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How To Make Money As an Independent Developer
itwbennett writes: A new survey of 13,000 developers in 149 countries by U.K.-based research company VisionMobile compared, among other things, the most popular versus the most lucrative revenue models for four groups of developers: those focusing on mobile apps, cloud services, the Internet of Things, and desktop apps. Among their findings for mobile developers: While advertising is by far the most popular revenue model, only 17% of developers who rely primarily on advertising make more than $10,000 per month from their apps. By comparison, 37% of those who make their money by e-commerce (selling real-world goods and services) make $10k per month or more.
Ads, with an option to buy a $5 ad-free experience. It's sure been working for me! Now excuse me while I go play with my 8 model girlfriends.
If there is nothing you find to sell, then create a new product!
Is there money in that?
Microsoft is dropping support on January 26 2016. There's gonna be a ton of apps that have to be rewritten when the patches stop coming.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"mobile developers relying on e-commerce who primarily target iOS devices make the most" What does that mean, a developer who builds e-commerce software for iOS? What the heck would that be?
You are so naive, it is not how things work. The big money makers don't listen to what people want, they tell people what to want and then provide that cr@p.
I don't think there is even 1% of the people who actually know what to want. I mean such that can provide solid arguments on what they want and why they want it.
How is it fair to compare advertising to selling physical goods, considering that it is so much easier to plug in an ad api for any developer who thinks he could make a few bucks off his hobbyist app?
I'm not at all surprised that a far lower percentage of the ad-supported devs make good money, a vast majority are probably those who saw some niche need and created a small app, maybe for themselves - then added in some advertising to get an easily acquired income stream. By contrast, those who actually have warehouses or tie-ups with stores to sell physical products have put in far more effort in creating their product, and probably would not do so without the expectation of a good RoI.
The article also talks of how IoT isn't very lucrative, not too surprising since its not even standardized across vendors (afaik) and needs more public awareness.
Shocking. Next thing you know, we'll see this headline:
Scientists Confirm Water To Indeed Be Wet
And copy someone else's product.
Revenue generated by advertising is almost pure profit, since you've already built the product and only have ongoing maintenance.
Revenue generated by ecommerce has way more overhead in potentially shipping fees, material costs, and/or labor costs for those goods and services.
This summary and the article seem to use revenue & profit interchangeably, which is not accurate and really tells us nothing.
It's not Haselton. He would have written about 10 times as much, with the word "I" being by far the most common.
Usually it's a penis and not money in [porn]
But doesn't money cum out of a penis? If not, why the heck do they call it a money shot?
If you build an app, and nobody buys it, you have pretty much just wasted time, but probably aren't out much in terms of cash.
Some of that depends on how much a particular app store's entry fee compares to the wages in your country. Google Play Store is a lot cheaper to get into than the App Store, which requires a second computer (a Mac) and a $99 per year developer license in addition to the 30% cut that both take. And both are far cheaper than developing for a game console. True, a lot of residents of the most advanced economies can afford to drop a thousand dollars on a hobby that turns out to flop. But in less developed countries, the cost of a Mac mini, iPad mini, and developer license is a lot of money, especially if your country's currency is undervalued due to lack of a history of exports, or your country has an import duty greater than 100% like Brazil has.
There's a huge potential to make a product once, and sell it a million times, without any ongoing costs. No physical product allows you to do that.
Print-on-demand has been around a long time for books, CDs, and T-shirts, and now it's stuffed toys too (source: happytoymachine.com). As additive manufacturing matures, this will extend into other markets. A MakerBot Replicator is cheaper than a Mac Pro now.
I don't even see a single mention of microtransactions. I know it is dominated by candy crush and clash of clans, but it is possible for the random flappy birds to start making serious lottery money for an indie developer.
The highest grossing apps are all doing it through microtransactions. As much as you and I and everybody hates them, they are here to stay and SOMEBODY is paying 99 cents each for all those "boosts" nobody admits it, yet microtransactions are king(candy crush pun intended).
