Maybe I just have low standards for success, but $220^H^H^H160/hour sounds pretty good to me. Also if it's sucessful on mac app store, a $2 version on iOS/android might be viable.
And for an app that just lets you selectively blur out bits of images. GIMP can do that in seconds, for free.
It's indicative of the state of the App Store that there are so many apps like this. The worst culprits - in my view - are 'distraction-free text editors'. I guess if the market is there for a $20 text editor that does nothing, then people are going to try to exploit it.
I seriously doubt you could design, develop, prep, submit app, and market for 30 hours and have anything that anyone would download for free, let alone pay $5 for. The sheer volume of users doesn't obviate the fact that there's a minimum level of quality for discoverability to kick in.
I don't want to get into specifics because I have abandoned their development and support a long time ago. The first one was a developer tool priced around $10, the second one was a more generic IT productivity tool priced around $5. They've both made around $10-15K over the years. In the end I had to abandon them because sales started to drop more and more every month and continued development didn't seem to stop that.
Right, this is the fate of many apps on the Mac App Store. Eventually you run out of people you are able to reach who are willing to purchase your app. Because you cannot charge for updates, this means that continued development and support becomes unsustainable at some point.
I'm curious how you haven't seen any miracle articles of the kids who just learn iOS programming in a week, spend a few hours on a game, and make serious cash. For the longest time those were coming out weekly, which always made my boss say "Why can't we do that?"
People are also forgetting that the time spent writing an app in your free time is "fun", or should be. I program in my free time for fun, getting paid after the fact is gravy. Getting paid $6600 for 30 hours of fun time (or so he says) is awesome.
Yeah, if you have no expectations at all of getting paid (like, say, Wozniak), a check is a very good surprise. However, since you are jumping through the hoops to get your app approved, you are expecting (or hoping) to get paid to some degree.
I can back up his claim.
I work for a large entertainment company that has a top 50 app, (in top grossing) and it consistently brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a week.
When it was at its highest, around 15, it was bringing in about 400-500k per week.
The article is a bad piece of journalism based on a single sample -- a trivial app that just happened to stay on the top for a short while due to momentum.
> Apps that stay at the top for weeks on end make lots of money -- up to several millions per year.
Paid Mac apps, no. The article is about the Mac App Store, not iOS. Even among iOS, however, the most successful apps are free ones with a viral incentive to do in-app purchases.
Most of the top apps have an external influence. 4 of the top 10 come out of Apple. Look at top games on Mac - most of them are major publishers. Even "independent" apps had a following outside of the Mac App Store, like 1Password.
I'm pretty sure Pixelmator, 1Password, Angry Birds, Call of Duty, GTA S.A., etc -- apps that are consistently on the MAS top ten make lotsa money.
Apps that stay there for a few days or so, because of initial momentum or some good review, don't -- but that's a matter of the algorithm favoring them.
>Most of the top apps have an external influence. 4 of the top 10 come out of Apple.
Actually in the current top 10 only one comes from Apple (Facetime). And it's still one until the top-40. That might be the case on my country's MAS though, but still.
>Look at top games on Mac - most of them are major publishers.
Sure, why wouldn't it be the case? They have the best products, more polished, and more marketing money (and tons of pre-existing fans for their game series).
But that's beside the point (the point being whether it pays well to be on the top of MAS or not).
Regarding MAS not making you rich for a couple weeks effort app like Redacted, that just chanced to be on top for a few days and didn't have a stable top path (and the respective big sales), that's obvious. No known market will do that.
The bit I found most interesting about this whole Redacted app story, but haven't seen mentioned anywhere, is that the app also happened to be at #1 on Product Hunt for a good portion of that same day.
The thing I've found most interesting is this guy has found success by whining about how little he's selling. This has to be the third or fourth separate news source where I've seen this story run.
I think that's an unfair characterization of the situation. Sam hasn't mentioned it since it happened. News outlets keep picking up the story because it's about Apple (hot topic), app stores (hot topic), and what most people would assume would be a source of obscene wealth (trending at the top of the chart).
But, it's a man bites dog story! The outcome defies typical logic, and so news websites keep running the story.
If a story is in syndication and "evergreen" in nature it could run on it's own for quite some time. [1]
Doing a google search for this particular article it's clear what has happened (although the results are mainly it appears around May 2015)
[1] I was featured in a story in the late 90's and could tell every time it hit a new town newspaper because orders would predictably come in from the new area. It all started with a story from the local paper and that was then distributed (Knight Ridder iirc) for any paper anywhere in the US to pick up. In this particular case it did translate into real dollars as well as many years of repeat business.
On the other hand, the Mac App store isn't as cluttered, and Mac users are much more willing to pay $19.99 or $29.99 for a Mac App. Who would pay $29.99 for an iPhone App?
