well， there is no Google Play in China. They should lump in revenue from Huawei App Store, Xiaomi App Store, Bidu App Store etc to do a true comparison
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
well， there is no Google Play in China. They should lump in revenue from Huawei App Store, Xiaomi App Store, Bidu App Store etc to do a true comparison
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
well， there is no Google Play in China. They should lump in revenue from Huawei App Store, Xiaomi App Store, Bidu App Store etc to do a true comparison
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
well， there is no Google Play in China. They should lump in revenue from Huawei App Store, Xiaomi App Store, Bidu App Store etc to do a true comparison
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
well， there is no Google Play in China. They should lump in revenue from Huawei App Store, Xiaomi App Store, Bidu App Store etc to do a true comparison
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Vision Mobiles's Q2 2015 Developer Economic report gives you some of the detail you're after:
- 8% of iOS developers (17,000 devs) generate greater than $2.4 Million annually
- 7% or 15,000 iOS devs make between $600K and $2.4 Million p.a.
- 24% or 50,000 iOS devs make between $60K and $600K p.a.
Those numbers don't match with Apple's and Vision Mobile doesn't have an active report with those numbers, they have the following:
You can enter any info to get the downloads. They survey a few thousand developers that includes people making money outside of the App Store like in e-commerce apps that have people buying on mobile. Those people in e-commerce are making money from their products, not from the app itself.
If you added up the above lowest numbers 17k x $2.4m + 15k x $600k + 50k x $60k, that comes to $52b. Apple only pays out $10b per year.
Out of the surveyed numbers in the q3 report, 50% make <$500/month, 21% make $500-5000/m, 7% make $5-10k/m, 8% make $10-50k/m, 9% make $50-500k/m, 4% make $500k+/m. This report also includes e-commerce.
Active publishers on iOS is noted to be 282,000 at the end of 2014 and the second site says 580,000 is the latest. The numbers still don't add up in Vision Mobile's active reports. 4% = 11k x $500k/month x 12 = $66b just for the top earners. Vision Mobile's reports don't give much insight into how much developers make.
The top 10 grossing apps make about half the revenue so that cuts out $5b from the $10b Apple pays out. It would be reasonable to assume the top 100 developers make 75%. About 1/3 of the developers make $0. This leaves $2.5b between 382k developers. That averages about $6.5k each.
If we split it in brackets of <$15k (supplementary income), $15k-100k (full-time income for individuals), $100k+ (business-level) and try 94%, 5%, 1%:
360k making <$15k (assume average of $6k) 19k making $15k-$100k 4k making $100k+
The ratios are just estimates but the total comes close to Apple's revenue numbers and these are per company, not per developer.
On top of these revenues, there are developers hired to build apps. Every app that exists (>2 million) was built by a developer so that's a few tens of billions in revenue that went to developers. There was an older survey of apps here that showed ~$6k average development cost:
Individual self-publishing developers would just develop apps without being paid but it's tens of billions being paid out in some way to contracted developers. Each individual developer could probably do an app contract in 3 months. The following says 5.7 million app developers worldwide, Apple notes 1.4m in both US and Europe:
By population, that would mean over 1 million full-time in the US.
Overall, I'd estimate: 360,000 supplementary incomes directly from the app development 23,000 full-time incomes directly from the app development easily a couple of million in full-time employment worldwide
Some of the 4k upper earners will be hiring some of the full-time employed, for example the companies earning billions employ hundreds of staff. Direct revenue is clearly skewed towards the top of the App Store. You have to be in the top 5,000 apps out of 2 million to make any kind of decent income.
It's far more reliable to get a job making apps for a company than to make apps for yourself. You'd have 2-5 million opportunities to find work worldwide as a developer making at least minimum wage but <25,000 opportunities to support yourself directly in the store. This is obvious from the revenue alone. $2.5b divides into $100k 25,000 times and the companies making millions pull the number down. The revenue that is paying for developers has to be mostly coming from outside the App Store: 2 million developers x $30k salary = $60b so is from companies selling some other product like an e-commerce store.
