6 ms·

Windows Phone is currently five times more profitable for us than the iPhone

76 points by kenjackson 15y ago

nonane 15y ago
Anyone one on HN developing on Windows Phone and seeing similar results?
- kpao 15y ago
  We're porting our game (Infinite Flight) from Windows Phone to the iPhone and we're expecting much better returns on iOS. We will have more data when it comes out in a couple of months.
  - nonane 15y ago
    Would love to hear more about it. Also porting is interesting - we're in a position where we have a bunch of highly optimized, debugged C/C++ 'backend' code. Since native code isn't supported on Windows 7 Phone, we'll have to port our app by rewriting it all in C#. Unfortunately, it's not practical option for us at the moment.
    - eropple 15y ago
      That does tend to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for WP7. I'm surprised they haven't figured out a way to deal with that. I'm going the other way - my own code is all in C# (Mac and Linux with Mono, and MonoTouch and MonoDroid for the mobile platforms) so deployment to any of the above platforms becomes relatively easy. (I'm writing games, so I can hoist a lot more of the otherwise platform-specific logic into OpenGL, OpenGL|ES, and XNA, respectively--still requires building different GUIs based on desktop vs. phone but is a lot nicer than Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. iOS vs. Android.)
- Spearchucker 15y ago
  I wrote a GPS app (for offroad use) in December last year. It's a pretty poor app, and because it was crap I priced it high to discourage buyers. And now I'm getting mailed by Microsoft because they want to give me my money. It was quite amazing - I never tracked the app's performance, and ignored it, because I only wrote it to get familiar with the tools. I've not written for any other platform, so have no comparison to offer.
toyg 15y ago
I remember seeing similar posts... Oh yes, Angry Birds at one point was more profitable on Nokia N900 than on iPhone. Make of this what you will.
- mark_up 15y ago
  This was addressed in the article. If you have a killer app, and are able to market it well, then of course you'll make the most money in the biggest market. 99% of apps on the Apple App Store only make a handful of sales. These are the sort of apps that would likely make more money in a smaller marketplace like WP7.
cageface 15y ago
there is fierce competition and a LOT of noise in the App Store, making it extremely difficult to stand out With 500k+ apps in the store, what are the chances that a user is even going to see your app at this point? Without a ton of marketing muscle or the good graces of the kingmakers at Apple just hanging your shingle out in the App store doesn't get you anywhere.
- z92 15y ago
  I think a better comparison number is [grand total of all apps sold per day] / [total number of apps in store]. When the customer base is 20 times larger, even 10 fold competitors still keeps the market twice as attractive.
  - danmaz74 15y ago
    That would be true if sales went down linearly when you get farther from the top spot. But the reality is much closer to a "top X take (almost) all".
    - mark_up 15y ago
      The 1% are raking it in. #OccupyAppStore
- TillE 15y ago
  Sure. Like any other piece of software, you have to do your own marketing. Unless you hit the lottery, you can't rely on Apple doing it for you. Getting people to your app via searches on the app store can be part of your marketing, though. There are still some good niches to be found there with little serious competition.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand you have a strong possibility of being lost in the shuffle (unless you have VC funding). On the other hand, there are a lot more eyeballs that could find you. My own personal experience is that getting in early is huge. I was in the Chrome Web Store before it officially launched and always got a lot of traffic despite barely working on the app and it being designed for Chromebooks (used a feature only available on Chromebooks) and almost no one owning those. My second app in the store got much less traffic. I had similar experience on Android (perhaps it's a Google problem). I'm trying to get into the Windows 8 market early for the same reason.
robryan 15y ago
This makes sense as while the WP7 market is a lot smaller, a far greater percentage of people looking for Educational games are being exposed to it. Now I guess it all depends on how much competition there is on WP7, also being at the top stop gets you more sales which helps to keep you there. If you don't get some initial good sales to put you there results could be vastly different. A better comparison would be an app that hasn't got any help from top lists on either platform.
rbanffy 15y ago
I am quite sure that, for every company that claims WP7 is more profitable than iOS, there will be more than five companies saying otherwise. As was pointed out to me a couple weeks back, the plural of anecdote is not data. And this one isn't even a plural.
- illumen 15y ago
  They had had microsoft people helping them, including helping to code. Who knows what sort of other help they got from MS? An average developer may not get that help, which might make the difference between doing well or not.
  - bjg 15y ago
    The article states that the people merely worked at MS. It's a big company, we the reader have no idea which product group they work in or if it's even related to WP7. I feel like the content of your comment is misleading.
- rms 15y ago
  Yup, this is a blog post from a clear outlier.
n9com 15y ago
Without any sales numbers, this post is meaningless. You could have at least given an indication.
Rajiv_N 15y ago
I would like to know what the development time difference is between these platforms. Also, what is the WP7 SDK like? For a single developer this could be a good time to write WP7 apps. But iOS is so attractive because of its SDK and the wealth of third party libraries available for developers to leverage.
