Numbers are interesting, however it's a small, non-representative survey.
This is also just for games, not for other apps.
Also, I'd probably consider this not very useful at all due to a survey defect that caused strange numbers:
>"One of the things I really wanted data on was a snapshot of what the last 12 months have looked like for game developers on the App Store. However, the questions I created to gather this data clearly confused respondents. The intent was that devs enter only revenue from games released within the last 12 months, but many developers provided revenue from the last 12 months for all their games. This made the data I collected for these questions largely useless for the purposes I wanted. Further, most people didn’t understand the instructions and didn’t match the sales revenue to the non-sales revenue in the two questions, making drawing conclusions there impossible, also. You’ll see later on that I did manage to get some basic data from it, but couldn’t do the detailed analysis I had hoped for."
yes but they are useful, or does anyone else know better stats how much mobile developers earn? apparently majority of mobile app developers don't earn enough money to cover their opportunity costs or development costs.
What is a mobile developer? Someone who spends 2 weeknights worth working on an app? Or a guy who does nothing but that for months, hiring full quality artists, etc.
I think the issue is many mobile apps aren't fully baked ideas implemented with the full range of work.
The top 1 percent of iOS game developers earn over a third
of all that cold, digital revenue. In contrast, the bottom
80 percent of iOS devs are splitting a mere 3 percent of
all App Store game revenue between one another.
The parallel with the current state of wealth in America[1] is interesting. I feel like there is something, sociologically, to be said there but I have no idea what it is.
Put another way: "This behavior of the top 1% capturing a huge portion of the environment to themselves is mirrored in our wealth as well... why does this pattern re-occur?"
haha, this comment is like a pile of kindling, covered with some lighter fuel and you laid some matches down next to it JUST incase anyone wanted to engage :)
20% seems way too high to me. I bet if you took a truly random sample, it would be less than 5%.
But per app or per developer statistics don't really tell you anything except that the app store is saturated with junk. It's just noise, and there is a world of mechanisms to filter it out.
The real interesting stat would be revenue per talent-hours or something, but obviously that is hard to measure objectively.
I wonder if a (rough enough) algorithm might be to filter all apps in the app store and only analyze apps that have more than 1k downloads then see what the profit split looks like so you (hopefully) filter out brand new apps that you don't care about, or junk apps that have been buried algorithmically by Apple already.
The more interesting question here isn't "what % take in the most money" but what kind of money can you expect to see? As in, if you write an iphone/ipad app, what are the maximum returns you could see?
It'd also be interesting to find out how much money has angry birds, or fruit ninja made off just the app store?(not counting merch sales) Additionally, how does it break down? (in app purchase/initial purchase, ad revenue, etc)
Overall reports are interesting, but not that useful, since there is a ton of crap that no one in their right mind would buy...and if you're doing it as a business you wouldn't produce a product that low quality (we hope)
My guess is not much. Everyone will want to spend his money on best of the list, specially when all those are same priced. Thus the top 5% will garner all revenue while the rest will starve.
Not surprising. The 80-20 (or 90-10) rule (top 10 to 20% of paying customers account for 80 to 90% of your revenues) applies to all sorts of businesses.
This is also just for games, not for other apps.
Also, I'd probably consider this not very useful at all due to a survey defect that caused strange numbers:
>"One of the things I really wanted data on was a snapshot of what the last 12 months have looked like for game developers on the App Store. However, the questions I created to gather this data clearly confused respondents. The intent was that devs enter only revenue from games released within the last 12 months, but many developers provided revenue from the last 12 months for all their games. This made the data I collected for these questions largely useless for the purposes I wanted. Further, most people didn’t understand the instructions and didn’t match the sales revenue to the non-sales revenue in the two questions, making drawing conclusions there impossible, also. You’ll see later on that I did manage to get some basic data from it, but couldn’t do the detailed analysis I had hoped for."