I have my app developing company since 2012. 80% of the income comes from developing apps for 3rd parties. My customers are banks, transport companies, government, ... These apps are always free and cross platform (iOS and Android). Being profitable with your own apps is difficult, but having my own apps makes it easier to win contracts with 3rd parties
Vision Mobile's Developer Economics Report also features the following estimates for these sorts of 3rd party revenue streams that make the App economy vastly larger than just the App Store figures we hear about normally:
- Mobile e-commerce for 2015 = $300 Billion
- App Store sales = $40.5 Billion
- Mobile Advertising revenue for developers = $34 Billion
- Mobile Developer Contract fees = $18.5 Billion
- App Subscriptions at $9 Billion
- other dev revenue at $18 Billion
TOTAL = $420 Billion dollars generated by the App Economy in 2015.
And here's another data point - Pollen VC, another analytical company also agrees with App Annie and Vision, reporting that in Q2 2015, there were 60% more App millionaires on the iOS platform than the Google Play Store.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Vision Mobiles's Q2 2015 Developer Economic report gives you some of the detail you're after:
- 8% of iOS developers (17,000 devs) generate greater than $2.4 Million annually
- 7% or 15,000 iOS devs make between $600K and $2.4 Million p.a.
- 24% or 50,000 iOS devs make between $60K and $600K p.a.
In terms of Android developers, Vision Mobile then reports:
“It turns out that Android is not even the second best platform for revenues. Of those prioritising the mobile browser, 47% are below the app poverty line, making less than $500 and 29% make more than $5,000 per month"
"Android developers look poor in comparison with 55% earning less than $500 per month from the platform and just 19% earning more than $5,000 per month. In fact, the revenue distribution for Android-first developers doesn’t look much better than that for those targeting BlackBerry 10 or Windows Phone either. Since the user base for Android is more than an order of magnitude bigger, this is astonishing.”
“Speculation that Android’s overwhelming market share would eventually tempt top iOS developers to switch their priorities seem to have been unfounded. If anything, the reverse is likely to happen as the app economy continues to mature.”
From your same source, Vision Mobile, but three months later in their Q3 report: "When the value of the app economy was dominated by app store
revenues, Apple’s user demographic advantage was overwhelming.
Now that the app economy is maturing and moving towards more
complex revenue models, such as subscriptions and e-Commerce,
Android’s reach is too large to ignore. Apple users may spend more
per transaction, but the quantity of users buying through their
Android devices will more than compensate for this over the next few
years. It seems likely that for the most popular apps of the future,
iOS-only, or even iOS-first, may no longer make sense. Currently
37% of all mobile developers target both iOS and Android, and we
expect their numbers to grow. If we exclude the Hobbyists and
Explorers in our segmentation model, counting only those developers
building apps for a living, then 44% are already supporting both
platforms. Android remains by far the most popular platform overall;
targeted by 71% of all mobile developers with 28% only using
Android from the top 3 platforms (Android, iOS and Windows
Phone). However, where both iOS and Android are used, iOS takes
priority by a significant margin. This still makes sense: even if the
majority of your customers are on one platform, you still prioritise
the premium platform where your best customers are to be found."
"Developers targeting iOS might be doing best out of commerce, but
they are far from alone. Well over a third of Android developers
looking to sell tangibles are making a sustainable income (considered
to be more than $10,000 a month)"
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
I have my app developing company since 2012. 80% of the income comes from developing apps for 3rd parties. My customers are banks, transport companies, government, ... These apps are always free and cross platform (iOS and Android). Being profitable with your own apps is difficult, but having my own apps makes it easier to win contracts with 3rd parties
Maybe that's where the real money is to be made. Creating App's for other businesses.
And here's another data point - Pollen VC, another analytical company also agrees with App Annie and Vision, reporting that in Q2 2015, there were 60% more App millionaires on the iOS platform than the Google Play Store.
