Uphill road for indie developers
2014 looks like a pretty hot year for app download seekers, some 3 million developers and publishers in the world. Ebooks grew a meager 4% in 2013, but app downloads from the AppStore and Google Play shrunk even more. It's going against the trend, because smartphones, carrying the two stores, are in the hands of more and more people who immerse themselves in their screens wherever they are. What are they doing? One of them: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or Snapchat. Here are the great four of the app economy.
This is revealed by the results of a survey by Deloitte, the largest consultancy and auditing company in the world, conducted on a sample of consumers in the United Kingdom. A third of smartphone owners do not download applications, while 9 out of 10 respondents said they do not spend anything on apps or other content on their mobile phones.
The survey shows that the revenue trend, on a quarterly basis, of the extremely popular app Candy Crash Saga it is in free fall. The consumer seems to be completely fed up with apps and when they are not, they download free apps without making any additional purchases. At the beginning of the app economy, smartphone owners had no problem shelling out a couple of euros to download a well-made, fun, useful or simply silly app. This behavior especially helped independent developers because it gave everyone the same opportunities. Today that is no longer the case.
A rather devastating state of affairs for app developers and publishers, especially for independent ones. According to Vision Mobile, which conducted a survey of 10 app developers, a fifth (24%) say they get nothing from the apps they publish, 23% would make between $1 and $100 and 22% between $100 and $1000 . 79% of developers earn less than a thousand euros a month from the apps they publish. Only groups capable of developing an important communication can rescue their apps from irrelevance. To earn the limelight, Hollywood stars such as Tom Hanks or Justin Bieber or TV stars whose reference even appears in the name of the app (eg. Hanx Writer). The beastly leveling of the market leaves room for only a few emergencies that arise from an investment even in the six-figure range against a red code risk. On the small screen of a smartphone, people don't spend much time browsing, researching and analyzing, they tend to do what others do and when they download, they download what they find in the charts, in the top 25 positions. To get in the rankings it is necessary that the Google Play algorithms or the Apple editorial staff place the app in the store window or that from the outside it builds a strong popularity that is not easy to build with the known communication tools.
Choosing a niche
50 billion dollars the value of the app economy in 2015 according to a study commissioned by Google.
The large retailers say that this is not the case at all, that the market is growing and that they distribute resources to developers that double each year. Apple says it paid developers $20 billion in 2014. Google has released a study that estimates the value of the app economy in 2015 at $50 billion, a whopping amount. The graph of payments made by Apple to developers looks like a rocket launched into the sky. The same goes for the download trend. Who is right then, Deloitte and the independent developers or the big retailers? This question reveals the golden rule of the new media distributed online: many participate but the winners are few and the winners take all the stakes which are large. And there is also the second golden rule: whoever has distribution in hand controls the business and bends it to their own objectives, in this case keeping the mobile device market vibrant for Apple and for Google the involvement of people in activities they can track their consumption behaviour.
For independent developers, there are two ways left: the first is to get bought by the large technological groups who see acquisitions as a shortcut to increasing the offer of services; the second is to jump into niches with a fair growth potential: health and fitness in the lead, but also education, tools that help fill out the tax return or improve productivity in the workplace, in short, business apps. Mark Wilcox, an analyst at VisionMobile, said "people who are making money with apps are in the smallest niches."
Here come the niches again. Niche or blockbuster, what kind of app are you? Tertium non datur.
