer market, so it was sold to commercial consumers. They biggest concern for them was business apps, photos, gps, and --wait for it-- barcode scanners. The types that could be used from 30 ft away.

For that industry, WinMob was much better than the competition (this is before the IPhone/Android was released). There were lots of models, multiple configurations, and some of them even made phone calls.

Since then, smart phones hit the consumer market, the app needs have change (consumers don't need lazer enabled barcode scanners and multiple gps hardware configurations). But, WinMob 7 doesn't replace WinMob 6, because of the complete lack of external hardware drivers. IPhone really doesn't fill that gap either. Just Android.

And, Silverlight (and Flash) are being discontinued as Web platform(s). It still exists for development on other systems. But it could be argued it is just WPF at that point.

I hate to be this pedantic, but the fact that you're calling in WinMo 7 seems to show your lack of experience. The platform is Windows Phone, and I believe they've done quite a bit right this time. And to note, they've made many firsts that iOS and Android have eventually picked up--or will soon do so.

They are claiming 5 times more sales, so are they saying that Microsoft take the same cut as Apple? Also the app was language learning app for (presumably) the very young, how likely is that these youngsters would have (extended access to) an iPhone? I can easily imagine giving the kids a Windows phone as a play thing because you didn't care if it got damaged or not.

So isn't piece this just saying putting your product in the right marketplace results in more sales than putting it into the wrong marketplace?

So they make $5 per day on Windows Phone as opposed to $1 per day on iOS? This stat is meaningless without figures...

They don't give figures, but they do give this info in a previous posting about their iPhone version:

"Rankings

We have reached the following top charts and have also been listed in 36 more countries around the world:

US: Top 100

UK: Top 50

Australia: Top 50

Germany: Top 25

Austria: Top 25

Switzerland: Top 25

France: Top 25

Italy: Top 10

Spain: Nr. 1

Mexico: Top 10

Greece: Nr. 1

Canada: Top 50

Argentina: Top 10

Colombia: Top 10

Chile: Top 10

User Ratings

Our paid versions have received 90+ reviews across all countries with an average of 4.5+"

No raw sales numbers, but it seems fair to guess they've made more than $1 on the iPhone version.

I'm actually surprised there aren't more people targeting the education market. On my iPad I tried to find good educational apps and I'm having a really hard time. It's probably one of the few app categories where I'd pay decent money for a good toddler+ app, and have only found a few worth a dime.

Ha. That basically means they are selling nothing. You can get into the top 100 iPhone Games/Educational section with about 20 downloads in a day. But these are their peak figures. Their boast about being in the top 400 for 2/3 of the time is laughable. That basically means they sold 1 per day. As for the other countries, that's even less meaningful. You can shoot to the top of that category with 5 downloads.

Basically, this was one unprofitable app on the iPhone. Making 5 times more on WP isn't so impressive.

Actually what you're saying is even worse. You're basically saying that almost no one makes money on the iPhone. Unless you're Rovio or PopCap -- you're selling nothing.

And given the fact that I already know a few independent WP7 devs who can make a living purely from WP7 apps makes me wonder if the iPhone app store really is the iPhone lottery for developers. This can end up actually turning into a really bad story for iPhone developers.

No. I'm saying the Games/Educational category is very small and takes very few sales to be in the top 100 and almost nothing to be in the top 400.

What I'm really saying (in my other comment) is that this was a wholly unremarkable app with very little to differentiate it from all the other apps out there. This article is just cynical linkbait to try to squeeze out some extra sales.

You can get away with selling unremarkable software in a new market. As soon as news of a gold rush for WP7 emerges then it will be just as tough as the iPhone market in no time.

Hint: if you develop primarily in Objective C and find the iPhone app market too crowded, make an iPad app.

First mover advantage.

Anyone one on HN developing on Windows Phone and seeing similar results?

We're porting our game (Infinite Flight) from Windows Phone to the iPhone and we're expecting much better returns on iOS.

We will have more data when it comes out in a couple of months.

Would love to hear more about it.

Also porting is interesting - we're in a position where we have a bunch of highly optimized, debugged C/C++ 'backend' code. Since native code isn't supported on Windows 7 Phone, we'll have to port our app by rewriting it all in C#. Unfortunately, it's not practical option for us at the moment.

That does tend to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for WP7. I'm surprised they haven't figured out a way to deal with that.

I'm going the other way - my own code is all in C# (Mac and Linux with Mono, and MonoTouch and MonoDroid for the mobile platforms) so deployment to any of the above platforms becomes relatively easy. (I'm writing games, so I can hoist a lot more of the otherwise platform-specific logic into OpenGL, OpenGL|ES, and XNA, respectively--still requires building different GUIs based on desktop vs. phone but is a lot nicer than Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. iOS vs. Android.)

I wrote a GPS app (for offroad use) in December last year. It's a pretty poor app, and because it was crap I priced it high to discourage buyers. And now I'm getting mailed by Microsoft because they want to give me my money. It was quite amazing - I never tracked the app's performance, and ignored it, because I only wrote it to get familiar with the tools.

I've not written for any other platform, so have no comparison to offer.

It's good to be a early bird, because if it becomes successful you can say it was a good choice, and if it fails you at least tried.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com