As you know, the typical app in an app store sells for $.99 which is not allot of money when you consider Apple will take $.30 for their 70/30 split offer. Whether that is a fair deal for developers or not is a debate for another time but I would like to focus this article on what else you can do to make more money per download and as a result more money into your bank account.
Since Apple launched the App Store back in July 2008, app developers have earned $90 billion. Apple paid out $26.5 billion of that sum in calendar 2017 alone. That’s 31% of the almost decade-old App Store’s payouts in just one year.
To put things in perspective, in 2014, billings from app sales rose 50 percent from the previous year, which results in roughly $15 billion in revenue for app developers and a $4.5 billion cut for Apple. Yea that’s allot of money that Apple is making but just having the app store and selling apps that developers created for the platform.
So what can you do to make more of that cut that is being split up among developers? The answer is obviously charge more than $.99 for your apps but, the golden question is will people pay more than the standard to download your app? Let’s take a look at a scenario where I actually did pay $7.99 for an app and I was very happy to do that!
I got married in October 2014. My beautiful wife and I were going to Maui, HI for our honeymoon and we knew it was the perfect place to chill out and relax after the wedding. We knew very little about Maui and we had never been there before. We did have a friend set us up with a really nice condo rental across from the beach. It was beautiful.
So we need to get information about the island, what to do (we like to hike), where to eat (without spending a fortune), how to get snorkel gear (we knew we wanted to try this). So I found a fantastic app called Maui Revealed.
The app cost me $7.99.
This app was perfect for what we needed. Not only did it have information about things to do, places to go and eat and where to get things for activities we wanted to do, it also had customer reviews of each place it had in its extensive database. It also had a way to use your location to find things that were around you while you were on the island and allowed you to save your favorites so you could easily locate them again. Another fantastic thing about this app is the database was actually downloaded into your phone so it didn’t rely on an Internet connection when you were using the app on the island. Seeing as Maui is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and almost half-way between the US and Japan I thought that was a fantastic idea. Simply it was a brilliant and very useful app!
As I stated above the cost of this app was $7.99 and I was happy to pay it. If you have never been to HI, I can tell you things can get very expensive fast. I figured I would more than make up for the $7.99 cost in one meal with the app and it was well worth the cost to know this information when we were on our honeymoon. It worked out great and we had a total blast on Maui!
So the take away for you the developer from this story is, you need to be tightly niched and provide great value for your customer to get the premium price for any app that you want to sell for more than the standard $.99. Yes you potential market will be much smaller but I believe there are literally thousands of niche markets that you can create apps for and charge a premium for.
Let me know what your thoughts are about this topic, please add your comments below.
