Report Shows Mobile Developers Are Still Struggling Monetizing Apps

Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Vision Mobile’s 7th Developer Economics surveyed more than 10,000 developers on the app economy, tracking developer experiences across platforms, revenues, apps, tools, APIs, segments and regions.

Highlights from the report Include:

Platform Wars

- On a global level the platform wars are ending with iOS claiming the majority of the high-end device market and Android winning almost everywhere else.

- Android leads in developers at 70% with iOS second with 51% of developers targeting the platform.

- Windows Phone was the only platform to gain with developers targeting the platform, rising to 28%, despite failing to gain device market share.

- The average number of platforms a developer targets has fallen from 2.9 to 2.2 over the last 12 months, with more than 40% only targeting a single platform.

- BlackBerry 10 is rapidly leaking developer mindshare, down to 11%, having failed to gain traction with consumers.

- Although HTML5 is used by 42% of developers as a technology for app development, only 15% still target mobile browsers as a distribution platform.

- 47% of iOS developers and 42% of Android developers are using something other than the native language on their platforms.

- While hybrid apps are the most popular non-native option for building Android and iOS apps, they’re only used by 13% of developers.

App Revenues

- 50% of iOS developers and 64% of Android developers are below the “app poverty line” of $500 per app per month.

- 24% of developers who are interested in making money earn nothing at all.

- 23% of developers make less than $100 per app per month.

- The overall app economy, including all revenue sources not just the app stores, is still growing but the revenues are highly concentrated. At the top end of the revenue scale there are just 1.6% of developers with apps earning more than $500k per month.

Game Development

- Games dominate app store revenues, yet most games developers struggle.

- 33% of developers make games but 57% of those games make less than $500 per month.

- 70% of games developers have shipped less than 4 titles.

- Games developers target 3 platforms versus 1.75 platforms for non-game developers.

- Multi-platform games benefit from cross-platform game development tools with Unity as the most popular, used by 47% of developers. Adobe Air is second at 15%.

Developer Tools

- New developers are typically not aware of the tools that are available and thus reduce the average usage levels.

- 26% of developers that are interested in making money don’t use any third party tools, up from 14% 12 months ago.

- The most popular category of tool is Ad Networks, with 30% of developers using them.

- More experienced and successful developers show a preference for Cloud Computing platforms, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, with 40% of those with 6 plus years experience in mobile apps adopting them.

Enterprise Apps

- 67% of mobile app developers primarily target consumers and 11% target professionals directly.

- The 16% of developers who target enterprises are twice as likely to be earning over $5k per app per month and almost 3 times as likely to earn more than $25k per app per month.

- 10% more enterprise developers targeting Android than iOS.

- Microsoft and BlackBerry are seeing weak adoption for their new platforms among enterprise developers due to lack of demand from enterprises.