That site has some interesting numbers, they are estimates based on app rank:
1260 developers on iOS estimated to be making > $1m in 2015. 78% of those made a game. $2.3b made by the 45% outside the top 100 on both App Store and Google stores.
They estimate around 39k developers can support themselves directly on the app stores. This is low compared to the millions of app development jobs.
Some people call it a lottery but the odds are much higher than the lottery. 1,887 out of 580,000 developers is odds of 1 in 307 of becoming a millionaire. Lotteries are about 1 in 10 million to do that.
From your same source, Vision Mobile, but three months later in their Q3 report: "When the value of the app economy was dominated by app store
revenues, Apple’s user demographic advantage was overwhelming.
Now that the app economy is maturing and moving towards more
complex revenue models, such as subscriptions and e-Commerce,
Android’s reach is too large to ignore. Apple users may spend more
per transaction, but the quantity of users buying through their
Android devices will more than compensate for this over the next few
years. It seems likely that for the most popular apps of the future,
iOS-only, or even iOS-first, may no longer make sense. Currently
37% of all mobile developers target both iOS and Android, and we
expect their numbers to grow. If we exclude the Hobbyists and
Explorers in our segmentation model, counting only those developers
building apps for a living, then 44% are already supporting both
platforms. Android remains by far the most popular platform overall;
targeted by 71% of all mobile developers with 28% only using
Android from the top 3 platforms (Android, iOS and Windows
Phone). However, where both iOS and Android are used, iOS takes
priority by a significant margin. This still makes sense: even if the
majority of your customers are on one platform, you still prioritise
the premium platform where your best customers are to be found."
"Developers targeting iOS might be doing best out of commerce, but
they are far from alone. Well over a third of Android developers
looking to sell tangibles are making a sustainable income (considered
to be more than $10,000 a month)"
Phrasing and timing. . .
As an owner of an app developing company, I can only confirm this. Compared to an iOS only app, the development of a cross platform app costs about 25% more (if you do the cross platform from the start), the marketing cost remains the same and I have roughly a revenue split 50-50. It took me about 6 months after I founded my company in 2012, to decide that all my apps would be cross platform. App developers are seeking more and more revenue outside the app eco system (and not visible to Apple or Google), so the app store revenue tends be a shrinking part of the income of app developers. This is partially because the lousy search function in the App Store app, partially because app developers are responsible for their own marketing.
well， there is no Google Play in China. They should lump in revenue from Huawei App Store, Xiaomi App Store, Bidu App Store etc to do a true comparison
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
I am a developer for iOS and tvOS. Not making much $$. I would very much like to see a report that shows how many developers are making a living doing apps for Apple. By that I mean $100,000 or more for each team member for an app.
Vision Mobiles's Q2 2015 Developer Economic report gives you some of the detail you're after:
- 8% of iOS developers (17,000 devs) generate greater than $2.4 Million annually
- 7% or 15,000 iOS devs make between $600K and $2.4 Million p.a.
- 24% or 50,000 iOS devs make between $60K and $600K p.a.
In terms of Android developers, Vision Mobile then reports:
“It turns out that Android is not even the second best platform for revenues. Of those prioritising the mobile browser, 47% are below the app poverty line, making less than $500 and 29% make more than $5,000 per month"
"Android developers look poor in comparison with 55% earning less than $500 per month from the platform and just 19% earning more than $5,000 per month. In fact, the revenue distribution for Android-first developers doesn’t look much better than that for those targeting BlackBerry 10 or Windows Phone either. Since the user base for Android is more than an order of magnitude bigger, this is astonishing.”
“Speculation that Android’s overwhelming market share would eventually tempt top iOS developers to switch their priorities seem to have been unfounded. If anything, the reverse is likely to happen as the app economy continues to mature.”
Vision Mobiles's Q2 2015 Developer Economic report gives you some of the detail you're after:
- 8% of iOS developers (17,000 devs) generate greater than $2.4 Million annually
- 7% or 15,000 iOS devs make between $600K and $2.4 Million p.a.
