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I find it difficult to parse all these financial factoids about what percentage of apps "break even" or "can support a standalone business" etc. How are these t

by SiVal 14y ago

I find it difficult to parse all these financial factoids about what percentage of apps "break even" or "can support a standalone business" etc. How are these things defined? Does break even include paying the programmer? How much? Or is the programmer working at his own expense but hoping to repay himself from future revenues? Okay, repay himself how much? Probably all of the revenues minus expenses, but what expenses and for how long before declaring that it did or didn't break even? I wish purveyors of this data would simply provide annual gross revenue per app for each percentile ("top-grossing 1%", next 1%, next 1%, etc.), and let ME decide whether that revenue would or wouldn't "break even" or be "sufficient to support a standalone business". Has anyone seen such data?

saurik 14y ago
Gross revenue is meaningless without taking into account those other factors: an app that took two weeks to develop and an hour a week from one developer to maintain that makes $1m in annual revenue would be amazing; but, if it took a year to develop and requires a team of five to maintain, then one would presume it is losing money (and a lot of it, possibly very rapidly). I can thereby understand asking for both sides, so you can do the subtraction yourself, but if I was going to see either the result of someone performing the subtraction or just one of the numbers being subtracted, I'd have to say only the former provides value; this is certainly true of you want to break them up into brackets: the top 1% by revenue might be losing money while the middle third are raking it in.
- SiVal 14y ago
  I would, of course, be happy to have a fully itemized accounting database, but the way it is, undefined "making money" or "breaking even" etc. doesn't give me anything at all that I can use. Having an undefined mishmash of revenues over an unspecified time (per year? since release? discounted cash flow anticipated forever?) minus who even knows what, and announcing just the result of comparing undefined values to undefined values, is not more informative than a simple top line gross revenue number. You're clearly correct that annual revenues per app without the costs it took to achieve those revenues is not all you would like to know. It's only one piece of relatively well-defined data, which you would have to supplement with your own estimates, based on looking at lists of popular apps and estimating what it would take to create them, of what it would take you to produce something similar. But having just the results of how often an undefined value exceeds another undefined value is not more information than one well-defined value; it is less. Now, of course, if they were to provide much clearer definitions of their terms ("breaking even", etc.), and give us some assurance that the developers who answered the questionnaires were quite clear on those definitions (not as certain as simply, "how many dollars per year does the store send to you for that app?), then we would both probably be happier with the data.

by SiVal 14y ago

saurik 14y ago

Gross revenue is meaningless without taking into account those other factors: an app that took two weeks to develop and an hour a week from one developer to maintain that makes $1m in annual revenue would be amazing; but, if it took a year to develop and requires a team of five to maintain, then one would presume it is losing money (and a lot of it, possibly very rapidly). I can thereby understand asking for both sides, so you can do the subtraction yourself, but if I was going to see either the result of someone performing the subtraction or just one of the numbers being subtracted, I'd have to say only the former provides value; this is certainly true of you want to break them up into brackets: the top 1% by revenue might be losing money while the middle third are raking it in.

SiVal 14y ago
I would, of course, be happy to have a fully itemized accounting database, but the way it is, undefined "making money" or "breaking even" etc. doesn't give me anything at all that I can use. Having an undefined mishmash of revenues over an unspecified time (per year? since release? discounted cash flow anticipated forever?) minus who even knows what, and announcing just the result of comparing undefined values to undefined values, is not more informative than a simple top line gross revenue number. You're clearly correct that annual revenues per app without the costs it took to achieve those revenues is not all you would like to know. It's only one piece of relatively well-defined data, which you would have to supplement with your own estimates, based on looking at lists of popular apps and estimating what it would take to create them, of what it would take you to produce something similar. But having just the results of how often an undefined value exceeds another undefined value is not more information than one well-defined value; it is less. Now, of course, if they were to provide much clearer definitions of their terms ("breaking even", etc.), and give us some assurance that the developers who answered the questionnaires were quite clear on those definitions (not as certain as simply, "how many dollars per year does the store send to you for that app?), then we would both probably be happier with the data.