So basically, if you want to make money, you have to have something to sell that people want to buy.
wow. that. is, such. a. surprise.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I've found the secret, you have other people pay you to make their apps for them. I've been making a pretty good living from that going 5 years now.
The same advice was given to me back when MS-DOS and Windows was king. Make utilities, not games. A game only has a small chance of making it big, and even then, you have to make sure to keep your market share or else someone will make a clone and grab it all, like how Candy Crush took over Bejeweled's market niche.
Utilities, on the other hand, tend to have a long tail. They may not be blockbusters, but they can be a constant, reliable source of income. For example, Raymond Lau's StuffIt for the Mac is still kicking, similar with WinRAR. Make sure that your utility is in its own territory, and doesn't fall completely within another group, as there are plenty of unarchivers.
There are plenty of niches for a utility these days written for smartphones or tablets... a few examples:
1: PGP/gpg encrypting/decrypting and key management. Yes, there are other utilities out there, but using iOS's KeyChain or Android's KeyStore coupled with the fingerprinter scanner as a way to confirm signing/decryption once the key is unlocked is something not done yet. Using the OS to securely store keys isn't as secure as a HSM, but it is far better than just leaving them sitting on a drive or filesystem, even if they are encrypted.
2: An implementation of PhonebookFS. That way, the same directory on a cloud provider can have many different layers of files, and even if all the layers are known, there is still chaff for plausible deniability.
3: A utility that archives loads of files to Amazon Glacier (preferably with some sort of encryption.) It also would retain a robust index, so if a file needs retrieved, it can be gotten with as little data having to be downloaded as possible.
4: A utility similar to #3, but can work with any offline media, so if one is using the program on a computer, it can burn DVDs, and keep an index to find files (with their creation times) no matter where they are. The only thing similar would be Retrospect, but they have very limited support for optical drives, and zero support for USB BD-R drives.
5: A superset of utility #3 and 4, but is able to cycle and copy files automatically to new media every so often (and cloud providers can be considered media). This way, something sitting on a corner of hard drive forgotten eventually winds up being copied onto newer media, to minimize the chances of bit rot and time killing the data. Error correction records and redundancy are important as well. Pretty much a "meta" zpool scrub that would occasionally prompt for offline media, check and copy it somewhere.
6: A utility that does a share split of a public key among peers/clients of the app. This would either expire access to a file (where requests for a key would be declined after a time/date), or deny access before a certain point in time. Because it is distributed, an attacker would have to create a bunch of nodes that hopefully are the ones chosen for stashing the pieces of the decryption key.
This would allow one to guarantee that data is expired and inaccessible after a time (financial/hospital archives) as well as ensure data that should not be seen until a future time is kept secure.
7: A duress mode utility that can do proper notifications and shutdowns if triggered.
tl;dr... there is a lot more for app writing than just trying to get a game out.
The report tells us that most developers make less than $500 / month. This is clearly not a sustainable income (except in a few countries) so we must suppose that these developers are not in it as a way of making a living. They must have some other means of earning a crust if they aren't still living with one or more parents.
This puts the majority of developers into the "hobbyist" category. They like to write "code" and if someone pays them a small amount in addition to the fun they get then that's a nice bonus. But that's all it is.
But from the users' perspective, it also means there is no security in the product they use (or buy - even if it's 0.99 ), since these hobby-programmers could easily lose interest, get girlfriends, choose not to fix bugs or provide any level of support that doesn't line up with their hacking / coding motivation. So while these apps cost less than it does to get a kid to mow your lawn, it would appear that they should be considered "disposable".
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
However, only 17% of developers who rely primarily on advertising make more than $10,000 per month from their apps, while 72% make less than $5,000 per month and 51% make $500 or less.
I guess that's total income from all apps, not average income per app. But the article isn't clear on that point.
Wouldn't someone who wrote two apps have twice the income (on average) as someone who wrote only one app?
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According to the infographic, the most lucrative way to make money with desktop apps is to sell services, and the most lucrative way to make money with cloud services is to license client software. Does this seem backwards to anyone?