In what sense? The question is would anyone pay $20 for an iPhone app and I'd say no, unless there's external value. (Though I did pay $49 or whatever back in the day for the TomTom app when it was the first GPS app available on the iPhone)
The question was "Who would pay $29.99 for an iPhone App?" I gave an example of a popular one, as do you with TomTom. Disqualifying it because it's most useful coupled with a desktop version is the goalpost move.
I think it's taking a long time for the Mac App Store to catch on-but I think it'll get there. When I find an app I want to buy I've gotten in the habit of checking the MAS to see if I can buy it there-I'd rather buy through the MAS and let Apple handle my credit card details and tracking of purchased software.
Users are slow to change, and buying your software through a portal on your computer is a big change.
As long as Apple continues to take 30% I'm not so sure thats true. Mobile devs put up with it because it's that or nothing but as long as Apple allows you to side load programs on Mac I can't imagine it'll ever make economic sense.
It's not just a matter of time and resistance to change. Two things that would need to change because they break the expectations of how software has always worked:
In many cases, you can't go back and forth (bought on website, bought v. 2 on MAS), so you're expecting people to understand that it's a "different" version - imagine if you had to explain that because you bought the Best Buy XBox One, you can't play games purchased at Wal-Mart.
2) Sandboxing. If users are going to pay anything near full price for something they expect full functionality.
Due to these headaches, publishers are abandoning the App Store:
I tend to do the opposite. If I find something on the MAS, I usually check for a direct purchase so that the developer gets that additional 30%, I'm eligible for upgrade pricing, and I don't have to wait a week for bug fix updates.
Anyone else reluctant to buy through the Mac App store because of the perceived lack of uptake? For example, I've been a longtime owner of a Transmit license...it's worked for years now. If I don't keep up with OS X releases, I can still download past binaries and use the key (within a limit...for example, Transmit 3 owners were required to upgrade to 4.x). But what if the developer decides that it's not worth maintaining the binary on Transmit? Do you get a license key for the App store purchase? From my perception, once you buy into the App store, you're bound to its limited upgrade routine. This has bitten me plenty of times on iOS, where the developer doesn't feel like keeping up with iOS upgrades, leaving you with broken apps with no ability to get them working again. I'm not talking about fly-by-night developers, but AAA developers like Capcom.
Other publishers have done the same thing. (with regard to upgrade pricing, usually, but I'd assume a similar approach to avoid backlash if they left the MAS) However, your concern still stands, as not everyone will do that.
nah, I figure it's not going anywhere, and a lot of the software I bought using homegrown licensing schemes I ended up not using, since it's just too much of a pain in the ass to try to hunt up the licenses and restore everything on a new computer.
edit: i do wish apple would relax the sandbox strictness a bit and other editor review criteria so it was a more attractive alternative to self-publishing.
I think Apple just needs to review their policy and add another entitlement "Entire Current User Folder ~/" to allow apps that traditionally cannot be sandboxed. I am sure they want us to re-imagine a way for FTP apps to work, but I don't want to change my workflow. I want to be able to browse any folder on my Mac on the left pane. So I won't buy the Mac App Store version. I fully agree with Panic and why they bailed out.
The Mac App Store is my main revenue source. I released my iOS app in November 2014. The revenue from it wasn't worth mentioning separately in last year's report.
This year, the revenue from iOS is around 10% of the Mac app.
Great, you're #8 on the App Store for an app that allows you to blur photos... you're so excited that you're going to get rich... Leaves me thinking: Who cares what rank you are on the App Store, making an app that does basically very little (though useful) should NOT make you rich.
I just think of something like Monument Valley - not a throwaway - tons of work - and it DID make them rich. Rightfully so. I guess I'd like to see at least SOME mention of that aspect of it.
Additionally, App Annie ranking is not the same as actual Apple App Store ranking. One should consider the motivation and incentives for AA to hand you a positive rank using methods unknown.
It's not that you should get rich from such an investment. It's that basically no one is getting rich from the Mac App Store. The desktop app store is a failure in many respects. It did not take off the same way mobile app stores have.
They didn't even make 10x their investment. There is a strong argument to made that a 10x project is the minimum you need just to have a sustainable company. Sustainable! That's a long, long way from rich. http://www.lostgarden.com/2015/04/minimum-sustainable-succes...
I've read the second article and I think you should take it with a grain of salt. I don't want to elaborate much but I think it's targeted at the "quantity developers" which pump out low to mid quality games, hoping for a hit. On the other end of the spectrum you have quality developers like ustwo who don't need to finance 9 unsucessful games. Of course in reality it's much more complex than that but I don't think that "you need to make 10x your investment" is a hard rule to measure success.
That doesn't contradict my point that ustwo might not need to make ten times more money than they spent developing the game to run the company (and to be considered succesful).
I was specifically referring to the statement "and it DID make them rich". That statement I think is provably false. Depending on how one defines rich of course.
There are many ways to define success. ustwo is a 300+ person design company. Their mobile games could lose money but still be considered a success.