- 24% or 50,000 iOS devs make between $60K and $600K p.a.
If you added up the above lowest numbers 17k x $2.4m + 15k x $600k + 50k x $60k, that comes to $52b. Apple only pays out $10b per year.
Hi Marvin, the reason Vision's numbers add up to much more than Apple's App Store Revenue total is because of an error in your assumptions. Vision Mobile's figures include ALL developer revenues, not just App Store and In-App purchases. Including all those revenue sources, Vision Mobile estimates that Developers earned $420 Billion dollars generated by the App Economy in 2015. Here is the breakdown of those figures again:
- Mobile e-commerce for 2015 = $300 Billion - App Store sales = $40.5 Billion - Mobile Advertising revenue for developers = $34 Billion - Mobile Developer Contract fees = $18.5 Billion - App Subscriptions at $9 Billion - other dev revenue at $18 Billion
TOTAL = $420 Billion dollars generated by the App Economy in 2015.
Also, your App Store figure of $10b per year is half what Apple reported in 2015 - it was $20 Billion.
Also, I should mention that Android fans often excuse these low Android app Store figures on the fact that so many more Android Apps are "free" being supported by advertising. Well, unfortunately Android users are horrifically worse at generating advertising revenue than iOS users as well.
A study of more than 200 billion ads on Facebook by Nanigans reports:
“Retailers are realizing significantly greater return from audiences on iOS than audiences on Android,” the report says. “For the first three quarters of 2013, RPC [revenue per click] on iOS averaged 6.1 times higher than Android and ROI [return on investment] on iOS averaged 17.9 times higher than Android.”
"Retailers have a large opportunity on mobile, the company says, but clearly the opportunity is much, much more lucrative on iPhone than it is on Android. Frankly, the numbers are shocking."
"It’s not just that Android monetizes worse than iOS — it actually offers negative return on investment. In other words, while advertising on iOS brings retailer 162 percent more cash than they spend on the ads, advertising on Android returns 10 percent less than the cost of the ads."
"Nanigans doesn’t speculate why the ad ROI differs so greatly between iOS and Android, and the study doesn’t delve into reasons, simply highlighting what’s happening. Likely, the challenge is the same that Android has faced for years: a lower-end audience."
"Brutally put, iPhone owners simply tend to both make more money and spend more money than Android owners."
Similarly, Goldman Sachs reports that 75% of Google's mobile search revenue came from the iOS platform in 2014.
Also, Apple absolutely dominates the TV EveryWhere market (paid streaming) according to the Adobe Digital Index with a massive 61.2% market share of which 22.3% came from the iPad, 18.2% were iPhones and 12.8% was from the AppleTV.
All of the Android platform combined (tablets and mobile) only managed a 9% market share and the Windows PC only managed 18%, Roku captured 7%, gaming consoles 2%, Amazon Fire 1% and SmartTVs 0.7%.
From your same source, Vision Mobile, but three months later in their Q3 report: "When the value of the app economy was dominated by app store
revenues, Apple’s user demographic advantage was overwhelming.
Now that the app economy is maturing and moving towards more
complex revenue models, such as subscriptions and e-Commerce,
Android’s reach is too large to ignore. Apple users may spend more
per transaction, but the quantity of users buying through their
Android devices will more than compensate for this over the next few
years. It seems likely that for the most popular apps of the future,
iOS-only, or even iOS-first, may no longer make sense.
Yes, I noticed that paragraph in Vision Mobile's report and actually had a discussion with the authors of the report about why their assumption was incorrect.
The problem is that Vision Mobile made the classic mistake of only looking at quarterly smartphone sales to estimate the relative sizes of each ecosystem.
Of course for a developer the important figure is active installed base. At the start of this year, Apple reported there were over a Billion active Apple devices (of which close to 900m are iOS devices) around the world. Since then, Apple has sold over 100 million additional iOS devices.
