2015 income roundup
It’s mid December as I’m writing this and the last 2 weeks of the year are going to make no difference to my AppStore income for this year so let’s look at the numbers. All numbers mentioned are net.
I had 3 apps for sale in the AppStore during the entire year:
- De knooppuntenapp — fietsen in Vlaanderen
- De knooppuntenapp — fietsen in Nederland
- De knooppuntenapp — wandelen in Vlaanderen
Around mid-2015 I added 2 more apps:
In 2014 I made 18252€ from the AppStore from the first 3 apps.
94% of that amount came from iOS sales, 6% came from Windows Phone sales. There was a free Android app for a while which I later pulled, but we’ll come back to Android later.
I added quite a lot of features this year and I was secretly hoping I’d crack the 20000€ barrier in 2015. That didn’t happen.
2015 — with 2 weeks to go — has resulted in 17445€ income. 95% of that amount came from iOS sales, 5% came from Windows Phone sales.
That’s still a good amount for a side project, but it’s not where I hoped I would be.
Why the drop in income?
The sales of my apps have always been very tied to the weather. I get very high sales during the first nice weekends in the spring for example. I’ve had a few +200€ days in those weekends. People are just happy to go out and spend some money when it’s nice outside.
The weather this year hasn’t been as good as it was in 2014. Especially the autumn was bad. In 2014 I still made good money between September in December. This year sales tanked during that period. Up until August this year I was making more money compared to 2014 but income dried up after that.
The second reason (I think) is the concept of App bundles. My apps are perfectly suited to be sold in bundles so that’s what I did. In 2015 I had 3 bundles for sale. Just under 6900€ was made from bundles in 2015.
Now, it’s hard to tell if bundles are to blame or not. The good side of bundles is that you can sell 2 or 3 apps at once. The downside of every bundle sale is that you get less money compared to separate purchases.
The big unknown of course, is whether people would have found and/or purchased other apps in my series if they hadn’t been bundled up.
Plans for 2016
Removal of bundles
I removed my bundles from sale last week and the plan for 2016 is to advertise my “other” apps inside every app. There won’t be annoying banners, just a list of apps on the main screen so people know they exist. I’ve also registered for the iTunes Affiliate program and I will be linking to my apps using my affiliate id. We’ll discuss the iTunes Affiliate program in a future blog post.
A new app
There will be a new app which will contain walking networks in The Netherlands and I might combine the networks of Belgium and The Netherlands and put them in one app.
Android
All the apps will be available on Android again. I’ve found a developer who is porting the apps right now. The good news is the apps run very well on a very slow and very cheap device, so they should really fly on the more expensive devices.
Unlike the iOS versions which are fixed price we’re going for a subscription model in the Android versions. More on that in a future blogpost.
Windows 10 universal
I’ve had good comments on the Windows Phone 8.0 version of my apps. Unfortunately they are very out of date compared to their iOS counterparts. I’m very interested in the “universal” part of Windows 10 so a new, up-to-date version of the apps on Windows Desktop, Tablet and Phone has to be done.
Website
We’re putting final touches on a website. The plan is to try and make some money from the “ecosystem” around our apps as well. This could come from T-shirts, maybe some branded bicycle parts or affiliate links to products that our customers might be interested in.
Paid routes
Right now we’re working on high-quality themed routes. There will be routes that take you along breweries, or maybe war-themed routes. These will be sold as in-app purchases in 2016.
Looking forward to next year
I’ve spent quite a lot of time on the apps in the last months but I’m very happy the way they turned out.
The plan is to spend less time working on the apps in 2016. The apps have almost all the functionalities that I wanted when I started writing the first line of code. There will be updates, but I want to go back to working on them in a more hobby state of mind.
We’ve rolled out an entire new backend which has been up and running for a few weeks now. There’s a lot to say about the new backend so there will be future blogposts on that as well. I’m very pleased with the rewritten backend and the amount of logging that is generated from the apps. Seeing daily activity of the apps and their most-used features is very cool. I’ll definitely write some backend related articles with screenshots in the future.
I’m very happy with the new app that is coming along nicely and there is of course the income from Android and Windows 10 to look forward to.
Join me next time, when I’ll be talking about the Android version of the apps and why we’ve made the decision to give Android another go.
