Earnings

A lot of developers won't post their earnings for whatever reason. Maybe they're embarrassed by their success or lack thereof, or they're hiding money from the government, or who knows what. Because of that, it's very hard to figure out what you might be able to earn as an independent app developer. The upper limit is in the millions, while the lower limit is zero, but beyond that, there's no way to tell.

So, in an effort to help people out, I'm going to provide a bit of my Playbook app sales data for this past month.

Here are the sales numbers for five of my apps:

The exact total's a bit of a pain to calculate due to the different currencies involved, but the total looks like it comes to about $65 or an average of $13/app. Since I only get 70% of that, my personal profit on these five apps comes to $45.50 or $9.10/app. Which works out to just about 30 cents per app per day. Meaning that in order to make the equivalent of a $10 per hour job, I'd need to put out somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 apps.

Now, these are just my numbers, and they may be atypical, but even at 25x my earnings, the numbers aren't good.

Just for fun, here's the download data for five different apps:

Again, it's hard to tell what the totals are, but it looks to be around 5000 or so. If I could earn $1 per download, I'd be a reasonably happy guy.