[mickanio]

Great, you're #8 on the App Store for an app that allows you to blur photos... you're so excited that you're going to get rich... Leaves me thinking: Who cares what rank you are on the App Store, making an app that does basically very little (though useful) should NOT make you rich.

I just think of something like Monument Valley - not a throwaway - tons of work - and it DID make them rich. Rightfully so. I guess I'd like to see at least SOME mention of that aspect of it.

[forrestthewoods]

It's not that you should get rich from such an investment. It's that basically no one is getting rich from the Mac App Store. The desktop app store is a failure in many respects. It did not take off the same way mobile app stores have.

As for Monument Valley, that's a pretty poor example. They invested 1.5m and made 5.8m. For a core team of 8 people it's not fuck you money. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/527b69fbe4b0febeee4fc...

They didn't even make 10x their investment. There is a strong argument to made that a 10x project is the minimum you need just to have a sustainable company. Sustainable! That's a long, long way from rich. http://www.lostgarden.com/2015/04/minimum-sustainable-succes...

[emsy]

I've read the second article and I think you should take it with a grain of salt. I don't want to elaborate much but I think it's targeted at the "quantity developers" which pump out low to mid quality games, hoping for a hit. On the other end of the spectrum you have quality developers like ustwo who don't need to finance 9 unsucessful games. Of course in reality it's much more complex than that but I don't think that "you need to make 10x your investment" is a hard rule to measure success.

[forrestthewoods]

The designer who wrote that article is behind the wildly popular Triple Town. It speaks to the reality of development for small development teams.

[emsy]

That doesn't contradict my point that ustwo might not need to make ten times more money than they spent developing the game to run the company (and to be considered succesful).

[forrestthewoods]

I was specifically referring to the statement "and it DID make them rich". That statement I think is provably false. Depending on how one defines rich of course.

There are many ways to define success. ustwo is a 300+ person design company. Their mobile games could lose money but still be considered a success.

[melling]

How about the problem discussed in the article?

"One Mac app developer made it up to No. 8 with just 59 downloads"

If you make it to number 8 with so few downloads, there probably isn't much of a market.

[geerlingguy]

I've been hovering around the top 30 in the Graphics category with anywhere between 1-5 sales/day of the $0.99 app Quick Resizer[1]. It's not that hard in certain categories.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-resizer/id498486288?mt...

[fuzzywalrus]

Notably, this article fails to mention that this is for only the graphics chart, and the selection of graphics apps fairly limited. Outside of Serif Labs, Bohemian Coding and Pixelmator, most of the apps are fairly one-note like Redacted. I don't think desktop users are of the same mindset for one-off applications outside of small utilities like SnapRuler or Colorsnapper.

[j_baker]

Hey, he worked on this app for a whole 30 hours. That's like 3/4 of a work week!

In all seriousness, when you figure it out, that's about $15/hr. I think a number of entrepreneurs would give their right arm to make that kind of money right at launch. And when you consider that he's probably going to be selling at least a few more copies of this, the money he'll make off of his time investment will grow.

In any event, I hope he didn't quit his day job to make a photo-blurring utility.

[kranner]

He made $6600 for Redacted. The $450 figure is for Realmac's Clear.

[rib3ye]

Additionally, App Annie ranking is not the same as actual Apple App Store ranking. One should consider the motivation and incentives for AA to hand you a positive rank using methods unknown.

[ThomPete]

Its about exposure. A lot of people on iOS are using the app store not so much for Mac. In fact from some of my sources I have been told that a lot of people will only have the apps that come with the Mac when they buy it and never actually explore apps.