Its about exposure. A lot of people on iOS are using the app store not so much for Mac. In fact from some of my sources I have been told that a lot of people will only have the apps that come with the Mac when they buy it and never actually explore apps.
Notably, this article fails to mention that this is for only the graphics chart, and the selection of graphics apps fairly limited. Outside of Serif Labs, Bohemian Coding and Pixelmator, most of the apps are fairly one-note like Redacted. I don't think desktop users are of the same mindset for one-off applications outside of small utilities like SnapRuler or Colorsnapper.
I've been hovering around the top 30 in the Graphics category with anywhere between 1-5 sales/day of the $0.99 app Quick Resizer[1]. It's not that hard in certain categories.
Hey, he worked on this app for a whole 30 hours. That's like 3/4 of a work week!
In all seriousness, when you figure it out, that's about $15/hr. I think a number of entrepreneurs would give their right arm to make that kind of money right at launch. And when you consider that he's probably going to be selling at least a few more copies of this, the money he'll make off of his time investment will grow.
In any event, I hope he didn't quit his day job to make a photo-blurring utility.
This explains why they merged iOS dev accounts and Mac accounts at WWDC. I wonder if this will help - I've been an iOS dev for a while and have always been curious to run some open source OS X apps like mpv on my Mac but was restricted.
You could always run your own apps (and any random download) on OS X without paying for a developer account. The only thing paying gets you, is access to prerelease software and the Mac App Store.
As a user, I'm glad it's there as an easy updating mechanism for Apple apps and a store for handy utility apps, but there's not much of a place for a centralized app store on the desktop. Steam poaches the most lucrative category and makers of prominent professional apps don't need any help with digital distribution... what's left? I'd imagine that this hollowing out makes it advantageous for software that might benefit from an app store (say, a $50 nichey app) to avoid it, conditioning/encouraging users to use Google and letting them keep all of the profit.
I could hypothesize about ways for Apple to turn the ship around... but I doubt they care. Apple's happy to have something conceptually coherent with iOS - an Apple Store employee can show a college freshman to "just update apps like on your iPhone". They decided long ago not to chase gaming. It's a pretty updating app.
I couldn't agree less. The MacOS app store has made it so much easier for me as a user. Apple might not be perfect, but to compare them to Steam? Just last week I had a problem with a Steam app and getting it resolved was farcical. Not to mention that literally every other time I launch Steam, it fails to see the network (even though all my other network apps are working just fine), and I have to quit and restart it. And when it does restart, just as I'm about to click "Play" on a game, a huge honking ad pops up in front of it. And never once has the ad been of any interest to me. Such a horrible user experience.
At this point I will avoid buying any more games from Steam if possible and just get them from the app store because it's so much easier and just works.
Back when I sold my own software, getting it noticed was nearly impossible. There were about 10 different websites you could submit it to that had lists of new apps (Version Tracker, Download.com, etc.), and eventually they all got more and more spammy until the point where users just stopped using them altogether. Something like an app store would have been a godsend!
I wish games would move from Steam to the App Store, but it's not gonna happen. Valve has way more skin in that game and Apple have repeatedly shown that they're not going to compete over a medium dominated by expensive exclusive hits - as we watch Sony and Microsoft fight eachother into irrelevancy, this looks like a wiser and wiser strategy. They'll take their iOS game monopoly, but that's it.
The shareware spam site days are long gone. Numerous companies (including Apple) have been working to make checkout easy to implement on your own website. It's easier than ever to make and distribute a demo video/ad. It's easier than ever to target users (Google, Facebook). It's cheaper and easier than ever to make a simple product site. For a simple app, that might constitute a crippling amount of overhead, but if you anticipate making more than $10,000 in revenue (and thus risk sacrificing $3,000 to the Apple cut), it's probably worth investing a few hours in.
I have been lucky and is doing fairly well with Ghostnote on the mac app store. My product is also lucky to be the only one of it's kind as far as I am aware, which means no competitor and plenty of room to grow it.
However I learned the hard way how dysfunctional the Mac App Store is mainly because Apple ignore it compared to the iOs app store and because their Sandboxing is so opaque it's hindering a lot of good innovation resulting in a lot of apps fighting for the same space.
I was top 10 in paid apps for a while and top 5 in productivity apps. On iOS it would normally be pretty good but that meant nothing for my mac sales as such.
I realized that the mac app store is purely a distribution channel. It's my product but it's their store and so I am now thinking about them as a Wall Mart with no specific importance as such.
I found Google ranking to be much more important plus the ability to sell your product a lot of other places.
And so this week we are going to start selling directly from the website with a 14 day trial. We are using paddle.com for that an amazingly good service.
I am planning to do a writeup about all this as soon as I have some more numbers.
Also as a side note. I would like to see Apple undergo the same scrutiny that we treat our politicians with. When you say you create so and so many jobs you really need to be talking actual jobs that people can live off for that to have any meaning.
