
IPhone App Sales, Exposed - transburgh
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/iphone-app-sales-exposed/
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wallflower
Almost every iPhone developer I know makes the bulk of their revenue from
contract or consulting work. Since they walk the anonymous clients through the
Registered iPhone Developer program paperwork, you would never know they are
ghost-coding.

Others have started to get into training. Even eBooks. For example, if you
have one sale of a $50 eBook on iPhone programming, it's an order of magnitude
difference in terms of profit per unit, compared with a sale of an app.

Yes, my friends have their own apps. And a lot of them have sold over a
thousand copies. But it is not the real product they sell- it's their ability
to build a polished and useful iPhone app for a Fortune 500 Company - that
they sell.

If you still want to make money off your own iPhone apps, good luck. There are
people with suites of forty apps that support their family. And these aren't
very fancy apps - stuff like currency converters - or even splashed with lots
of graphic love. But they sell.

The average consumer could care less about how an iPhone program is produced.
They just want something that is either useful or makes them look cool to
their peers. The average company wants to make their customers feel cooler
-that is a sweet spot.

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credo
The numbers are interesting and though they don't look pretty, I'd say that a
selection-bias makes the average daily/sales number (from the sample of 94
paid apps) a lot higher than the real average-sales number for the 100K+ paid
apps in the app-store.

~~~
zweben
Even if the sample were random, the numbers could be misleading. It's clear
from browsing any category by release date (almost random) that many app store
apps have no effort put into them at all. Trying to use a sample of mostly
junk apps to gauge the chances of success for an app that has had serious
effort put into it is just going to give needlessly discouraging numbers.

The best bet is probably to look at apps with both a similar quality level and
a similar amount of marketing behind them.

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krschultz
Great data, but have they never heard of a Histogram?

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madmaze
check this out: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1352829> talks more in
depth about the number of similar applications on the market.

