How much does An Average App earn ?

Are you making your app for Android, iOS or Windows? Who you are making an app for, will greatly affect how much you can possibly earn. Of course, it’s no secret that Android dominates the smartphone market with over 90 million phones sold, Apple’s iOS comes in second with over 60 million phones sold and Windows phones which have sold over 12 million phones. If you want to reach out to a larger audience, choose Android – the more the number of users the more the number of people who can access your app

Apple, at its WorldWide Developer Conference, talked about 1.25 million apps in the app store accounting for 50 billion downloads and $5 billion paid off to developers in the last year. To the company, it is a sign of pride to be able to pay this developer community. Internal data from the app store, gathered from sources close to the company, indicate that the numbers are in line with the actual payments made to developers.

At Google I/O, the largest Android developer conference, Google touted 150,000 developers responsible for over 800,000 apps. While the company does not break out revenue numbers on their apps, recent data in their financial filings seemed to indicate somewhere around $900 million in pay-outs to developers “over the last 12 months” and discussions with external research analysts put the number of downloaded apps from the Google Play store at around 48 billion, close to what Apple has claimed.

Microsoft, meanwhile, has been claiming 160,000 apps in their store from 45,000 developers. In a recent interview, Microsoft officials claimed that the average user downloaded 54 apps, which would put their download count at 650 million to date. While the company does not break out data for its mobile division, looking at the variations in the accounts payable line of their 10-Qs over the last few quarters before and after they introduced their app store shows a variation of up to $100 million since 2011 that could be attributed to the app store.

So taking all that data into account, we can summarize it as follows:

What we see here is that while decent amounts of money can be made on an app, a hard-working developer on iOS will be able to get a new car, while Android and Microsoft developers will be forced into the used car market if they plan to take those earnings on the road. At $4,000 in average revenue per app, Apple has a lead but it still begs the question as to how many developers can actually make a living directly from apps on any platform. Direct revenue from the apps themselves may not be able to justify large development teams but other revenue sources (advertising, for example) may help developers increase their take.

On A More Personal Level
The app Angry birds has generated a revenue of $4.5 million for the developers after Apple’s cut. But each and every app is not like Angry birds. On an average, an app developer earns $500 for an average paid app, the cost is however not enough to cover the costs of the app, especially those that require constant updates and have a lot of competition.

So How We Increase Our Revenue?
Advertising is the answer. Advertising tough will generate more revenue should be used wisely, as a user may just stop actively using an app if it displays too many adds.

There are a lot of apps in the market, few breakeven fewer make a big profit, but when they do they make it big like Angry birds, Instagram, Truecaller etc. The key is to keep it original and unique, something that appeals to the mass and something nobody has done before.