- bad_user 15y ago
  For a single developer this could be a good time to write WP7 apps Personally, I doubt that. In my circles I have a lot of non-technical and technical people. I don't live in Silicon Valley, or in the US, so the echo chamber that a lot of people from this community does not apply to me. I see a lot of iPhones and Android phones. Galaxy S and S2 were huge hits. Low-end Android phones were hits too, like LG Optimus One - great value for the price. I see my friends and acquaintances with these phones, like a friend of mine who's a taxi driver has a Galaxy S in his pocket. But I know NONE with a WinMo 7 phone. Its market share is completely abysmal. Now, this company may have had the first mover advantage. Cool for them - however, personally I want a smaller piece of a bigger pie. The reason for that being that this pie is growing, exponentially even. Competition may be fierce and you won't get rich over night, however the 700 million users that Facebook has will be nothing compared to the number of people carrying Androids in their pockets, 3 years from now. A lot of people have ridden the first wave, especially when it comes to Apple's App Store. However a bigger wave is coming and I don't want to invest the limited resources I have in Microsoft's me-too-me-too platform. Another problem is one of trust - WinMo 7 is the successor of WinMo 6, but it's a completely different platform. This is understandable, as WinMo 6 simply sucked and in my view it was the same story as with IExplorer 6 - they got something working, then they reinvested resources in the latest fad du-jour, leaving customers and developers disappointed, WinMo 7 being their latest attempt at preventing irrelevancy. I have no trust left for Microsoft to do the right thing in regards to its developers or customers, fucking with their learned knowledge all over again, or leaving them in the dust. I mean - they are discontinuing Silverlight for Christ's sake.
  - spqr 15y ago
    Nice anti-Microsoft diatribe. All of it is horseshit. I especially loved your taking of Silverlight rumors as fact.
asto 15y ago
First mover advantage.
bluekeybox 15y ago
Hint: if you develop primarily in Objective C and find the iPhone app market too crowded, make an iPad app.
10dpd 15y ago
So they make $5 per day on Windows Phone as opposed to $1 per day on iOS? This stat is meaningless without figures...
- kenjackson 15y ago
  They don't give figures, but they do give this info in a previous posting about their iPhone version: "Rankings We have reached the following top charts and have also been listed in 36 more countries around the world: US: Top 100 UK: Top 50 Australia: Top 50 Germany: Top 25 Austria: Top 25 Switzerland: Top 25 France: Top 25 Italy: Top 10 Spain: Nr. 1 Mexico: Top 10 Greece: Nr. 1 Canada: Top 50 Argentina: Top 10 Colombia: Top 10 Chile: Top 10 User Ratings Our paid versions have received 90+ reviews across all countries with an average of 4.5+" No raw sales numbers, but it seems fair to guess they've made more than $1 on the iPhone version. I'm actually surprised there aren't more people targeting the education market. On my iPad I tried to find good educational apps and I'm having a really hard time. It's probably one of the few app categories where I'd pay decent money for a good toddler+ app, and have only found a few worth a dime.
  - shimfish 15y ago
    Ha. That basically means they are selling nothing. You can get into the top 100 iPhone Games/Educational section with about 20 downloads in a day. But these are their peak figures. Their boast about being in the top 400 for 2/3 of the time is laughable. That basically means they sold 1 per day. As for the other countries, that's even less meaningful. You can shoot to the top of that category with 5 downloads. Basically, this was one unprofitable app on the iPhone. Making 5 times more on WP isn't so impressive.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      Actually what you're saying is even worse. You're basically saying that almost no one makes money on the iPhone. Unless you're Rovio or PopCap -- you're selling nothing. And given the fact that I already know a few independent WP7 devs who can make a living purely from WP7 apps makes me wonder if the iPhone app store really is the iPhone lottery for developers. This can end up actually turning into a really bad story for iPhone developers.
shimfish 15y ago
A lot of nonsense here. They claim to have been "featured by Apple". This was most probably just in the "What's Hot" section buried under 5 levels of clicks on the iTunes desktop app. The rankings they claim are actually pitifully small. Selling 5 times as much wouldn't be such a big deal. The apps themselves appear to be yet another bunch of spelling apps for young children. This has been done to death in the app store. Unless the app is spectacular, it's no shock that it didn't do so well. I have an app that apparently is doing far better than this in the young kids iPhone space. I didn't spend any money advertising it. However, it is something that hasn't been done 1000 times already by everyone else looking to cash in.
Freestyler_3 15y ago
It's good to be a early bird, because if it becomes successful you can say it was a good choice, and if it fails you at least tried.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
epo 15y ago
They are claiming 5 times more sales, so are they saying that Microsoft take the same cut as Apple? Also the app was language learning app for (presumably) the very young, how likely is that these youngsters would have (extended access to) an iPhone? I can easily imagine giving the kids a Windows phone as a play thing because you didn't care if it got damaged or not. So isn't piece this just saying putting your product in the right marketplace results in more sales than putting it into the wrong marketplace?

