Ask HN: How much money are you making as an indie mobile app developer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much money are you making as an indie mobile app developer?

38 pointsalc9022 comments

How much money you're making from Android/iOS apps on a monthly basis? Any revenue reports that you want to share?

I've made ~220k over the last 4 years, anywhere from 3-8k a month, depending on the season and how well things are going. It's been pretty decent, combined with a bit of freelancing here and there to deal with the lower months. I will say that it is much harder now than it was 4 years ago. I only wish I had started even sooner.

I've written up my experiences a few times over the years

[1] http://www.entrelife.com/2012/05/how-i-went-from-0-to-50k-on... [2] http://www.entrelife.com/2013/01/my-first-year-on-my-own-in-... [3] http://www.entrelife.com/2014/01/my-app-business-2013-year-i... [4] http://www.entrelife.com/2015/01/2014-year-in-review-for-my-...

My 4 year anniversary of quitting my day job is actually this weekend. I'll likely write up something in the next day or two summarizing things.

I'll chime in...

I developed my first game, Rocket Renegade [1], for iOS. Although I think that it was well-received (based on the reviews and emails I've received), it's made under $100 US since launching in January 2015. But, I did finish, and I taught myself Swift in the process, so I'm proud of that.

I'm a classic example of a technical person that's learning the marketing side, so I have a lot to learn in that area. I think the game is a solid offering for its genre (80s/90s inspired shmup).

For stories of much greater success than myself:

1. There was a user here (kreci) that used to post financial reports regarding his Android development efforts, but it doesn't appear that he has been active on HN for quite some time. However, you may still find his reports a useful/interesting resource [2].

2. Nathan Barry (nathanbarry) has written about his experience developing his "OneVoice" app and the financials surrounding it [3].

3. The greatest financial success story that I am aware of in terms of sales in the mobile space is Allen Wong. He really hit it big with "5-0 Radio Police Scanner". He did an AMA [4], which you may find interesting.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rocket-renegade/id955229059?...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:kreci%20%22Income%20Rep...

[3] http://nathanbarry.com/how-i-made-19000-on-the-app-store-whi...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/17lwcs/iama_a_person_...

Looks cool, nice work! Before you get discouraged, remember that Angry Birds was Rovio's 52nd game [1] -- consumer products and pop art are a hit-based crapshoot. As much as you want to learn about marketing stuff, make sure to keep producing new work.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovio_Entertainment

"[...] make sure to keep producing new work."

Thank you. Yes, this is solid advice... to keep moving. I'm working on figuring out what's next.

The fact that you managed to learn Swift while developing a new game just by yourself it's a great accomplishment already. Hope you'll manage to increase the revenue on your game - it looks like a really nice game.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the kind words.

You know, looking back, I sometimes think I was a bit insane to go with Swift, mostly because it was so new. I'd almost dread when a new Xcode beta would be released, because Swift was in such a state of flux; working code would end up breaking and I'd have to get everything working again, but in the end, it was exciting to go with a new language.

I wrote about my development experience here [1]. Warning, though: it's a long post!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8888107

What are the resources you used for learning Game Development with Swift?

Hi, thanks for asking...

At the time, I didn't have any game-specific tutorials for Swift when I started. That's largely because I started with the first Xcode beta (Xcode 6 Beta 1) that was released with Swift support in 2014. It was so new, that there just wasn't much out there.

That said, I used the Swift documentation that Apple released as a guide to the language. I also used the Objective-C (There wasn't a Swift version at the time) SpriteKit Guide [1] as a way to get a handle on SpriteKit. If you aren't familiar with it, it's essentially an Apple framework for working with sprites, physics, collision detection, etc. It's similar in spirit to Cocos2d, if you are familiar with that.

Then, I just brute-forced my way through a Swift equivalent of the syntax. It was a slow process. My first version of the game was just displaying the player's ship on the screen, and then I iteratively built the game up from there.

On a related note, I'm really proud of the way the enemy drones fly in the 3rd level. If you go to this link [2], it's the 4th screen-shot from the left. I implemented a Catmull-Rom spline generator that creates flight patterns for the enemy drones.

