Not quite time to quit your day job :: The Future of the Internet

Not quite time to quit your day job

November 10th, 2009 | by elisabeth | Published in iphone | 1 Comment

Newsweek recently carried a story noting that the App Store isn’t the fount of instant riches that Apple, and occasionally the media, sometimes suggest. The story follows some developers who created very popular applications, but found themselves just barely profitable, or sometimes losing money. It’s a good read, and has some particularly interesting stats:

—Per Forrester Research, most apps “take at least six months of full-time work and cost between $20,000 and $150,000 to develop.” Which means that sales have to be quite robust to turn a profit.
—Nearly 60% of apps are rejected at least once (again, according to Forrester). That really surprises me—Apple’s recent letter to the FCC said that 95% of apps are accepted within 14 days. If it’s true that almost half the apps are being reviewed twice, that could strain an already-small staff that reviews apps.
—Only a few hundred developers can live off solely their App Store products.

The article also echoes a theme repeated on this blog—that the App Store can be “an anxiety-wracked marketplace full of bewildering rules, long odds, and little sense of control over one’s success or failure.” Of course, any entrepreneur will have those problems to some degree in every marketplace. But Apple’s unexpected and unexplained rejections don’t help.

As the article also points out (and we have too), App Stores knockoffs are springing up for all the different smartphones. So we may have a chance to see how different store policies play out over time.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Responses

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Bertil Hatt says:

November 13th, 2009 at 9:36 am (#)

The fact that most developpers don’t live off their Apps (provided it’s clear to them they won’t) is the proof that it’s a very generative platform, where anyone can try to make a difference, not short of having a dedicated investment on the topic. The number of those who do (and the total breakdown of lines of code by dedication) should be compared to other coding platforms to say more on that—but a few hundred doesn’t seem too little to me.

The buzz around instant millionaires was great to have people try, and might unfortunately have given the wrong impression to rather daring people. In both cases: more transparency, not Apple’s strong suit.

What is impressive is the ratio of efforts towards how many people try it out (not unlike at Facebook) and that’s great.

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