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The developer also has the lowest amount of money in the game generally. Anyone can start a hardware company, but it takes a lot of money, time, etc to make mo
by MrEnigma 15y ago
The developer also has the lowest amount of money in the game generally. Anyone can start a hardware company, but it takes a lot of money, time, etc to make money like apple does on things. Apps probably have much much faster ROI.
$12 x 100 million devices is still a lot of money to be had.
- ChrisLTD 15y agoThat's an important point. The work Apple puts into making an iPhone is enormous. They do research, design, manufacturing coordination. They made the operating system, police the App Store, operate a content delivery store, manage licensing deals. The list goes on and on.
- orbitingpluto 15y agoConsider that there are 400k active apps on the Android Market. Apple is about the same. That's not a lot of money earned per app. Many developers haven't put a lot of money in, but they have put in a lot of time! If every app only took 1 developer 1 day to make, that's still ~1/4 minimum wage. Edit: I'm not suggesting min. wage for indy smartphone devs. I'm just noticing a discrepancy and strongly keeping in mind that the existence of hundreds of thousands of applications is used by Apple & Android marketing departments all the time.
- polemic 15y agoTrue, but not all developer days are created equally :D
- funkah 15y agoWell, maybe that's the market saying they don't really want or need your app. A tough lesson to learn, but there's no reason to assume that the world wants something just because you took the time to build it.
- orbitingpluto 15y agoWell that went unnecessarily ad hominem. A harder lesson to learn is that 250,000 users don't make you a lot of money.
- funkah 15y agoSorry, I didn't mean "you" "you", I meant "one" "you".
- orbitingpluto 15y agofunkah: I assumed. Please excuse the obtuse sense of humor. I was just trying to stress that a modicum of success writing apps doesn't necessarily pay out that well. (I've avoided some of the more distasteful privacy-agnostic and annoy-ware revenue streams however.)
- gawker 15y agoIt's not a lot of money earned per app but good apps have been able to achieve decent success. There's no reason why the hardware manufacturers should ensure every single developer that signs up makes a decent living. Make an app, market it well and you may well be rewarded.
- aiscott 15y agoYou can spend a lot of time digging a hole in the ground. Spending a lot of time on a project is not sufficient in and of itself to create wealth.
- dasil003 15y agoYes I don't understand what he was getting at by putting these numbers together. The prices and profit are controlled by markets, not by "fairness". The deal app developers sign up to is an easy-to-use platform with built-in payment and distribution infrastructure. If you don't like it you don't need to play ball, but many do because actually it's not a bad bet as an indie dev. Plus, even if you want to talk "fair", I'd say the cost of developing the iPhone is well more than 30 times the cost of developing the average app. Tim's assertion that smart phones "exist mostly to run apps" ignores that Apple supplies all the apps the average user needs out of the box. If he's angry that users are only buying 20 apps on average instead of 1000 apps, or that apps cost $0.99 instead of $50.00, well, neither of those things are Apple's fault.