IOS app success is a lottery: 60% (or more) of developers don't break even
This article is silly. The idea that you can't make any money from an App if you aren't in the top of the charts is false.<p>One of my apps has only occasionally and then briefly, broken the top 200 in the US in its CATEGORY. (So nowhere near top 200 overall) and it still reliably pays out every single month.    Further over its lifetime-- about 2 years at this point, the amount it pays every month has gone up, not down.   The experiments we've done show that several things we could do would make it pay even more.<p>For instance, if we'd done a single bit of marketing that might have helped.  The closest thing to "marketing" we do is to give promo codes to anyone who asks for one because they want to review the app. (nobody in the USA has yet reviewed the app.)<p>The idea that you need hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop an app is also kinda silly.  A team of two developed our app over the course of a month.  In the intervening 2 years, another month or two has been put into the app.  At this point, the app has gone well more than a year without an update and it is still earning the same income- in fact, its income has gone up in the past several months.<p>There are somethings that you should do to have success though:<p>1. Have a good UI.  The team of 2 was an engineer and a designer and we spent a lot of time on the design.<p>2. Make the app good.  The star rating is a factor in the app doing well.<p>3. Make the app useful.  Have something unique about it... but this doesn't have to be super unique. (our unique value is quite terrible. Paul Graham would throw me out of his office or a YC interview if I pitched him on it... its barely a differentiator, but its enough.)<p>4. Learn from your app and then do another one.  Over time you can build a nice stable of apps and a nice income.<p>5. Update your app regularly.  You experience a sales dip when the app is first updated, but after there are sufficient ratings on the new version the update seems to boost your sales. (or at least ours have, though we stopped updating it to focus on other things.)<p>6. Make your app sticky.  About %80 of the people who buy our app never use it, and that's unfortunate.  But the %20 who do, do for a long time and use it quite a bit.  I think not every app is for everyone. But if your app is going to be useless after awhile, there's not much point (remember the vevuzula?  lots of apps came out to make that sound. wonder how they're selling now?)<p>Hits come and go, and the big money may go to the hits.  But viewing an App as a dividend that pays out every month, in my experience the returns are quite well worth it.<p>Some more points<p>-- Don't spend $100,000 on an app.  Or even $10,000.  IF you count our cost of living, our app cost us $3,400.  We did spend a couple hundred on an outside designer that didn't work out, and about $500 on the app down the road after it was already making good money each month.   That $3,400 we "spent" on it-- we get more than half of that back <i>each month</i>.<p>-- If you're a big business expecting to gross $1M a year from an app, then maybe it is a lottery.  I dunno.<p>-- A high price is not a problem.  We sold our app for $3 the first year, then $5 the second.  No real change in income.  We experiment with pricing a bit. You get a lot more downloads at $0.99.  And you can have a big boost to your app by running a sale... but that also affects the amount of "juice" apple gives you.<p>-- Since we're not in the charts, our sales come because Apple is recommending our app to people.  Think about that.  The store does work, even if you'd never see us in the store by just browsing.<p>-- I think the idea of focusing on a few apps is a very good one.  don't just throw crap out there and see if it sticks.  That's the biggest problem with the store-- too much crap.  But Apple is getting algorithmically better at figuring out whats crap and what isn't.  Make your app good.  Doesn't have to have all the features you could possibly want in the first version, an MVP is fine, but make it polished.<p>I think that the app store is a huge opportunity for people who would like to work for themselves but aren't in a position to raise funding to do a startup.<p>I think its a lot easier to get a good app discovered than an obscure website.