Mobile purchasing is ruled by iOS in the states, at least. Desktop purchasing, especially in regards to productivity, is ruled by Windows. Those fancy macs you see everywhere are little more than dedicated facebook machines. Those people are interested in your product, generally. Or if they are, it'll be for their work computer and paid for by the IT department. Do you have a windows version and a relationship with a VAR or two and enterprise friendly pricing/terms?
I don't see how Apple can help you. You're selling running shoes to people in wheelchairs. Find where the runners are.
>Those fancy macs you see everywhere are little more than dedicated facebook machines
People have been saying things like that about apple since forever, yet even NextStep was able to maintain a viable community of full time software developers and companies that exclusively published for the platform. Some of them are still around. Just look at OmniGroup. Do you think they're likely to be doing better nowaday, or worse?
The fact is the Mac has always done well as a third party software platform because Mac owners have always been more willing to pay for high quality software than PC owners. It's just that the OSX App Store has never really taken off as a distribution channel for that software.
As someone who has used a Mac (vs. Windows) box as a working machine for as long as I've had a choice in the matter, this is abject nonsense. Yes, Windows is still a huge presence in the software industry. But denying that people do serious work on Macs is just plain trolling.
If we're going to throw around anecdata, virtually everyone I know who uses a computer to work on these days uses a Mac. This is a vast turnaround from just a few years back, when Windows was virtually compulsory. For much longer than that, it's been University Student => Mac laptop, only rarely Windows. When I meet with folks from Very Big(tm) software companies, they invariably have Macs.
There are definitely domains that are Windows strongholds. AFAICT, none of the major CAD/CAM suites run on OS X (e.g. Solidworks, Pro/E, Geomagic (nee Alibre) Design, etc.) Stuff like major site planning software (e.g. that keeps big airports running) is virtually all Windows.
For all that, it's easy to miss that Mac has for a very long time been on a user-driven vs. enterprise-mandated upwards trajectory. This seems similar to the forces that pushed acceptance of iOS (and Android) into the enterprise: where user demand ultimately broke the stranglehold that the entrenched, enterprise-friendly solutions had. (I'm looking at you, Blackberry.)
Throwing in some data here,according to stackoverflow Mac is en pair with Linux,but both still behind windows. Anyway seeing the "normal" desktop marketshare on desktop,both Mac and Linux are way more common in the developers world. http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015
My advice is that you think about the app store as a distribution channel and use something like Paddle to sell online so you aren't only relying on the mac app store.
You should post back tomorrow how high you climb based on this post. I never heard of Ghostnote, but I just bought it after watching your video online.
Thank you so much and I appreciate it. Litteraly in the process of submitting update for app store review. So a bunch of new features and improvements coming your way.
>> "I realized that the mac app store is purely a distribution channel. It's my product but it's their store and so I am now thinking about them as a Wall Mart with no specific importance as such."
Totally agree - the MAS needs to be seen as a single distribution channel. I think the broader problem is that devs rely solely on the Mac App Store to drive sales for them, which is a risky approach. There are a bunch of different ways to drive app sales; it's just a matter of putting in the work.
Glad to have you on board with Ghostnote, and looking forward to that write-up too! :-)
1) It talks about an app that reached #8 in "Top Paid". The more interesting list would be "Top Grossing"
2) It talks about a trivial app that was created with very little effort. While gimmick apps might work on iOS, people prefer to buy actually useful software on the Mac.
The title is still somewhat true: It's unlikely you will become very rich by selling Mac Apps. But you can make a decent living; I currently make around 6000€/month (gross revenue) from two Mac Apps.
I don't think it's a mistake as my guess is he is comparing with with the iOS app store where this would mean fairly certain success.
I agree with the trivial app comment but I have a unique app which is doing pretty well. However compared to the iOS store it's not potentially self sustaining to be in the top once you get there.
One of your apps is to view Access DB on Macs. I'd have never guessed in a million years that people are still using Access, and that it is possible to build a business on top of it. Goes to show that all these rankings etc don't matter as much as we are led to believe.
Access is a pretty handy desktop analysis tool for running ad-hoc queries against linked tables, etc.
You do see it used quite frequently in enterprise situations where desktop users have outgrown Excel but aren't quite ready to deal with a server-based database.
Filemaker Pro is still hanging around too, for what it's worth.
We do data migrations for our SaaS offering. Most of our competitors use Access as the database.
When I go to migrate data it's very convenient to pull up an Access viewer on OSX to get a feel for the data structure so I can inform the customer on what will be migrated. Saves the minute it takes to boot up a Windows VM (and pay monthly for Access 365).
deliver their developers $10 billion in annual revenue... Apple, which declined to comment for this story, said in January that annual revenue from its mobile apps rose 50 percent last year and helped create 627,000 U.S. jobs.
That distills down to about $15,000 per US job if the $10 billion doesn't go anywhere else in the world and before business expenses such as the $99.00 developer fee.
