Comments on: iPhones Devs Sanity-Check Analyst App-ocalypse

By: Freddie Rantanen

Freddie Rantanen — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 18:08:24 +0000

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By: Annelle Cederberg

Annelle Cederberg — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:18:05 +0000

informative

By: JL

JL — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:36:04 +0000

While the Top Paid and Top Free app listings have unfortunately encouraged ruthless price cutting as the way for developers to gain visibility in the listings, a glance at the Top Grossing list is somewhat encouraging in that the biggest money makers aren't the bargain basement $0.99 apps.

In the Top 10 Grossing, only Tap Tap Revenge 3 is $0.99 (An incredible bargain) and the second highest grossing app cost $89.99! If we exclude Navigon's MobileNavigator, the average selling price for the other 9 top grossing apps comes out to $4.21.

The one thing that does stand out among the Top 10 grossing is that it's full of brand names (Electronic Arts, Gameloft, CNN, Navigon and even Tapulous and Smule have become semi-recognizable brands in the app store). This isn't exactly shocking that users are more likely to trust a name they recognize than a indy developer.

What all this Newsweek article shows is that the App Store is not a gold mine where any person who thinks up a clever gimmick or works really hard on their passion app will make a fortune. It's a business like any other where you need business sense (predicting expected revenue and expected costs) a good product, some brand building and yes, luck to succeed.

By: Mark Sigal

Mark Sigal — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:18:20 +0000

On the one hand, it is humorous to listen to the woes of aspiring millionaires quibble in the Newsweek piece that: A) There is no free lunch: B) It takes time, resources and repeated success to build sustainable wealth in the App Store model; C) Apple makes the approval process "hard," despite the fact that 85K apps have gotten through in 18 mos.

On the other, there is a valid argument that Apple's push to drive volume via cheap comes at the potential cost of cultivating breakout, transformational apps that cost more, require a longer sales cycle and more evangelizing to find their beachhead.

Mind you, this is independent of the argument that Apple has democratized the process of achieving global distribution/reach, and monetizing same vis-a-vis its awesome platform.

The argument here is that a successful platform is defined by it's developers, and one reason that Microsoft, with an arguably inferior platform thrived for so long was that they could show an ecosystem of third party entrepreneurs getting VERY RICH off of it. This includes hardware OEMs, software developers, VARs, integrators, etc.

At some point, I believe that Apple will need to figure that one out, as the "born-on" date for the Demeter reference is pretty tired, yet there aren't obvious other breakout examples that come to mind, something that I blogged about in:

Is the iPhone Platform Destined to Disrupt the Packaged Software Industry? http://bit.ly/MZ7To

Check it out, if interested.

Mark