76 points by kenjackson 15y ago

nonane 15y ago

Anyone one on HN developing on Windows Phone and seeing similar results?

kpao 15y ago
We're porting our game (Infinite Flight) from Windows Phone to the iPhone and we're expecting much better returns on iOS. We will have more data when it comes out in a couple of months.
- nonane 15y ago
  Would love to hear more about it. Also porting is interesting - we're in a position where we have a bunch of highly optimized, debugged C/C++ 'backend' code. Since native code isn't supported on Windows 7 Phone, we'll have to port our app by rewriting it all in C#. Unfortunately, it's not practical option for us at the moment.
  - eropple 15y ago
    That does tend to be one of the biggest stumbling blocks for WP7. I'm surprised they haven't figured out a way to deal with that. I'm going the other way - my own code is all in C# (Mac and Linux with Mono, and MonoTouch and MonoDroid for the mobile platforms) so deployment to any of the above platforms becomes relatively easy. (I'm writing games, so I can hoist a lot more of the otherwise platform-specific logic into OpenGL, OpenGL|ES, and XNA, respectively--still requires building different GUIs based on desktop vs. phone but is a lot nicer than Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. iOS vs. Android.)
Spearchucker 15y ago
I wrote a GPS app (for offroad use) in December last year. It's a pretty poor app, and because it was crap I priced it high to discourage buyers. And now I'm getting mailed by Microsoft because they want to give me my money. It was quite amazing - I never tracked the app's performance, and ignored it, because I only wrote it to get familiar with the tools. I've not written for any other platform, so have no comparison to offer.

toyg 15y ago

I remember seeing similar posts... Oh yes, Angry Birds at one point was more profitable on Nokia N900 than on iPhone. Make of this what you will.

mark_up 15y ago
This was addressed in the article. If you have a killer app, and are able to market it well, then of course you'll make the most money in the biggest market. 99% of apps on the Apple App Store only make a handful of sales. These are the sort of apps that would likely make more money in a smaller marketplace like WP7.