I had a video editing app in the Mac App store since the MAS launched. It made high five figures for the first two years and then trailed off, mostly due to me neglecting it for more lucrative (and time consuming) consulting work. Also, it was heavily based on the deprecated QuickTime API, so it had a definite shelf life and upgrading it for each new iteration of OS X was fraught with all sorts of woes. Not to mention being trapped in 32-bits due to QuickTime being a 32-bit only framework (not QTKit).
But, in its hey day, it did really well. It even beat iMovie for a few weeks. Though now I am sitting here almost five years later and I have no idea who my customers are, beyond the handful that went out of their way to contact me.
I had some down time this past spring, so I rewrote the entire thing from the ground up using AVFoundation. I haven't launched this new version yet because I'm waiting to finish the iOS version to launch both within the same time frame. However, I won't be putting the OS X version on the Mac App Store for a few reasons:
- I want to know who my customers are
- I want to be able to contact my customers
- Sandboxing restrictions are workable, but not a good customer experience imho.
- Lack of paid upgrades isn't viable for an app not everyone needs
- MAS seems way neglected
So now I'm going to be going with Paddle (http://paddle.com) since it sort of replicates that experience really well and the guys there are super responsive. Maybe I'll change my mind down the road, but not likely.
Every app is a special case, yes. I was just saying that the numbers in the article are not real. Redacted (the app) didn't stay in the top grossing rank enough. It just climbed and fell.
See, some time ago (feels like ages now), I contacted him to see what would it take to add Chicken Scheme to the list of docsets. His response was quick and helpful.
My company got "bought" and I suddenly had zero free time to follow up. But that boosted my respect for Dash considerably. A assume other people will have similar experiences. I've recommended it to every single developer with Macs that I've met.
Now that I got reminded of it, let's see what I can do about that docset...
I appreciate your transparency about your business model/data, amazing functionality and regular updates of Dash.app, no-bullshit attitude over maintenance of official docsets, and your involvement in the community.
Kudos all around and, while it ain't $2-4k, I hope you appreciate my sincere 'thanks' today.
I'd just like to echo this. I'm a (very) happy Dash buyer, and encourage any developers reading this on OS X to give Dash a look. It's one of those tools that you don't always need, but when you need it, you really need it. Oh, and it integrates quite nicely with Alfred and Sublime Text :) Kudos to 'kapeli for building some very useful, usable software.
Off topic, but I never knew that Dash existed. I frequently look up APIs through google, which always involves a few clicks, and Dash is going to make my life so much better! As I went down through the API list, I was amazed how many times I thought, 'adding that will save me some google searches'. I just bought a copy, thanks!
Plus with all the different integrations it has, it's really indispensable. I use the Alfred integration most of the time, since it's global. And I even got it on my phone, just to see what that's like. It's pretty nifty all-around.
The point is that being in the top doesn't mean what it means on iOS. On iOS you will be able to stay in the top purely by being in the top because people use the app store much more frequently.
On the Mac app store you being in the top is more a product of a lot of other things you do.
If you hit a nerve just like you did and I to some degree did you will do well even if you aren't in the top of the app store.
At least that's how I understood it, but perhaps I am putting too much of my own bias into it.
Not sure how it is on iOS, but I'd assume your app has to deserve to some extent to be in the top. If you're in the top because of a fluke (e.g. you got featured in some blog post), you'll fall as soon as the hype fades. No idea really, the most "high-ranked" I've been on iOS was around rank 80 Top Grossing in the Productivity category, which I lost as soon as the launch hype faded.
On iOS you are much more likely to stay in the top if you first get there. I.e. it has it's own mechanics internally and externally because more people visit the iOS app store.
Also much more sites are looking at the top in the app store and so your exposure for getting there is many many times more.
Further more much more iOS apps are inherently social so that helps too.
Did you simply release that app and customers come after?
Or did you have to pay a certain amount to acquire customers (i.e. paid advertising)?
Or did you acquire customers some other way?
No marketing really. At the beginning, almost all users came from the Mac App Store.
I've tried different marketing things along the way, like sponsored posts or Google Adwords. Probably spent around $500 in total on marketing during the lifetime of the app. None had a meaningful effect so I kind of stopped trying.
I mostly focus on engaging my users as much as I can and trying to make them happy, so that they will recommend Dash to others.
Thank you for answering. And wow, amazing results from using the default "marketing" you get with the Mac App Store (especially given the difficulties that so many others have reported).
I second the thanks for divulging your numbers...always great to see what's behind the veil here. Perhaps you should contact the OP's author and see if they'll write a followup about you.
And you shouldn't be shy about direct-linking your app (as well as the blog post)...I didn't know about it until now but it looks right up my alley. Thanks!
Yeah, but you're forgetting that's because Dash is awesome. I mean, it's really quite a useful app and I feel like it belongs in the top 10 for a very good reason, rather than the vast majority of apps.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 199 ms ] threadThat seems to be a low ceiling on success, no?
