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State of App Economy, 2014

How lucrative is indie app development? What are the challenges facing app developers? App developers seem to agree: it's complicated and there are patches of success, but overall things are getting worse. There's been a rash of articles and blog posts lately by well-known app developers on these issues.

Read These

1. A Candid Look at Unread's First Year by Jared Sinclair -- the post that appears to have started it all. Jared posts detailed sales figures and graphs, and walks us through them to tell a story of just how hard it can be to make money on the App Store even when you have a great product and incredibly good publicity & word of mouth on your side.
2. App Rot by Marco Arment is a great follow-on post. Marco has a good handle on the precise causes behind the atrophying App Store economy, and links to/sums up several other recent posts on this topic as well.
3. (late addition) Pleco: Building A Business, Not An App by Ben Thompson, who asserts that Sinclair’s results "are not a 'solid piece of evidence' of anything."

...And Maybe These

If you have limited time/interest, read the ones above. If you want more perspectives, here are some more posts, all by app developers. (Most of these are linked/quoted in Marco's post above too):

• A Candid Look at the Financial Side of Building Mac Apps on Your Own is a good counterpoint to the first article above: another developer offers his own set of detailed numbers, which paint a different picture. Illustrates the difference in economics between Mac OS apps vs iOS.
• Benjamin Mayo responds to Jared's post on Unread. "The amount of effort you put into an app has very little to do with how much of the market will buy it. This means that making big apps exposes you to substantially more risk, which is not fairly counterbalanced by significantly higher earnings potential."
• Being Indie in 2014 by Gus Mueller
• The Indie Life by Luc Vandal, about the changing nature of indie life, and how making a great app is, by itself, not enough to be successful any more.

Updates and Additions

• If you want to know how bad it can get for really small-time apps/developers, check out: My iOS Indie-Game Numbers.

-- Joel Dueck (see all notes)