cageface 15y ago

there is fierce competition and a LOT of noise in the App Store, making it extremely difficult to stand out With 500k+ apps in the store, what are the chances that a user is even going to see your app at this point? Without a ton of marketing muscle or the good graces of the kingmakers at Apple just hanging your shingle out in the App store doesn't get you anywhere.

z92 15y ago
I think a better comparison number is [grand total of all apps sold per day] / [total number of apps in store]. When the customer base is 20 times larger, even 10 fold competitors still keeps the market twice as attractive.
- danmaz74 15y ago
  That would be true if sales went down linearly when you get farther from the top spot. But the reality is much closer to a "top X take (almost) all".
  - mark_up 15y ago
    The 1% are raking it in. #OccupyAppStore
TillE 15y ago
Sure. Like any other piece of software, you have to do your own marketing. Unless you hit the lottery, you can't rely on Apple doing it for you. Getting people to your app via searches on the app store can be part of your marketing, though. There are still some good niches to be found there with little serious competition.
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand you have a strong possibility of being lost in the shuffle (unless you have VC funding). On the other hand, there are a lot more eyeballs that could find you. My own personal experience is that getting in early is huge. I was in the Chrome Web Store before it officially launched and always got a lot of traffic despite barely working on the app and it being designed for Chromebooks (used a feature only available on Chromebooks) and almost no one owning those. My second app in the store got much less traffic. I had similar experience on Android (perhaps it's a Google problem). I'm trying to get into the Windows 8 market early for the same reason.

robryan 15y ago

This makes sense as while the WP7 market is a lot smaller, a far greater percentage of people looking for Educational games are being exposed to it. Now I guess it all depends on how much competition there is on WP7, also being at the top stop gets you more sales which helps to keep you there. If you don't get some initial good sales to put you there results could be vastly different. A better comparison would be an app that hasn't got any help from top lists on either platform.

rbanffy 15y ago

I am quite sure that, for every company that claims WP7 is more profitable than iOS, there will be more than five companies saying otherwise. As was pointed out to me a couple weeks back, the plural of anecdote is not data. And this one isn't even a plural.

illumen 15y ago
They had had microsoft people helping them, including helping to code. Who knows what sort of other help they got from MS? An average developer may not get that help, which might make the difference between doing well or not.
- bjg 15y ago
  The article states that the people merely worked at MS. It's a big company, we the reader have no idea which product group they work in or if it's even related to WP7. I feel like the content of your comment is misleading.
rms 15y ago
Yup, this is a blog post from a clear outlier.

n9com 15y ago

Without any sales numbers, this post is meaningless. You could have at least given an indication.

Rajiv_N 15y ago

I would like to know what the development time difference is between these platforms. Also, what is the WP7 SDK like? For a single developer this could be a good time to write WP7 apps. But iOS is so attractive because of its SDK and the wealth of third party libraries available for developers to leverage.

bad_user 15y ago
For a single developer this could be a good time to write WP7 apps Personally, I doubt that. In my circles I have a lot of non-technical and technical people. I don't live in Silicon Valley, or in the US, so the echo chamber that a lot of people from this community does not apply to me. I see a lot of iPhones and Android phones. Galaxy S and S2 were huge hits. Low-end Android phones were hits too, like LG Optimus One - great value for the price. I see my friends and acquaintances with these phones, like a friend of mine who's a taxi driver has a Galaxy S in his pocket. But I know NONE with a WinMo 7 phone. Its market share is completely abysmal. Now, this company may have had the first mover advantage. Cool for them - however, personally I want a smaller piece of a bigger pie. The reason for that being that this pie is growing, exponentially even. Competition may be fierce and you won't get rich over night, however the 700 million users that Facebook has will be nothing compared to the number of people carrying Androids in their pockets, 3 years from now. A lot of people have ridden the first wave, especially when it comes to Apple's App Store. However a bigger wave is coming and I don't want to invest the limited resources I have in Microsoft's me-too-me-too platform. Another problem is one of trust - WinMo 7 is the successor of WinMo 6, but it's a completely different platform. This is understandable, as WinMo 6 simply sucked and in my view it was the same story as with IExplorer 6 - they got something working, then they reinvested resources in the latest fad du-jour, leaving customers and developers disappointed, WinMo 7 being their latest attempt at preventing irrelevancy. I have no trust left for Microsoft to do the right thing in regards to its developers or customers, fucking with their learned knowledge all over again, or leaving them in the dust. I mean - they are discontinuing Silverlight for Christ's sake.
- spqr 15y ago
  Nice anti-Microsoft diatribe. All of it is horseshit. I especially loved your taking of Silverlight rumors as fact.