Now Google also reported the number of active Android devices at their Sept 2015 Nexus lunch as being only 1.4 Billion active Android devices. That means that Apple's active iOS platform is around 60-70% the size of Google's active installed base, far higher than the 15% quarterly smartphone market share figure that is always bandied around.
Also, as Nanigan's data demonstrates, having even more Android users can actually be a liability as in the case of advertising, they cost more than they generate.
They estimate around 39k developers can support themselves directly on the app stores. This is low compared to the millions of app development jobs.
Some people call it a lottery but the odds are much higher than the lottery. 1,887 out of 580,000 developers is odds of 1 in 307 of becoming a millionaire. Lotteries are about 1 in 10 million to do that.
Actually, it's much better than that. Pollen only considered App Store revenue but when you add in the 10x higher revenues developers make from all the other sources that Vision reports ($420b), the figure could be as high as 1 in 30 developers becoming a millionaire. (very rough calculations of course, but you get the idea).
I don't know about you, but I like those odds considering the huge number of hobbyists and dabblers publishing to the App Store. As the other stats have shown, developing for iOS increases your chance of making it big even more.
They should change the name from Google Play to Android Mall(ware).........................._______________
Android, the new Windows95 as far as viruses go.
If you added up the above lowest numbers 17k x $2.4m + 15k x $600k + 50k x $60k, that comes to $52b. Apple only pays out $10b per year.
Hi Marvin, the reason Vision's numbers add up to much more than Apple's App Store Revenue total is because of an error in your assumptions. Vision Mobile's figures include ALL developer revenues, not just App Store and In-App purchases. Including all those revenue sources, Vision Mobile estimates that Developers earned $420 Billion dollars generated by the App Economy in 2015. Here is the breakdown of those figures again:
- Mobile e-commerce for 2015 = $300 Billion - App Store sales = $40.5 Billion - Mobile Advertising revenue for developers = $34 Billion - Mobile Developer Contract fees = $18.5 Billion - App Subscriptions at $9 Billion - other dev revenue at $18 Billion
TOTAL = $420 Billion dollars generated by the App Economy in 2015.
Also, your App Store figure of $10b per year is half what Apple reported in 2015 - it was $20 Billion.
That's right, the App Store payouts were higher than $10b last year. They reported $25b cumulative (total since the app store launched) in January 2015:
Schiller said $20b over 2015 at that point, though the difference is $15b. It's somewhere in that region.
The e-commerce numbers look like they are counting all mobile commerce, that's just the revenue the entire industry makes including the likes of Amazon:
This is an opportunity for developers to make money but they make a small percentage of that revenue. They seem to be including companies who sell products that also make apps and they are considering them as both a developer and a retailer. Amazon is an app developer and a retailer that makes over $100b in revenue but the people doing the development (in Amazon's case, their employees) only make a portion of that.
Developers can get a 6% commission from promoting physical goods in their apps. E-commerce developers will also get commissions from the running of a mobile store they have developed too.
Commissions on mobile revenue will typically be single digit percentages so that could be ~$20b for the people doing development work from e-commerce.
When you add that to $30-40b app store payouts across multiple stores and ad revenue of $30-40b, maybe some external subscription models, that's ~$100b for developers supporting themselves directly. Even with that weighted towards top developers, it still leaves enough to support a lot of people directly - more than 100,000 developers worldwide.
There are still a majority of developers left not able to make a living directly simply because nobody can browse through 2 million apps but a lot of them will get a supplementary income of some kind and the rest can easily work full-time or on contracts as developers.
Comments
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
http://www.visionmobile.com/product/developer-economics-q1-2015-state-developer-nation/
http://www.visionmobile.com/product/developer-economics-state-of-the-developer-nation-q3-2015/
http://www.visionmobile.com/product/developer-economics-state-of-developer-nation-q1-2016/
You can enter any info to get the downloads. They survey a few thousand developers that includes people making money outside of the App Store like in e-commerce apps that have people buying on mobile. Those people in e-commerce are making money from their products, not from the app itself.
