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Reminds me, I should write my own story of how I made $190 on the App Store while exercising 15 years of coding experience.
by newobj 15y ago
Reminds me, I should write my own story of how I made $190 on the App Store while exercising 15 years of coding experience.
- kirubakaran 15y agoHe made something people want. That trumps programming excellence.
- nupark2 15y agoKeep in mind -- $20k over 10 months is a pretty low return on the investment involved in an application. Perhaps the revenue will trend upwards ... but if we put our team on an application like this and only saw $20k in revenue in 10 months, we'd be out of business.
- randomdata 15y agoThough I think the point still applies. If the best computer scientists of the world had built this app, it still would have unlikely achieved greater success.
- k-mcgrady 15y agoFor 1 guy coding alone that is a good return. $2000 per month doing something you enjoy and that is changing peoples lives is great. It might not be the kind of project a team or company would take on because their main goal is profit but for an individual it is great.
- nupark2 15y agoOur average individual software engineer salary is around $10k/month, not factoring in insurance, payroll taxes, office space expenses, etc.
- k-mcgrady 15y agoBut he is working on your terms. It's a choice between working at home, without a boss, on anything you like. Or working for someone, on a specific project or piece of code. Also, I doubt you would pay a guy just getting started learning objective-c $10k/month :)
- Mike_Nelson 15y agoif you do pay $10k/month for entry level skills my email is.... :P
- nathanbarry 15y agoI pulled in a good amount as a lead designer at a software company (though not 10k/month). You are absolutely right that the success of OneVoice is not enough for even a small company. But for my tiny company it is good. Also my Objective-c skills are not worth anywhere close to $10k per month. Though someday I'll be a good programmer.
- dextorious 15y agoGood for you. Not having to tolerate micromanagers and pointy haired bosses? Priceless. Also the world is not America. $20,000 can feel more like $100,000 in another country. Tons of competent programmers working 12 hour days, 6 days a week, make like 1400 dollars per month (exc insurance) in my country --if they are lucky.
- MichaelApproved 15y agoYou're mixing up development time with sales time. Your team would probably bang this out in a few weeks and then move on to another app. In the meantime, the app would be selling in the store not costing you developer resources.
- nupark2 15y agoI'm not mixing them up. $20k over 10 months would barely cover the development and support costs.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- newobj 15y agoTotally get it. I'm very happy for him, and I'm fully aware of why I only made $190 :) As the parent of an autistic child, I'm really happy that app authors like this can disrupt entrenched and overpriced industries and make tech like this available to a lot more people. Someone will eventually compete with him too (App Stores totally grease the wheels for competition) and then consumers will benefit even more.
- nathanbarry 15y agoIf it makes you feel any better I wrote another simple app and have only made $15 from it.
- watmough 15y agoMy HP-41C has made maybe $5 so far. ROFL! edit: Just adding the name in case anyone wants to buy it; Calc41C. The source is up on github.com/watmough
- brador 15y agoYou may laugh, but this is exactly the type of story we need to hear more about to balance the super hype around apps. Yeah, you could hit gold, but with a random roll you're much more likely to fire a dud. Anyone else with a crap-app story?
- wallflower 15y agoIt is not a crap-app story per se, but I and many other developers I know have made all of our money from client work, not a dollar from the app store. Since we manage the provisioning etc. for the client and walk them through the initial paperwork, no one ever knows who built the (admittedly sometimes faddy) app. We do build our own apps but just for fun and personal use.
- brador 15y agoSerious question, if I outsource my app idea to be made elsewhere through a freelanceer or agency, should I be worried? How would I protect myself here? NDA?
- prawn 15y agoAnd I almost fell off my chair that it wasn't a fart app - nice to see someone put in real effort, create something useful to an under-served segment and see success from that.
- nathanbarry 15y agoThis made me smile. Thanks!
- matwood 15y agoOnly $190? I made about $1k with a small learning app I put up. The goal was just to recoup the developer fee and it made more than that. I still get $5-$10 from Apple deposited in my account every so often :)
- _delirium 15y ago$190 is probably even high for an "average" app. Plenty of $1 apps languish with sales that round to zero. Either they're no good, or they have too much competition, or they have insufficient marketing so nobody knows they exist, or they got unlucky somehow (bad choice of name, who knows).
- wanorris 15y agoActually rather than being unlucky, I think it would be more correct to say that they failed to get lucky somehow. In the absence of doing something right (promotion, naming, hitting a niche at the right time, having other successful apps by the same developer) or getting lucky (being featured by Apple or a blog, etc.), I expect the natural state of an app is to have sales that round to zero. With hundreds of thousands of apps in the App Store, it's not much different from building a random website and expecting people to somehow just show up.
- baconner 15y agoI said almost the exact same thing in December when my first android app only made $150 in 5 months. Hang in there. I took that as education time, improved my marketing and added a new app, and now its more like 350/m avg. Its no business but not bad for a few weekends building apps I wanted for myself.
- lurker17 15y agoPssh. I lost $99 on the App Store, with 20 years experience!