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.

Comments

Revenue and profit are not the same thing

[PraiseBob]

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.

Job or hobby?

[petes_PoV]

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".

Re:Job or hobby?

[srichard25]

I'm trying to understand why people have any expectations whatsoever for something they paid 0.99 for. Most people tip a waitress more than that just for bringing food to their table.