If you added up the above lowest numbers 17k x $2.4m + 15k x $600k + 50k x $60k, that comes to $52b. Apple only pays out $10b per year.
Out of the surveyed numbers in the q3 report, 50% make <$500/month, 21% make $500-5000/m, 7% make $5-10k/m, 8% make $10-50k/m, 9% make $50-500k/m, 4% make $500k+/m. This report also includes e-commerce.
There are some active developer numbers here:
http://blog.appfigures.com/app-stores-growth-accelerates-in-2014/
http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/
Active publishers on iOS is noted to be 282,000 at the end of 2014 and the second site says 580,000 is the latest. The numbers still don't add up in Vision Mobile's active reports. 4% = 11k x $500k/month x 12 = $66b just for the top earners. Vision Mobile's reports don't give much insight into how much developers make.
The top 10 grossing apps make about half the revenue so that cuts out $5b from the $10b Apple pays out. It would be reasonable to assume the top 100 developers make 75%. About 1/3 of the developers make $0. This leaves $2.5b between 382k developers. That averages about $6.5k each.
If we split it in brackets of <$15k (supplementary income), $15k-100k (full-time income for individuals), $100k+ (business-level) and try 94%, 5%, 1%:
360k making <$15k (assume average of $6k)
19k making $15k-$100k
4k making $100k+
The ratios are just estimates but the total comes close to Apple's revenue numbers and these are per company, not per developer.
http://dazeend.org/2015/01/the-shape-of-the-app-store-redux/
On top of these revenues, there are developers hired to build apps. Every app that exists (>2 million) was built by a developer so that's a few tens of billions in revenue that went to developers. There was an older survey of apps here that showed ~$6k average development cost:
https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/iphone-app-sales-exposed/
Individual self-publishing developers would just develop apps without being paid but it's tens of billions being paid out in some way to contracted developers. Each individual developer could probably do an app contract in 3 months. The following says 5.7 million app developers worldwide, Apple notes 1.4m in both US and Europe:
http://www.digitaltimes.ie/european-app-economy-2015/
http://www.apple.com/about/job-creation/
http://www.apple.com/uk/job-creation/
There's an article here saying 14,000 full-time app developers just in Chicago:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lake-forest/community/chi-ugc-article-chicago-developers-receive-helping-hand-from-2016-07-08-story.html
By population, that would mean over 1 million full-time in the US.
Overall, I'd estimate:
360,000 supplementary incomes directly from the app development
23,000 full-time incomes directly from the app development
easily a couple of million in full-time employment worldwide
Some of the 4k upper earners will be hiring some of the full-time employed, for example the companies earning billions employ hundreds of staff. Direct revenue is clearly skewed towards the top of the App Store. You have to be in the top 5,000 apps out of 2 million to make any kind of decent income.
https://sensortower.com/blog/app-store-one-percent
It's far more reliable to get a job making apps for a company than to make apps for yourself. You'd have 2-5 million opportunities to find work worldwide as a developer making at least minimum wage but <25,000 opportunities to support yourself directly in the store. This is obvious from the revenue alone. $2.5b divides into $100k 25,000 times and the companies making millions pull the number down. The revenue that is paying for developers has to be mostly coming from outside the App Store: 2 million developers x $30k salary = $60b so is from companies selling some other product like an e-commerce store.
- Mobile e-commerce for 2015 = $300 Billion
- App Store sales = $40.5 Billion
- Mobile Advertising revenue for developers = $34 Billion
- Mobile Developer Contract fees = $18.5 Billion
- App Subscriptions at $9 Billion
- other dev revenue at $18 Billion
TOTAL = $420 Billion dollars generated by the App Economy in 2015.
And here's another data point - Pollen VC, another analytical company also agrees with App Annie and Vision, reporting that in Q2 2015, there were 60% more App millionaires on the iOS platform than the Google Play Store.
