

Windows Phone is currently five times more profitable for us than the iPhone - kenjackson
http://blog.anlock.com/?p=28

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rbanffy
I am quite sure that, for every company that claims WP7 is more profitable
than iOS, there will be more than five companies saying otherwise.

As was pointed out to me a couple weeks back, the plural of anecdote is not
data. And this one isn't even a plural.

~~~
illumen
They had had microsoft people helping them, including helping to code. Who
knows what sort of other help they got from MS? An average developer may not
get that help, which might make the difference between doing well or not.

~~~
bjg
The article states that the people merely worked at MS. It's a big company, we
the reader have no idea which product group they work in or if it's even
related to WP7. I feel like the content of your comment is misleading.

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cageface
_there is fierce competition and a LOT of noise in the App Store, making it
extremely difficult to stand out_

With 500k+ apps in the store, what are the chances that a user is even going
to _see_ your app at this point? Without a ton of marketing muscle or the good
graces of the kingmakers at Apple just hanging your shingle out in the App
store doesn't get you anywhere.

~~~
z92
I think a better comparison number is [grand total of all apps sold per day] /
[total number of apps in store].

When the customer base is 20 times larger, even 10 fold competitors still
keeps the market twice as attractive.

~~~
danmaz74
That would be true if sales went down linearly when you get farther from the
top spot. But the reality is much closer to a "top X take (almost) all".

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toyg
I remember seeing similar posts... Oh yes, Angry Birds at one point was more
profitable on Nokia N900 than on iPhone.

Make of this what you will.

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robryan
This makes sense as while the WP7 market is a lot smaller, a far greater
percentage of people looking for Educational games are being exposed to it.

Now I guess it all depends on how much competition there is on WP7, also being
at the top stop gets you more sales which helps to keep you there. If you
don't get some initial good sales to put you there results could be vastly
different.

A better comparison would be an app that hasn't got any help from top lists on
either platform.

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shimfish
A lot of nonsense here. They claim to have been "featured by Apple". This was
most probably just in the "What's Hot" section buried under 5 levels of clicks
on the iTunes desktop app. The rankings they claim are actually pitifully
small. Selling 5 times as much wouldn't be such a big deal.

The apps themselves appear to be yet another bunch of spelling apps for young
children. This has been done to death in the app store. Unless the app is
spectacular, it's no shock that it didn't do so well.

I have an app that apparently is doing far better than this in the young kids
iPhone space. I didn't spend any money advertising it. However, it is
something that hasn't been done 1000 times already by everyone else looking to
cash in.

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n9com
Without any sales numbers, this post is meaningless. You could have at least
given an indication.

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Rajiv_N
I would like to know what the development time difference is between these
platforms. Also, what is the WP7 SDK like?

For a single developer this could be a good time to write WP7 apps. But iOS is
so attractive because of its SDK and the wealth of third party libraries
available for developers to leverage.

~~~
bad_user

         For a single developer this could be a good 
         time to write WP7 apps
    

Personally, I doubt that.

In my circles I have a lot of non-technical and technical people. I don't live
in Silicon Valley, or in the US, so the echo chamber that a lot of people from
this community does not apply to me.

I see a lot of iPhones and Android phones. Galaxy S and S2 were huge hits.
Low-end Android phones were hits too, like LG Optimus One - great value for
the price. I see my friends and acquaintances with these phones, like a friend
of mine who's a taxi driver has a Galaxy S in his pocket. But I know NONE with
a WinMo 7 phone. Its market share is completely abysmal.

Now, this company may have had the _first mover_ advantage. Cool for them -
however, personally I want a smaller piece of a bigger pie. The reason for
that being that this pie is growing, exponentially even. Competition may be
fierce and you won't get rich over night, however the 700 million users that
Facebook has will be nothing compared to the number of people carrying
Androids in their pockets, 3 years from now. A lot of people have ridden the
first wave, especially when it comes to Apple's App Store. However a bigger
wave is coming and I don't want to invest the limited resources I have in
Microsoft's me-too-me-too platform.

Another problem is one of trust - WinMo 7 is the successor of WinMo 6, but
it's a completely different platform. This is understandable, as WinMo 6
simply sucked and in my view it was the same story as with IExplorer 6 - they
got something working, then they reinvested resources in the latest fad du-
jour, leaving customers and developers disappointed, WinMo 7 being their
latest attempt at preventing irrelevancy. I have no trust left for Microsoft
to do the right thing in regards to its developers or customers, fucking with
their learned knowledge all over again, or leaving them in the dust. I mean -
they are discontinuing Silverlight for Christ's sake.

~~~
cwbrandsma
On WinMo 6, I think you are skipping over the history with that one. When it
was released (WinMo 2,3,4,5,6,6.5) the hardware was too expensive for the
consumer market, so it was sold to commercial consumers. They biggest concern
for them was business apps, photos, gps, and --wait for it-- barcode scanners.
The types that could be used from 30 ft away.