It's indicative of the state of the App Store that there are so many apps like this. The worst culprits - in my view - are 'distraction-free text editors'. I guess if the market is there for a $20 text editor that does nothing, then people are going to try to exploit it.
> I have abandoned their development and support a long time ago. > sales started to drop more and more every month and continued development
So there were obvious support and continued development costs, so I expect that the true hours you'd add to the ROI calculation are well more than 30.
> I have abandoned their development and support a long time ago. > sales started to drop more and more every month and continued development
So there were obvious support and continued development costs, so I expect that the true hours you'd add to the ROI calculation are well more than 30.
I can spend almost no time on an iOS app and make myself rich. Even kids can do it.
According to the hype. So it must be true.
Apps that stay at the top for weeks on end make lots of money -- up to several millions per year.
As for the App Store, just like ANY OTHER marketplace, it won't make you rich in itself, just for appearing there and "putting the work"...
The article claims the Mac App Store sales is measured in thousands for the top apps. Care to point to your sources which claim three magnitudes more?
Paid Mac apps, no. The article is about the Mac App Store, not iOS. Even among iOS, however, the most successful apps are free ones with a viral incentive to do in-app purchases.
Most of the top apps have an external influence. 4 of the top 10 come out of Apple. Look at top games on Mac - most of them are major publishers. Even "independent" apps had a following outside of the Mac App Store, like 1Password.
Citation needed.
I'm pretty sure Pixelmator, 1Password, Angry Birds, Call of Duty, GTA S.A., etc -- apps that are consistently on the MAS top ten make lotsa money.
Apps that stay there for a few days or so, because of initial momentum or some good review, don't -- but that's a matter of the algorithm favoring them.
>Most of the top apps have an external influence. 4 of the top 10 come out of Apple.
Actually in the current top 10 only one comes from Apple (Facetime). And it's still one until the top-40. That might be the case on my country's MAS though, but still.
>Look at top games on Mac - most of them are major publishers.
Sure, why wouldn't it be the case? They have the best products, more polished, and more marketing money (and tons of pre-existing fans for their game series).
But that's beside the point (the point being whether it pays well to be on the top of MAS or not).
Regarding MAS not making you rich for a couple weeks effort app like Redacted, that just chanced to be on top for a few days and didn't have a stable top path (and the respective big sales), that's obvious. No known market will do that.
But, it's a man bites dog story! The outcome defies typical logic, and so news websites keep running the story.
If a story is in syndication and "evergreen" in nature it could run on it's own for quite some time. [1]
Doing a google search for this particular article it's clear what has happened (although the results are mainly it appears around May 2015)
[1] I was featured in a story in the late 90's and could tell every time it hit a new town newspaper because orders would predictably come in from the new area. It all started with a story from the local paper and that was then distributed (Knight Ridder iirc) for any paper anywhere in the US to pick up. In this particular case it did translate into real dollars as well as many years of repeat business.
- download desktop trial
- buy iOS app
- begin to like the combination
- buy desktop app
Users are slow to change, and buying your software through a portal on your computer is a big change.
1) Upgrade pricing. At best you'll get convoluted instructions on how you can obtain an upgraded version: http://www.barebones.com/store/bbedit_MAS_upgrade.html https://support.omnigroup.com/omnifocus-2-upgrades/
In many cases, you can't go back and forth (bought on website, bought v. 2 on MAS), so you're expecting people to understand that it's a "different" version - imagine if you had to explain that because you bought the Best Buy XBox One, you can't play games purchased at Wal-Mart.
2) Sandboxing. If users are going to pay anything near full price for something they expect full functionality.
Due to these headaches, publishers are abandoning the App Store:
http://www.panic.com/blog/coda-2-5-and-the-mac-app-store/
Personally I wish the MAS was a better solution for the reasons you described (I have purchased a good amount of software there)
http://www.panic.com/blog/introducing-coda-2-5/
Other publishers have done the same thing. (with regard to upgrade pricing, usually, but I'd assume a similar approach to avoid backlash if they left the MAS) However, your concern still stands, as not everyone will do that.
edit: i do wish apple would relax the sandbox strictness a bit and other editor review criteria so it was a more attractive alternative to self-publishing.
A high profile example of that is: https://blog.sourcetreeapp.com/2012/02/16/abandoning-the-mac...
This year, the revenue from iOS is around 10% of the Mac app.
I just think of something like Monument Valley - not a throwaway - tons of work - and it DID make them rich. Rightfully so. I guess I'd like to see at least SOME mention of that aspect of it.
As for Monument Valley, that's a pretty poor example. They invested 1.5m and made 5.8m. For a core team of 8 people it's not fuck you money. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/527b69fbe4b0febeee4fc...
They didn't even make 10x their investment. There is a strong argument to made that a 10x project is the minimum you need just to have a sustainable company. Sustainable! That's a long, long way from rich. http://www.lostgarden.com/2015/04/minimum-sustainable-succes...