"When the value of the app economy was dominated by app store revenues, Apple’s user demographic advantage was overwhelming. Now that the app economy is maturing and moving towards more complex revenue models, such as subscriptions and e-Commerce, Android’s reach is too large to ignore. Apple users may spend more per transaction, but the quantity of users buying through their Android devices will more than compensate for this over the next few years. It seems likely that for the most popular apps of the future, iOS-only, or even iOS-first, may no longer make sense. Currently 37% of all mobile developers target both iOS and Android, and we expect their numbers to grow. If we exclude the Hobbyists and Explorers in our segmentation model, counting only those developers building apps for a living, then 44% are already supporting both platforms. Android remains by far the most popular platform overall; targeted by 71% of all mobile developers with 28% only using Android from the top 3 platforms (Android, iOS and Windows Phone). However, where both iOS and Android are used, iOS takes priority by a significant margin. This still makes sense: even if the majority of your customers are on one platform, you still prioritise the premium platform where your best customers are to be found."
"Developers targeting iOS might be doing best out of commerce, but they are far from alone. Well over a third of Android developers looking to sell tangibles are making a sustainable income (considered to be more than $10,000 a month)"
Phrasing and timing. . .
http://insights.pollen.vc/articles/the-millionaires-index
1260 developers on iOS estimated to be making > $1m in 2015. 78% of those made a game.
$2.3b made by the 45% outside the top 100 on both App Store and Google stores.
They estimate around 39k developers can support themselves directly on the app stores. This is low compared to the millions of app development jobs.
Some people call it a lottery but the odds are much higher than the lottery. 1,887 out of 580,000 developers is odds of 1 in 307 of becoming a millionaire. Lotteries are about 1 in 10 million to do that.
App developers are seeking more and more revenue outside the app eco system (and not visible to Apple or Google), so the app store revenue tends be a shrinking part of the income of app developers. This is partially because the lousy search function in the App Store app, partially because app developers are responsible for their own marketing.
it does not matter they too are not making money, you missing the point, Apple is making money since they are solely focus on the market segment which will spend money the people with disposable incoming. Android has the customers who can barely afford to have a phone, they buy the cheapest thing on the market.
Not sure why everyone think just because they can make and App they should be rich and famous. First in order to make lots of money you need a product which everyone wants or needs. Just because you had what appeared to be a great idea does not mean everyone else with money in their pockets sees it that way. Just look at Pokémon go, who would have thought it would have taken off like it did. Is your app like Pokémon go which everyone wants to play.
Face there are only a few great ideas which generate lots of income for their developers. Even then some of those developers has few good years then it starts to die off. The best product is one that people must have and are willing to pay for it over and over again.
Hi Marvin, the reason Vision's numbers add up to much more than Apple's App Store Revenue total is because of an error in your assumptions. Vision Mobile's figures include ALL developer revenues, not just App Store and In-App purchases. Including all those revenue sources, Vision Mobile estimates that Developers earned $420 Billion dollars generated by the App Economy in 2015. Here is the breakdown of those figures again:
- Mobile e-commerce for 2015 = $300 Billion
- App Store sales = $40.5 Billion
- Mobile Advertising revenue for developers = $34 Billion
- Mobile Developer Contract fees = $18.5 Billion
- App Subscriptions at $9 Billion
- other dev revenue at $18 Billion
TOTAL = $420 Billion dollars generated by the App Economy in 2015.
Also, your App Store figure of $10b per year is half what Apple reported in 2015 - it was $20 Billion.
A study of more than 200 billion ads on Facebook by Nanigans reports: “Retailers are realizing significantly greater return from audiences on iOS than audiences on Android,” the report says. “For the first three quarters of 2013, RPC [revenue per click] on iOS averaged 6.1 times higher than Android and ROI [return on investment] on iOS averaged 17.9 times higher than Android.”
"Retailers have a large opportunity on mobile, the company says, but clearly the opportunity is much, much more lucrative on iPhone than it is on Android. Frankly, the numbers are shocking."