asto 15y ago

First mover advantage.

bluekeybox 15y ago

Hint: if you develop primarily in Objective C and find the iPhone app market too crowded, make an iPad app.

10dpd 15y ago

So they make $5 per day on Windows Phone as opposed to $1 per day on iOS? This stat is meaningless without figures...

kenjackson 15y ago
They don't give figures, but they do give this info in a previous posting about their iPhone version: "Rankings We have reached the following top charts and have also been listed in 36 more countries around the world: US: Top 100 UK: Top 50 Australia: Top 50 Germany: Top 25 Austria: Top 25 Switzerland: Top 25 France: Top 25 Italy: Top 10 Spain: Nr. 1 Mexico: Top 10 Greece: Nr. 1 Canada: Top 50 Argentina: Top 10 Colombia: Top 10 Chile: Top 10 User Ratings Our paid versions have received 90+ reviews across all countries with an average of 4.5+" No raw sales numbers, but it seems fair to guess they've made more than $1 on the iPhone version. I'm actually surprised there aren't more people targeting the education market. On my iPad I tried to find good educational apps and I'm having a really hard time. It's probably one of the few app categories where I'd pay decent money for a good toddler+ app, and have only found a few worth a dime.
- shimfish 15y ago
  Ha. That basically means they are selling nothing. You can get into the top 100 iPhone Games/Educational section with about 20 downloads in a day. But these are their peak figures. Their boast about being in the top 400 for 2/3 of the time is laughable. That basically means they sold 1 per day. As for the other countries, that's even less meaningful. You can shoot to the top of that category with 5 downloads. Basically, this was one unprofitable app on the iPhone. Making 5 times more on WP isn't so impressive.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    Actually what you're saying is even worse. You're basically saying that almost no one makes money on the iPhone. Unless you're Rovio or PopCap -- you're selling nothing. And given the fact that I already know a few independent WP7 devs who can make a living purely from WP7 apps makes me wonder if the iPhone app store really is the iPhone lottery for developers. This can end up actually turning into a really bad story for iPhone developers.

shimfish 15y ago

A lot of nonsense here. They claim to have been "featured by Apple". This was most probably just in the "What's Hot" section buried under 5 levels of clicks on the iTunes desktop app. The rankings they claim are actually pitifully small. Selling 5 times as much wouldn't be such a big deal. The apps themselves appear to be yet another bunch of spelling apps for young children. This has been done to death in the app store. Unless the app is spectacular, it's no shock that it didn't do so well. I have an app that apparently is doing far better than this in the young kids iPhone space. I didn't spend any money advertising it. However, it is something that hasn't been done 1000 times already by everyone else looking to cash in.

Freestyler_3 15y ago

It's good to be a early bird, because if it becomes successful you can say it was a good choice, and if it fails you at least tried.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

epo 15y ago

They are claiming 5 times more sales, so are they saying that Microsoft take the same cut as Apple? Also the app was language learning app for (presumably) the very young, how likely is that these youngsters would have (extended access to) an iPhone? I can easily imagine giving the kids a Windows phone as a play thing because you didn't care if it got damaged or not. So isn't piece this just saying putting your product in the right marketplace results in more sales than putting it into the wrong marketplace?