There are many ways to define success. ustwo is a 300+ person design company. Their mobile games could lose money but still be considered a success.
"One Mac app developer made it up to No. 8 with just 59 downloads"
If you make it to number 8 with so few downloads, there probably isn't much of a market.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-resizer/id498486288?mt...
In all seriousness, when you figure it out, that's about $15/hr. I think a number of entrepreneurs would give their right arm to make that kind of money right at launch. And when you consider that he's probably going to be selling at least a few more copies of this, the money he'll make off of his time investment will grow.
In any event, I hope he didn't quit his day job to make a photo-blurring utility.
I could hypothesize about ways for Apple to turn the ship around... but I doubt they care. Apple's happy to have something conceptually coherent with iOS - an Apple Store employee can show a college freshman to "just update apps like on your iPhone". They decided long ago not to chase gaming. It's a pretty updating app.
At this point I will avoid buying any more games from Steam if possible and just get them from the app store because it's so much easier and just works.
Back when I sold my own software, getting it noticed was nearly impossible. There were about 10 different websites you could submit it to that had lists of new apps (Version Tracker, Download.com, etc.), and eventually they all got more and more spammy until the point where users just stopped using them altogether. Something like an app store would have been a godsend!
The shareware spam site days are long gone. Numerous companies (including Apple) have been working to make checkout easy to implement on your own website. It's easier than ever to make and distribute a demo video/ad. It's easier than ever to target users (Google, Facebook). It's cheaper and easier than ever to make a simple product site. For a simple app, that might constitute a crippling amount of overhead, but if you anticipate making more than $10,000 in revenue (and thus risk sacrificing $3,000 to the Apple cut), it's probably worth investing a few hours in.
However I learned the hard way how dysfunctional the Mac App Store is mainly because Apple ignore it compared to the iOs app store and because their Sandboxing is so opaque it's hindering a lot of good innovation resulting in a lot of apps fighting for the same space.
I was top 10 in paid apps for a while and top 5 in productivity apps. On iOS it would normally be pretty good but that meant nothing for my mac sales as such.
I realized that the mac app store is purely a distribution channel. It's my product but it's their store and so I am now thinking about them as a Wall Mart with no specific importance as such.
I found Google ranking to be much more important plus the ability to sell your product a lot of other places.
And so this week we are going to start selling directly from the website with a 14 day trial. We are using paddle.com for that an amazingly good service.
I am planning to do a writeup about all this as soon as I have some more numbers.
Also as a side note. I would like to see Apple undergo the same scrutiny that we treat our politicians with. When you say you create so and so many jobs you really need to be talking actual jobs that people can live off for that to have any meaning.
Mobile purchasing is ruled by iOS in the states, at least. Desktop purchasing, especially in regards to productivity, is ruled by Windows. Those fancy macs you see everywhere are little more than dedicated facebook machines. Those people are interested in your product, generally. Or if they are, it'll be for their work computer and paid for by the IT department. Do you have a windows version and a relationship with a VAR or two and enterprise friendly pricing/terms?
I don't see how Apple can help you. You're selling running shoes to people in wheelchairs. Find where the runners are.
People have been saying things like that about apple since forever, yet even NextStep was able to maintain a viable community of full time software developers and companies that exclusively published for the platform. Some of them are still around. Just look at OmniGroup. Do you think they're likely to be doing better nowaday, or worse?
The fact is the Mac has always done well as a third party software platform because Mac owners have always been more willing to pay for high quality software than PC owners. It's just that the OSX App Store has never really taken off as a distribution channel for that software.
No more than any other Windows machine.
If we're going to throw around anecdata, virtually everyone I know who uses a computer to work on these days uses a Mac. This is a vast turnaround from just a few years back, when Windows was virtually compulsory. For much longer than that, it's been University Student => Mac laptop, only rarely Windows. When I meet with folks from Very Big(tm) software companies, they invariably have Macs.
There are definitely domains that are Windows strongholds. AFAICT, none of the major CAD/CAM suites run on OS X (e.g. Solidworks, Pro/E, Geomagic (nee Alibre) Design, etc.) Stuff like major site planning software (e.g. that keeps big airports running) is virtually all Windows.
For all that, it's easy to miss that Mac has for a very long time been on a user-driven vs. enterprise-mandated upwards trajectory. This seems similar to the forces that pushed acceptance of iOS (and Android) into the enterprise: where user demand ultimately broke the stranglehold that the entrenched, enterprise-friendly solutions had. (I'm looking at you, Blackberry.)
Didn't the sandbox give you trouble, though? I thought it wouldn't be possible for a sandboxed app to get the user's context like that.
We basically had to white label the apps we want document support for and we have to have the user to install document support manually too.
But we did make it so that people who know a little applescript can add their own apps and in general add all sorts of scripts to their apps. You can see how here http://www.ghostnoteapp.com/blog/how-to-manually-add-new-doc...