"It’s not just that Android monetizes worse than iOS — it actually offers negative return on investment. In other words, while advertising on iOS brings retailer 162 percent more cash than they spend on the ads, advertising on Android returns 10 percent less than the cost of the ads."
"Nanigans doesn’t speculate why the ad ROI differs so greatly between iOS and Android, and the study doesn’t delve into reasons, simply highlighting what’s happening. Likely, the challenge is the same that Android has faced for years: a lower-end audience."
"Brutally put, iPhone owners simply tend to both make more money and spend more money than Android owners."
Similarly, Goldman Sachs reports that 75% of Google's mobile search revenue came from the iOS platform in 2014.
Also, Apple absolutely dominates the TV EveryWhere market (paid streaming) according to the Adobe Digital Index with a massive 61.2% market share of which 22.3% came from the iPad, 18.2% were iPhones and 12.8% was from the AppleTV.
All of the Android platform combined (tablets and mobile) only managed a 9% market share and the Windows PC only managed 18%, Roku captured 7%, gaming consoles 2%, Amazon Fire 1% and SmartTVs 0.7%.
The problem is that Vision Mobile made the classic mistake of only looking at quarterly smartphone sales to estimate the relative sizes of each ecosystem.
Of course for a developer the important figure is active installed base. At the start of this year, Apple reported there were over a Billion active Apple devices (of which close to 900m are iOS devices) around the world. Since then, Apple has sold over 100 million additional iOS devices.
Now Google also reported the number of active Android devices at their Sept 2015 Nexus lunch as being only 1.4 Billion active Android devices. That means that Apple's active iOS platform is around 60-70% the size of Google's active installed base, far higher than the 15% quarterly smartphone market share figure that is always bandied around.
Also, as Nanigan's data demonstrates, having even more Android users can actually be a liability as in the case of advertising, they cost more than they generate.
Actually, it's much better than that. Pollen only considered App Store revenue but when you add in the 10x higher revenues developers make from all the other sources that Vision reports ($420b), the figure could be as high as 1 in 30 developers becoming a millionaire. (very rough calculations of course, but you get the idea).
I don't know about you, but I like those odds considering the huge number of hobbyists and dabblers publishing to the App Store. As the other stats have shown, developing for iOS increases your chance of making it big even more.
https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/01/08App-Store-Rings-in-2015-with-New-Records.html
and nearly $40b cumulative in 2016:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2016/01/06Record-Breaking-Holiday-Season-for-the-App-Store.html
Schiller said $20b over 2015 at that point, though the difference is $15b. It's somewhere in that region.
The e-commerce numbers look like they are counting all mobile commerce, that's just the revenue the entire industry makes including the likes of Amazon:
http://yfsmagazine.com/2015/05/08/these-innovations-will-disrupt-300-billion-e-commerce-industry/
This is an opportunity for developers to make money but they make a small percentage of that revenue.
They seem to be including companies who sell products that also make apps and they are considering them as both a developer and a retailer. Amazon is an app developer and a retailer that makes over $100b in revenue but the people doing the development (in Amazon's case, their employees) only make a portion of that.
Amazon has a program for app developers:
https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/community/post/Tx1IHGY6BIA4ZWM/Announcing-the-Amazon-Mobile-Associates-API-Earn-Advertising-Fees-by-Selling-Pro.html
Developers can get a 6% commission from promoting physical goods in their apps. E-commerce developers will also get commissions from the running of a mobile store they have developed too.
Commissions on mobile revenue will typically be single digit percentages so that could be ~$20b for the people doing development work from e-commerce.
When you add that to $30-40b app store payouts across multiple stores and ad revenue of $30-40b, maybe some external subscription models, that's ~$100b for developers supporting themselves directly. Even with that weighted towards top developers, it still leaves enough to support a lot of people directly - more than 100,000 developers worldwide.
There are still a majority of developers left not able to make a living directly simply because nobody can browse through 2 million apps but a lot of them will get a supplementary income of some kind and the rest can easily work full-time or on contracts as developers.