Fast-forward.... now, I think more game-specific Swift tutorials are available. I would definitely check out http://www.raywenderlich.com , for example.

Good luck!

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Graphi...

[2] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rocket-renegade/id955229059?...

In 2014, I made a grand total of $3,700 (mostly ad revenue, some in-app purchases to remove ads) for my vocabulary training app WordPic, and Sapphire Smash, a hexagon-based match 3 game. Both are only available on Android and Amazon.

I also spent $300 running ads for the game last year, which I have yet to recoup. Overall, it's quite disappointing.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Smartician

I made about $500 with a wallpaper for kids (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jafj.spark...) and $3500 with a wallpaper for World of Warcraft enthusiasts. This last one was removed by Google/Blizzard because copyright infringement when it was making around $300/month.

Interesting - I had also an app in the Play Store that was removed because of copyright infringement when I reached $300/month.

I made about $1,500 per month with this App for about a year [1]. Over time the downloads went down and so did the revenue. (It came down to about $300 per month).

This website, which I own started it all [2]. The website was always free and the app was an revenue generating up-sell for the website.

In Dec 2014, I wanted to sell the Website, but all the sites like Flippa wanted Adwords Revenue, so I put Adwords on the site...to show some revenue and try and sell the site.

Adwords revenue immediately jumped to $2K a month, so I decided to make the app free again, since it was only making $300 and I would rather get it in as many people's hands/pockets as possible.

Comment if you have any other questions.

[1]https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/7-min-workout/id657369636?mt...

[2]http://7-min.com/

Almost three dollars off of my flappy bird + team fortress mash up.

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/littlest-monster...

I want to joke but I am scared I would offend. Basically well done man it's far better than I could do if that is a working hat store !

I have to say though the design is lacking. Other than that keep at it !

No worries. Only my friends and co workers really played it. But hey at least I shipped! :D

And yes the hat store totally works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FKrrlhvSCk

I've made a whopping $40 total on my Android game since February 2014. I didn't do anything to promote it.

http://bit.ly/1QBZjay

Do you have some marketing strategies in mind? Or how do you want to increase the number of downloads?

35€ since August 2014

For the "PRO" version of https://graticule.link/

I'm still supporting a few niche utility apps on the iOS and Mac app stores from a few years ago, back before I started focusing pretty exclusively on client projects. Things I wrote because I needed them and later cleaned up and released so others could use them too. They're all due for some updates (life and full time work frequently take precedence), but they're pretty consistent in terms of revenue.

Mi-Fi Monitor has an iOS[1] and a Mac[2] version that was developed first but released a few months later (it's a shared codebase to the maximum extent possible, different native UI, same app).

They've never really been promoted by me directly, but the Mac version was independently noticed by a writer at TUAW (now Engadget) soon after release and was featured[3] on the site. The TUAW story caused the Mac version alone to generate $600 in just 1-2 days, but then both versions fell back down to a combined total of roughly $50-100/month where they've stayed ever since.

Several execs at Novatel (Mi-Fi manufacturer) sent support requests or general emails about them, and I talked to one on the phone briefly about various things, but they never had any other involvement. Still, that was pretty cool knowing they were interested and using the apps :)

There is a native Android version of Mi-Fi Monitor but I never released it so I can't even guess what the revenue would have been like.

The only other app I released myself is Codepoints[4], which only has a Mac version. It generated about $350 right after release, then fell back down to around $50-75/month. Again no direct promotion on that one. I get nice emails from users about it frequently though, which is also cool :)

[1] https://infincia.com/apps/mi-fi-monitor-ios

[2] https://infincia.com/apps/mi-fi-monitor-mac

[3] http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/13/daily-mac-app-mi-fi-monit...

[4] https://infincia.com/apps/codepoints

What's the use of this question? Inspiration? Wondering if it's worth diving into?

Part inspiration: It really gives me a bust of energy and it inspires me to start/continue working on the things I've been working on/planning.

Part research: I was hopping to find out if and how are indie app developers making money, what marketing strategies are they using and so on.

I find fascinating this stories (about success or failures) because I've learned so much things from it.

ZERO! Not allowed to make money from my apps on H1B visa status :)

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