I was putting off developing an app for the store because of the whole sandbox app whitelist issue. I should have done more homework.
Thank you!
My advice is that you think about the app store as a distribution channel and use something like Paddle to sell online so you aren't only relying on the mac app store.
Totally agree - the MAS needs to be seen as a single distribution channel. I think the broader problem is that devs rely solely on the Mac App Store to drive sales for them, which is a risky approach. There are a bunch of different ways to drive app sales; it's just a matter of putting in the work.
Glad to have you on board with Ghostnote, and looking forward to that write-up too! :-)
Fabio @ Paddle.com
1) It talks about an app that reached #8 in "Top Paid". The more interesting list would be "Top Grossing"
2) It talks about a trivial app that was created with very little effort. While gimmick apps might work on iOS, people prefer to buy actually useful software on the Mac.
The title is still somewhat true: It's unlikely you will become very rich by selling Mac Apps. But you can make a decent living; I currently make around 6000€/month (gross revenue) from two Mac Apps.
I agree with the trivial app comment but I have a unique app which is doing pretty well. However compared to the iOS store it's not potentially self sustaining to be in the top once you get there.
You do see it used quite frequently in enterprise situations where desktop users have outgrown Excel but aren't quite ready to deal with a server-based database.
Filemaker Pro is still hanging around too, for what it's worth.
When I go to migrate data it's very convenient to pull up an Access viewer on OSX to get a feel for the data structure so I can inform the customer on what will be migrated. Saves the minute it takes to boot up a Windows VM (and pay monthly for Access 365).
That distills down to about $15,000 per US job if the $10 billion doesn't go anywhere else in the world and before business expenses such as the $99.00 developer fee.
Business owners should think of an app as an extra benefit to a paid service or product rather than the product itself.
But, in its hey day, it did really well. It even beat iMovie for a few weeks. Though now I am sitting here almost five years later and I have no idea who my customers are, beyond the handful that went out of their way to contact me.
I had some down time this past spring, so I rewrote the entire thing from the ground up using AVFoundation. I haven't launched this new version yet because I'm waiting to finish the iOS version to launch both within the same time frame. However, I won't be putting the OS X version on the Mac App Store for a few reasons:
- I want to know who my customers are
- I want to be able to contact my customers
- Sandboxing restrictions are workable, but not a good customer experience imho.
- Lack of paid upgrades isn't viable for an app not everyone needs
- MAS seems way neglected
So now I'm going to be going with Paddle (http://paddle.com) since it sort of replicates that experience really well and the guys there are super responsive. Maybe I'll change my mind down the road, but not likely.
There's a huge difference between climbing to the top and then instantly failing and actually staying at the top.
A full day in Top Grossing on the Mac App Store gives you something like this:
Ranks #10 to #20: at least $2-4k per day. Ranks #30 to #80: around $800-1k per day. Ranks #80 to #150: around $500-$800 per day.
All sums are after Apple's cut. They fluctuate a bit depending on the day of the week.
I make more than the mentioned $454 per day at ranks of around #200.
My revenue report from last year can be found here: https://blog.kapeli.com/my-year-in-review-2014.
It's shit article.
See, some time ago (feels like ages now), I contacted him to see what would it take to add Chicken Scheme to the list of docsets. His response was quick and helpful.
My company got "bought" and I suddenly had zero free time to follow up. But that boosted my respect for Dash considerably. A assume other people will have similar experiences. I've recommended it to every single developer with Macs that I've met.
Now that I got reminded of it, let's see what I can do about that docset...
Kudos all around and, while it ain't $2-4k, I hope you appreciate my sincere 'thanks' today.
The point is that being in the top doesn't mean what it means on iOS. On iOS you will be able to stay in the top purely by being in the top because people use the app store much more frequently.
On the Mac app store you being in the top is more a product of a lot of other things you do.
If you hit a nerve just like you did and I to some degree did you will do well even if you aren't in the top of the app store.
At least that's how I understood it, but perhaps I am putting too much of my own bias into it.
Also much more sites are looking at the top in the app store and so your exposure for getting there is many many times more.
Further more much more iOS apps are inherently social so that helps too.
Since you're here: have you considered adding Kickstart file syntax? RHEL's pages tend to be pretty bad (the CentOS ones are better I know).
Did you simply release that app and customers come after? Or did you have to pay a certain amount to acquire customers (i.e. paid advertising)? Or did you acquire customers some other way?
I've tried different marketing things along the way, like sponsored posts or Google Adwords. Probably spent around $500 in total on marketing during the lifetime of the app. None had a meaningful effect so I kind of stopped trying.
I mostly focus on engaging my users as much as I can and trying to make them happy, so that they will recommend Dash to others.
And you shouldn't be shy about direct-linking your app (as well as the blog post)...I didn't know about it until now but it looks right up my alley. Thanks!
I don't think they care about someone making a living on the App Store. They either care about failures or about getting insanely rich.