Sales figures for an iPad app here:

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/29244/page/3

It's not a music app, but a well-done iPad app that was actually app of the week in the UK. When you consider how much time it takes to write apps like these and consider that these are probably fairly typical sales figures you can understand why people aren't exactly getting rich doing this.

And????

Are all these diagramms telling you that this guy is losing money???

And so all the other Devs???

Well I don't know about this particular App, but: if it was sooooooo impossible to make money on the App Store then it'd have been deserted from the Devs, not?

I still see plenty of Apps there.

And even plenty of devs bringing updates!!!!



One more thing:

There is a huge difference between getting rich and making a living of this...

The guy is definitely losing money relative to what he could be making at a salaried job. Independence has it's rewards, of course, but anybody with the talent to make a top-rating app can make as much on an average day punching the clock as he or she can on the handful of peak sales days a typical app gets. And that doesn't even take things like health care benefits and 401k etc into account.

I'm posting this because a lot of people seem to think that a lot of people are getting rich in the indie app market and it just isn't true. Maybe people would complain less often about spending $5 on something that took 6-12 months of work if they knew this.

Yep, you pointed it. Nothing more to say.
If you wanna get rich don't be an indie, my wife is one of them but she didn't choose this path to get rich...

I know what you mean with people complaining for a 5$ App.
As a consumer (who buy a looooot of Apps) I'm sometimes really tired to hear devs complaining about how they don't get rich thanks to the App store...

Did this dev jumped in the App business without a business plan?? No wonder then...

I actually don't think I've heard a single dev complaining about not getting rich in the app store but I sure have heard a lot of users justifying rude and entitled behavior on the assumption that devs are making bucketloads of money on the app store.

In fact, most are making beer money if they're lucky.

The bitching over app cost does grate on me. Really, apps like GarageBand, JamUp, and AmpKit+ are a steal for what they do, IMO.

Absolutely. Apple can afford to lose money on Garageband but a lot of these other apps take just as much work to develop as your typical VST.

Then he should take the salaried job. What are we supposed to do about it?

A plan is critical. It is hard to compare our experience from a ground-up endeavor into iOS music app development but there are some good answers here from our CEO in the KVR interview from a while ago: http://www.kvraudio.com/interview_with_enrico_iori_ik_multim edia.php

This could be meaningful at least in comparison of established companies vs independents since you can see a mix of them in the top music apps.

Thanks for the link Peter. Very interesting. I hadn't seen it before.

I imagine it probably is a little different for an established company with a well-known product line.

I saw that the Retronyms guys made their Tabletop modular system "free" as of last Friday. For something like Tabletop, where it's pretty much a closed system and they charge you for extra devices, I think that makes sense (as opposed to charging $10 for the app, then charging for extras via in app purchases). If you look at the pricing history for Tabletop on AppShopper, though, you can see that's been all over the place since it came out less than a year ago ($15, $5, $10, Free). I think (and time will tell of course) where they have it represents a pretty good long-term strategy (broaden the userbase, improve the product, sell the extras), but it does illustrate one developer's journey towards finding the right product pricing strategy.