For that industry, WinMob was much better than the competition (this is before
the IPhone/Android was released). There were lots of models, multiple
configurations, and some of them even made phone calls.

Since then, smart phones hit the consumer market, the app needs have change
(consumers don't need lazer enabled barcode scanners and multiple gps hardware
configurations). But, WinMob 7 doesn't replace WinMob 6, because of the
complete lack of external hardware drivers. IPhone really doesn't fill that
gap either. Just Android.

And, Silverlight (and Flash) are being discontinued as Web platform(s). It
still exists for development on other systems. But it could be argued it is
just WPF at that point.

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epo
They are claiming 5 times more sales, so are they saying that Microsoft take
the same cut as Apple? Also the app was language learning app for (presumably)
the very young, how likely is that these youngsters would have (extended
access to) an iPhone? I can easily imagine giving the kids a Windows phone as
a play thing because you didn't care if it got damaged or not.

So isn't piece this just saying putting your product in the right marketplace
results in more sales than putting it into the wrong marketplace?

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10dpd
So they make $5 per day on Windows Phone as opposed to $1 per day on iOS? This
stat is meaningless without figures...

~~~
kenjackson
They don't give figures, but they do give this info in a previous posting
about their iPhone version:

 _"Rankings

We have reached the following top charts and have also been listed in 36 more
countries around the world:

US: Top 100

UK: Top 50

Australia: Top 50

Germany: Top 25

Austria: Top 25

Switzerland: Top 25

France: Top 25

Italy: Top 10

Spain: Nr. 1

Mexico: Top 10

Greece: Nr. 1

Canada: Top 50

Argentina: Top 10

Colombia: Top 10

Chile: Top 10

User Ratings

Our paid versions have received 90+ reviews across all countries with an
average of 4.5+_"

No raw sales numbers, but it seems fair to guess they've made more than $1 on
the iPhone version.

I'm actually surprised there aren't more people targeting the education
market. On my iPad I tried to find good educational apps and I'm having a
really hard time. It's probably one of the few app categories where I'd pay
decent money for a good toddler+ app, and have only found a few worth a dime.

~~~
shimfish
Ha. That basically means they are selling nothing. You can get into the top
100 iPhone Games/Educational section with about 20 downloads in a day. But
these are their peak figures. Their boast about being in the top 400 for 2/3
of the time is laughable. That basically means they sold 1 per day. As for the
other countries, that's even less meaningful. You can shoot to the top of that
category with 5 downloads.

Basically, this was one unprofitable app on the iPhone. Making 5 times more on
WP isn't so impressive.

~~~
kenjackson
Actually what you're saying is even worse. You're basically saying that almost
no one makes money on the iPhone. Unless you're Rovio or PopCap -- you're
selling nothing.

And given the fact that I already know a few independent WP7 devs who can make
a living purely from WP7 apps makes me wonder if the iPhone app store really
is the iPhone lottery for developers. This can end up actually turning into a
really bad story for iPhone developers.

~~~
shimfish
No. I'm saying the Games/Educational category is very small and takes very few
sales to be in the top 100 and almost nothing to be in the top 400.

What I'm _really_ saying (in my other comment) is that this was a wholly
unremarkable app with very little to differentiate it from all the other apps
out there. This article is just cynical linkbait to try to squeeze out some
extra sales.

You can get away with selling unremarkable software in a new market. As soon
as news of a gold rush for WP7 emerges then it will be just as tough as the
iPhone market in no time.

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bluekeybox
Hint: if you develop primarily in Objective C and find the iPhone app market
too crowded, make an iPad app.

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asto
First mover advantage.

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nonane
Anyone one on HN developing on Windows Phone and seeing similar results?

~~~
kpao
We're porting our game (Infinite Flight) from Windows Phone to the iPhone and
we're expecting much better returns on iOS.

We will have more data when it comes out in a couple of months.

~~~
nonane
Would love to hear more about it.

Also porting is interesting - we're in a position where we have a bunch of
highly optimized, debugged C/C++ 'backend' code. Since native code isn't
supported on Windows 7 Phone, we'll have to port our app by rewriting it all
in C#. Unfortunately, it's not practical option for us at the moment.

~~~
eropple
That does tend to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for WP7. I'm
surprised they haven't figured out a way to deal with that.

I'm going the other way - my own code is all in C# (Mac and Linux with Mono,
and MonoTouch and MonoDroid for the mobile platforms) so deployment to any of
the above platforms becomes relatively easy. (I'm writing games, so I can
hoist a lot more of the otherwise platform-specific logic into OpenGL,
OpenGL|ES, and XNA, respectively--still requires building different GUIs based
on desktop vs. phone but is a lot nicer than Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. iOS
vs. Android.)

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Freestyler_3
It's good to be a early bird, because if it becomes successful you can say it
was a good choice, and if it fails you at least tried.

