Very nice work Dave - one thing thats probably a more interesting question - can you make a living on that? Making many small apps?
Have also been toying with an idea to start doing apps for a while now and rather than do a major idea, instead do many small apps. Like for example if 1 app brings 100$ per month - then making 20 could make 2000$ and so on - but does 1 app make 100$ on average at all?
Don't take this the wrong way, but please don't contribute to the flood of low quality apps in the app store(s) that serves to drown even the better apps out there.
I know of a person (via one of the local game dev groups I was part of in a previous city I lived in) that would just crap out a "new" app every couple of days by making a super simple game (like infinite runner) and then get some artist in Romania to reskin it 4-5 different ways for $10/hour, then SEO the title for popular keywords (names like "Runner Game for boys and girls with cute bunny! Christmas edition!").
If you have an idea for a genuinely useful app or good game, something you would enjoy working on and can imagine others enjoy using, then go for it. But don't do shotgun-dev of shit app. We have enough of those already.
This is a kind of naïveté. Experimenting at scale to sell apps and find what might be a viable business is pretty much all the AppStore offers developers. The lack of custom storefronts or advertising/marketing options makes this the only viable way to try to make money.
Just waiting til you've made the perfect app and only launching that would mean you were one of the most brilliant people in tech, having complete knowledge of your target market even before release.
And relative to your comment about not releasing 'low quality apps', you might as well tell people not to release their blogs on wordpress because all these 'low quality' websites are just re skinned versions of the same blog engine.
The value of the blog is not the engine it's the text. If their text is a blatant rehashing of someone else's content with SEO on top then yes, I would tell them to not put up crap online & try to find something of value to do.
I'm not saying don't try to release MVPs quicky to test the market, I'm saying don't log in to itunes, check out the top 10 games and then make cheap generic rip offs with different skins and optimized titles. The summery of what I'm trying to say is: do something you care about, in one way or another. It would be better for your mental health and probably also more likely to be a viable business. Don't be the ios equivalent of spammers & spyware-laden internet explorer toolbars.
I should say that I've been making a living as an independent developer for almost 3 years now so I'm not just talking out of my ass here.
Yeah but that is business. That is exactly how a good business man approaches business. Study the market, determine what is successful, emulate them but either more efficiently, to a new niche, or marketed better.
I mean the whole point of business is to maximize the return on your investment.
Now making absolute garbage may not be the right solution, and making incredible product that takes 5 years to develop is probably not the right solution either... finding the right mix is key
To me the advice sounded more like "don't spam the app store with useless crap" rather than "don't start small and experiment". Maybe it wasn't worded that great, but I agree with the sentiment.
I'll try not taking it the wrong way even though you're assuming that I'd be making low quality apps :) even though you don't really know my level of experience.
I was talking about doing specific niche apps by limiting their feature-set, not their quality.
You're right, sorry & no offense meant. I was talking against a phenomenon I've (personally) encountered a couple of times in my professional circles, there are of course many worthy apps that can be developed quickly.
emm, have you even tried my apps/games? These are not "low quality apps", in fact some have been 5 star apps for months (now settling at 4 stars and above). The ones that have no rating simply have not got the exposure needed to be rated. I understand the reaction to shovelware, and totally agree with you, but I'd like to think my work isn't that.
I haven't tried any of your work & wasn't referring to you personally, it was aimed at something the comment above reminded me of that I've (more than once) seen attempted in my local tech circles.
Thanks for the clarification, yeah I totally understand. Its one of the bigger reasons its so hard to be seen on the app stores. The good comes with the bad I suppose.
In a word, no.
All that these apps have been doing (finically) is to pay for over heads.
The most important thing for me is getting back on my creative horse this year, You'd need to produce 3x that amount to bring in a small living unless one is some kind of hit. The more you do the more likely you'll have that hit, and thats really down to experience and your community knowing who you are. Thanks for taking a look!!
What kind of marketing efforts do you put into each app? I've been working on an iOS landing page generator and I would be curious to get your thoughts on it @DaveSapien: http://bit.ly/carp-hn.
That pretty cool! For small dev's like myself building a landing page is a pain but doable. What we dont have is spare cash so we end up putting something together ourselves. Our big challenge is discoverability, if you could add some cross promotion to your service you could address that painpoint, and make it worth the 4.99 per landing page (for someone like me anyway). ta.
Curious what you define as overheads. App Store membership fee? Paying yourself a minimum wage? Depreciation on your development Mac? Thanks for your insights!
There is a question of what constitutes a "small" app. For my purposes I'll assume small is - "can be made in a month @ half time". I know someone making a decent salary on about 8-10 of these types of apps. they vary in technical difficulty and a couple required coming out of pocket a small amount of money for rudimentary design work. But it's definitely doable.
Yeah, its definitely a weird calculation I know. Was just curious if an average "small" app makes anything at all or not...
My definition of small is even stricter than yours :) I'd say something that you'd be able to make in 2 weekends - like lottery/weather apps (of course both of these have been done to death - but in that general direction). I'm not expecting those to make anyone rich - just curious if something like that could make nothing, 10$ per month, 100$, etc...
Like just from appstore exposure and no marketing... but lets assume that all the apps would be decent looking and programmed to work nicely - just with a limited feature set... and maybe a mix of appstores if I develop them in something thats able to do cross-platform compiles...
I'd say that if you copied 10 common "small" - "utility" apps that have already been done to death and worked hard on moving them up in search rankings and whatnot you could make ~ 100$ a day.
Small games would be your best bet, though I have a feeling that the indie bubble is bursting. In saying that, ultra niche is the sure way to go for small projects.
It's super competitive, and small games (that are financially viable) probably take longer to make than you realize (Super Hexagon took more than half a year to make, I was play testing early versions of it).
Yeah totaly, I'm working on a game right now that has been in development for 8 over years! But again, some amazing stuff is built at game jams though most need at least a month or so of polishing.
Do you feel that making half as many things and spending twice the time on each app would lead to better sales? Presumably the extra time would allow for more content / polish / marketting before release?
Is this an average of all of your apps? Or a minimum per app?
I've also noticed that you started doing more iOS apps towards the end of the year. Is this because (as some people previously reported) iOS apps tend to generate a lot more sales currently? i.e. could you compare different stores in terms of the number of sales?
Yeah an average on Dave Sapien ltd. Me and the Giants (my other studio) is about the same again. The reason I was releasing more iOS apps towards the end of the year was simply todo with my development schedule. The painting apps took a lot more than you would assume.
Have also been toying with an idea to start doing apps for a while now and rather than do a major idea, instead do many small apps. Like for example if 1 app brings 100$ per month - then making 20 could make 2000$ and so on - but does 1 app make 100$ on average at all?