We have covered a plenty of mobile apps here on Vulcan Post: from music streaming apps, food delivery apps to taxi booking apps and even selfie apps.
Sometimes we wonder too, are there too many apps out there?
“There’s an app for that”
Ever since the first apps were introduced on smartphones in 2008, it has changed our lives forever. Fast forward to six years later in 2014, we’ve now a library of over one million apps. Whatever idea you can think of, it has probably already been done. Maybe not in your locale, but somebody elsewhere might have already done and executed it. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t.
Are these apps making any money?
Turns out, a majority of them might not be making any money at all. A new study done by VisionMobile which surveyed over 10,000 app developers revealed that there is now a “one percenter” group of developers earning most of the revenue from mobile and almost half of other developers make almost no income at all. The research report, called State of the Developer Nation Q3 2014 research report, investigates the latest trends and discusses platforms, languages, consumer vs. enterprise revenues, as well as developer tools and segments.
“The revenue distribution is so heavily skewed towards the top that just 1.6% of developers make multiples of the other 98.4% combined.” – VisionMobile
Here are some key points from the study:
- 1.6% of all developers have an app earning more than $500,000 per month.
- 88% of all developers take in only 11% of all app revenues.
- The majority of app businesses are not sustainable at current revenue levels.
- 24% of app developers make no money. 47% make less than $100 a month.
- 64% of Android app developers live below the app poverty line (<$500/ month).
- 50% of iOS app developers live below the app poverty line.
- 33% of developers make games.
- 40% of all downloads are games.
- 80% of store revenues are from games.
- 57% of games make less than $500 a month.
- 24% of app developers are independent developers designing as a side hobby.
- 23% of app developers are building a business and designing primarily for money.
- Only 16% of developers design apps on commission.
- 5% of developers are mobile startup entrepreneurs looking for venture capital investments.
Currently, there are over one million apps in the App Store and 1.3 million in Google Play.
I dont know about you, but I only have less than 40 apps on my mobile phone, and on average, I use less than 10 of them daily.
That leaves about 1 million more mobile apps which I have never (and probably would never) use.
VisionMobile, which conducted the study, concludes that “It seems extremely unlikely the market can sustain anything like the current level of developers for many more years.”
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