The Long Slow Decline of App Store Income

I didn’t expect to get rich creating an iOS app. If that were my goal I certainly wouldn’t have create a ‘to do’ list app to compete with the gazillion other ‘to do’ lists apps in the App Store.

But for a very long time I'd been making lists on scraps of paper, so when I first got my iPod Touch in September 2008 and couldn’t find a list app that I liked, I decided to make my own. If I could make a bit of extra money in the process, so much the better.

I released List! Lite in February 2010 and List!, a paid version of the app, in July 2010. Since that time, I’ve released 25 updates including new features and bug fixes. List! has 210 ratings with an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars.

There are many excellent articles worth reading on the challenges of making money on paid apps, but I can nicely summarize them with a single graph showing the monthly income I’ve made on List! between October 2010 and April 2014:



I got a large bump in income shortly after adding support for the larger screen of the iPad in June 2011, but nothing I've done since that time—new features, sales, promotions, and localization—has had any lasting effect on generating sustainable income. At best, all I've done is just slow the decline.

As a hobbyist, I have no regrets on the time I spent developing the app. I learned a number of new things, made enough money to buy some toys, and have an app that I use on a daily basis.

As a developer, I’m glad the only investment I lost was my spare time. There’s all kinds of speculations I could make, but at the end of the day I wrote an app I loved creating that just wasn’t commercially successful. I haven't written my last app, but I now have a more enlightened view of the economic realities of app development.

So if you approach a developer about an app idea that’s sure to make money and they look at you skeptically, now you know why.