

How Much Do Average Apps Make On Each Platform? - YeahKIA
http://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/10/how-much-do-average-apps-make/?partner=yahootix

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Zaheer
I have a very popular app for iOS and Android. Both have the same
functionality. These figures (5x more revenue on iOS) is pretty consistent
with what I see. For many apps moving forward I am actually not creating
Android versions as it is simply not worth the effort.

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chii
can you say which platform you released first on? or did you make it at the
same time?

I'm quite surprised at that big of a revenue difference

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Zaheer
I released on Android first.

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Tichy
It seems very misleading to me to just calculate average revenue by "money
paid/downloads". At least a while ago a popular model on Android was to
publish the app free and make money with advertising. So the average payout
per app is probably much higher.

Although I also suspect it follows a power law, so a few apps make lots of
money and most apps make little to no money (on all platforms).

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megablast
Oh sure, this is called working with the data you have.

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twotwotwo
You _really_ want a survey of some folks who have released similar apps on
multiple platforms, and to cover the development-cost and revenue sides,
including in-app purchase and any ad revenue, if that's a substantial source
for anyone.

Just comparing aggregates, it's hard to tell what differences are thanks to
the platform and what's simply because "the average app" on Android is
different from "the average app" on iOS (because of review, barriers to entry,
etc.). And there's nothing about costs.

Much as I like Android, I bet iOS tends to be the better deal for paid-app
developers right now. You have fewer devices to target and no equivalent of
Android's Gingerbread situation. ("The Gingerbread Situation" is also a new
punk band I'm forming, BTW.) And Apple customers seem to skew a little
spendier, though maybe that's changing.

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sirkneeland
I think the average Apple user will continue to skew spendier, but the sheer
number of Androids will mean that there is a portion of Android users who will
spend as an iOS user would. And when the overall number of Androids is high
enough, it could be so that even is 25% of Android customers were valuable
against 75% of Apple's customers, Android being 5x the size means there are
just as many (or more) "valuable" Android users than iPhone users.

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miahi
I'm not sure about that. I spent >$1500 on Android phones, but less than $10
on apps. There are a lot of free/ad app equivalents for the paid apps - I did
not need to buy anything. The only paid app I am regularly using is JuiceSSH
for the port forwarding feature.

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sirkneeland
I can't speak to the iOS and Android numbers, but they are significantly off
on the Windows Phone numbers.

MSFT just announced their WP downloads stand at 2 billion (a significant delta
from the 0.65 billion estimated here) As for units sold, Nokia alone has sold
20 million Windows Phones or so, and there is another 20% of non-Nokia WP
phones on top of that.

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diminish
Nokia forms the majority of WP sales and boosters are the cheaper models like
520/21\. A good quarter of the sales are pre-WP8 models.

Finally, Nokia sales in North America and US, is lagging behind other
continents. That's maybe from an app sales perspective Nokia doesnot make a
lot of bang!.

US is mainly an AppleLand, and app store app sales get huge boost from having
a big portion of iPhone/iPad subscribers here.

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warrenmiller
Android is now more popular than iOS in the US, see "Smartphone Platform
Market Share"
[http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/6/comSc...](http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/6/comScore_Reports_May_2013_U.S._Smartphone_Subscriber_Market_Share)

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diminish
Simply averaging does not mean a lot. Does anyone have any stats which take
into account the fact that 5% top apps get a lot more reveneues than the
bottom 80%?

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guyrt
Agreed. A comparison of medians would be more interesting.

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z92
Median value would have made sense here, not mean value.

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Ihmahr
Agree.

This article is just ridiculous. FunFact: half of the revenue from the app
stores go to the top 25 developers.

[http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/top-25-us-developers-
account...](http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/top-25-us-developers-account-half-
app-revenue)

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dylangs1030
A similar ratio to most things in economics.

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artursapek
This would be useful if the distribution of downloads/app were a bell curve
(meaning being "average" was actually common). I doubt it is.

