How much are those iPhone apps making?

While there are over 100,000 different iPhone and iPod Touch apps in the App Store, the vast majority don’t make much of a splash ( or a profit ). In a down economic year, how well did some developers do?

Tapulous Makes $1 million a month

According to Reuters: “iPhone app developer Tapulous says its sales have approached $1 million a month, providing fresh evidence of the growing success of start-ups designing programs for Apple Inc’s mobile device. Tapulous — with a mere 20 employees — said its “Tap Tap Revenge” game series has now been installed more than 20 million times, with more than 600 million total games played.” Source: Reuters, 20th December 2009

Future Tap Profits $250,000

Future Tap, a company that actually bought an iphone app, that Tapulous developed earlier in it’s life, (” Where To?” was purchased for a reported 70k ) and has since turned a tidy profit. As Techcrunch reports: “The company had $325 055 in gross sales. Apple took a $97 157 cut on sales revenue, so that means the young company made a $227.538 profit on the app in 2009.” [The app retails for $2.99]

So who’s making money of iPhone Apps Some of the developers for sure, but the real profiteer is apple. Taking nearly 30% of every transaction in the App store is huge. Huge!

Baby Maker Earns $5,190.24

On the other end of the spectrum we have iPhone App developler Loler apps with their Baby Maker app. According to blog posts by Loler apps, Baby Maker, an app that lets you to see the result of to photos mating, was developed for $5000 and broke even in August of 2009.

From the Loler Apps guys:

“In total, after 50 days on sale, Baby Maker has netted us $5,190.24. This equates to 2,524 actual units sold. Calculating this out, Apple’s 30% commission is about $2,350.00. That’s a nice chunk of change, but that’s the cost of doing what we do. “

So is there money in iPhone apps?

I think Pat Flynn of Loler Apps said it best:

You always hear about the guy who wrote an app and got rich, or the dude who developed the app that sold 50,000 units in just one day. That’s THE dream, and it still is for us. It’s still a dream that we believe we can reach.

citations: Digital Stats

Tagged as: app, development, earnings, iPhone, revenue

Stephen Beck

The App Store gold rush is a tricky racket. The big misconception with the App business is that these are simple cash cow opportunities. The reality is that Apps are products just like anything else. It has to be a good (and useful) product, reliable, and show some reasonable level of quality. But beyond that, Apps require ongoing support and most importantly: marketing. Even marketing play Apps require marketing. Unless an App is incredibly unique, or tied to a major brand name, it'll sink quickly to the depths of the App Store. Very few get featured, and most that are lucky enough to, only stay featured for a short period of time - others clearly stay featured because they're just really great Apps.

The Apps mentioned above are likely all doing well because they're early entries to the App Store, and they're all really well made, unique concepts. Thousands more are completely unknown and their investments are unlikely to make it into the black. Apps are not cheap to build, and marketing in a buzz product category that's growing at such warp speeds (According to Wikipedia, as of January 5, 2010, there are over 115,000 third-party applications in the App Store), anyone considering investing in this space should consider putting aside a big chunk of change to drive awareness of their App and be ready to invest time in the online space making as much noise as possible. The lucky one's will see a profit quickly. The rest may never recoup their dev costs.

@mrstephenbeck

Jess @thattallguy

Well said. It's not the same as it was even 9 months ago and the app
store is only getting bigger.

Just like anything online, you've got an uphill battle for awareness,
so you better not suck.

Thanks for the long and thoughtful comment stepehen. Your insights are
always welcome here. :)

Stephen Beck

Thanks Jess!
Some great posts on here so far.

@mrstephenbeck

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