Since last week, a couple more interesting posts have surfaced on how to survive in the App Store. In particular, Stuart Hall published an in-depth look at the value of driving revenue with in-app purchases. I find it distressing that an app with almost 2 million downloads can make as little as $60,000, but that's still a lot better than $0. Although I have no inside knowledge, my guess is that Stuart either already makes as much, or will soon, with his AppBot service. (Remember what I said about SaaS before?)
Amy Hoy offers up a wealth of information on this topic, and I highly recommend that you read some of her blog posts.
Also, another potential revenue model that I didn't touch upon last week, and one that some of you asked about, was advertising in your app. The data I've seen on the matter suggests that—unless you have a significant number of users—advertising is a dead end, and will never deliver a meaningfully contribution to your bottom line. But, I'd love to be proven wrong on this. What kind of advertising revenue have you seen from your apps?
Until next time,
Aaron
What We're Reading
- Biz
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Control of the Week
TOMSMorphingLabel
Configurable morphing transitions between text values of a label. MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
Sleipnir
BDD-style framework in Swift MIT licensed. |
AssetPicker
AssetPicker is a UIViewController subclass that provides an alternative solution to UIImagePickerController. MIT licensed. |
KSMManyOptionsButton
M2DHudView
M2DHudView is a simple hud library. You can show a hud with 3 styles and custom description on the hud. MIT licensed. |
JGProgressHUD
CropperView
using CropperView Rect You can apply multiple rect areas. You can move it. each of corners. You can move it. each of croppers. and You can crop it. MIT licensed. |
CYRKeyboardButton
AudioRecorder
AITabBarController
AITabBarController is a container controller that you can use to load your controllers. You can use a sidebar view and hide that with. MIT licensed. |
MQTimeOut
MQTimeOut detects when an app goes idle/inactive (no touches) and sends a time out notification. MIT licensed. |
HelpStack
MHYahooParallaxView
Parallax implementation inspired by Yahoo Weather and News Digest :) MIT licensed. |
CBZSplashView
A drop in animated splash screen as seen on the current twitter app. Add your icon and background color. It does the rest. MIT licensed. |
YahooClassicalButton
Yahoo Classical Button is a cocoa version of yahoo flickr classical button. MIT licensed. |
EMNotificationPopup
BFPaperCheckbox
iOS Checkboxes inspired by Google's Paper Material Design. MIT licensed. |
MAFormViewController
MintAnnotationView
UITextViews with name highlighting (mentions) like Facebook for iOS. Animated GIF: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/soleaf/MintAnnotationView/master/cs_chatview.gif MIT licensed. |
M13MarketKit
M13MarketKit is a complete backend for handling in app purchases. MIT licensed. |
JTSActionSheet
Replacement for UIActionSheet on iOS 7, with customizable fonts and colors, and block-based actions. MIT licensed. |
AYVibrantButton
JMMarkSlider
Fully customizable slider that allows you to set marks on it. You can set the color of the bar, marks and handler, the width of the marks and even an image for the handler. MIT licensed. |
Masu
Placeholder for iOS prototyping MIT licensed. |
BKCardExpiryField
iOS control for credit card expiration date input. MIT licensed. |
FrostedSidebar
Hamburger Menu based off of RNFrostedSidebar (https://github.com/rnystrom/RNFrostedSidebar), written in Swift, and uses the new iOS 8 UIVisualEffectView for the UIBlurEffect. MIT licensed. |