Apps have quickly become little chunks of gold wrapped up in computer code and where there is big money, there’s normally a core group controlling the cash. This is no more true than in the app business as a recent discovery at Canalys has shown. The analyst firm claims to have discovered that just 25 developers account for 50% of the revenue in both the Apple App Store and Google’s Play Store – making $60 Million between them. That doesn’t sound like a lot of cash, especially when we’re talking about the technology sector but, lets not forget that apps and games normally go for anywhere between $0.99 and $3.00. You’ve got to sell a lot of games at $0.99 to make any money.
The findings were part of a 20-day period that was estimated using data from Canalys’ daily App Interrogator surveys. Over this period, the 25 developers in question managed to accrue $60 Million in the States’ two biggest app stores. A perhaps unsurprising find of the analysts is that all of the 25 developers – except for one – were game developers. Take that Nintendo and Sony. The exception that you could say “proved the rule” was Pandora – another unsurprising find, I’m sure. Some of the game developers in question include: Zynga, Electronic Arts, Disney, Kabam, Rovio, Glu, Gameloft and Storm8’s TeamLava. If there were any doubt that games really are at the top of the charts right now, Canalys had something to say on that:
“During the same period, games accounted for 145 on average of the top 300 paid apps in the Apple App Store and 116 of Google Play’s top 300 paid apps. Games also accounted for 94 of the top 300 listed free apps for Apple and 110 for Google Play.”
There’s more of a stuggle than ever before for those making apps, and not games. With more and more people turning to the web on their devices to get their content there is less room for a new app in people’s life. As well as this, LTE and increasing network speeds have made it a lot easier for people to stream content from Netflix or YouTube, making that lightweight app you used to entertain yourself with while you wait for the train become obsolete. It begs the question how do people really make money from apps these days? A lot of people are more than happy with the set included on their phones and it’s a lot more common for someone to spend money on a game that it is an app or utility.
[Source: TechCrunch]