Windows Phone devs earn double what poor Android devs pocket Windows mobile developers need every crumb of comfort they can muster – so mobile ad network InMobi has offered a few. InMobi’s annual developer survey suggests that Windows Phone devs pocket twice the monthly revenue of Android developers. There might be far fewer users of the platform, but there is less competition in the …
*"...The average WinPho developer took home an average of $11,400 gross per month, with 49 per cent grossing at least $10,000. That compares to $8,100 for iOS developers, and $4,900 for Android developers..."*
If those figures represent true averages then I reckon most of us are in the wrong line of work —especially given the number of "I had a top-selling app and only made $RISIBLE-AMOUNT in 6 months" articles which abound.
Unfortunately, I suspect those averages were calculated from within a smaller and more successful sample, than the language used suggests.
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Nah - doesn't need to be. The "average" is probably a mean, which is a very poor average to use for something like this.
It's like the "average bonus" figure that's given for an Investment Bank every year. It's normally something ridiculously huge, but it's massively skewed by a very few very high bonuses - and 99% of the people who get a bonus get below the average.
Similarly, a few ultra-successful apps (Flappy Birds being one such example) skew the average figure.
"Nah - doesn't need to be. The "average" is probably a mean, which is a very poor average to use for something like this."
The average is always the mean. The most basic statistical measurements for a population are the mode, median and mean and the standard deviation.
The mean is pretty useless without either the mode and median or the standard deviation. Estate agents love average London house prices because that way the Candy brothers' £65 million flats drag up the apparent price of your one bed ex council flat in Tower Hamlets. It's the same effect here.
But the quote of $10000 being exceeded by 49% puts that $10000 as close to the median, and gives some context.
I think the difference is there are more junk apps on Android dragging the figures down for everyone else.
Combined with the fact I can only presume many android dev's make their money by selling the data they rip from you phone, not from ads. After all does a flashlight app really need access to your phone book and location in order to work?
The 49% figure is around the median, which suggests average is not too bad as a measure in this case. (Why not 50% used for the median - statistical illiteracy I guess, the desire to get the nice $10000 rather than a widely used measure).
What we don't know is costs. How much do they have to spend on promotion?
Also we don't know where the developers are based. If a lot of Android developers are in developing countries and a lot of iOS and WP developers are in the US, that might go some way to explain the discrepancy.
Interesting but raises a whole lot of new questions.
According to the report itself, 51% of Windows Phone devs take in less than $1000 a month, so that puts the median pretty much at $1,000.
The $1000 mark comes up at 40th percentile for iOS devs, and 55th for Android. iOS has the most equal distribution of income bands (if we can call any app store's payout distribution "equal"),
Also, much as I'd like to dream about taking in five figures a month, the rest of the report makes it clear that earning this kind of revenue is the purview of the medium and large app studios, not the one-person developers. (73% of sole developers earned less than $1000 a month)
I'd have loved to see a the surveyors capture a "$0-$100 per month" revenue band, because my suspicion is that this would have covered 25% of all paid-app developers.
My gut feeling for the difference in average revenues is that Android an iOS attract more glorious failures, whereas Windows Phone is a way of extending the reach of an already successful product: publishers only bring a title to Windows Phone once it has proved that it can earn high revenues.
Unfortunately, I suspect those averages were calculated from within a smaller and more successful sample, than the language used suggests.
That is indeed the case - the sample is based on developers which have infested their app with the "monetization" provided by the ad network which authored the report. So people who decided to honestly earn a living by making their app sell for X $$ need not apply.
Just fake numbers. Fake stats. Nothing else.
Microsoft is so desperate at trying to save that mess of a Windows8.x=10 and WindowsPhone with the atrocious childish Metro/ModernUI that they keep lying and telling b*ll. Now they want to trick developers into believing that they would earn a lot more on the dead WindowsPhone crap that Microsoft is soon going to rename as SurfacePhone. With so few customers it is not that they are all buying whatever expensive crap a developer publishes on the Microsoft crap store. Anyone really believing these lies must be retarded.
WindowsPhone is dead. And Windows8.2=10 sucks too. The Windows Store is a shame as well.
Not sure (and don't want to register) if these two questions are addressed in the report, but my feeling is that they can skew the figures a lot.
- Is the data weighted by number of developers in each platform? the bulk of the Play Store is made up of applications whose developers have little, if any income from them. But Android's barrier of entry for developers is very low compared with iOS (you have to own Apple HW plus the iStore fee) or Windows (you need a Windows license plus MSDN/whatever) thus to some degree you need a lower income to get the same revenue out of Android.
- How they split the revenue of developers working on multiple platforms: the highest selling apps are usually developed for all platforms, and likely have the largest sales figures in WP.
I assume that all the amateurs and hobbyists who are coding an app or two for fun are mostly coding it for Android, since they are more likely to have an Android in the first place. On the other hand, people who develop anything for Windows are more likely to be professionals who fully intend to make real money out of it.
You would probably get similar results comparing say Python vs. Cobol developers. People who code in Python are dime-a-dozen and go from professional to high-schoolers, but nobody codes in Cobol unless they have somebody paying them good money for it.
If the Microsoft Mobile ecosystem is diminishing - according to Microsoft's own filings, why then would any sensible person - mobile developer - who is competent with mathematics think that more developers will be attracted to the Microsoft mobile development marketplace, and thus significantly expand the MS Mobile base.
Just last week Microsoft officially announced "abandonment" of efforts to have their cross-platform mobile tools work on Android, which controls about 80% of the global Mobile software platform. Even at Mobile World Conference recently in Barcelona, Spain, about 95% of (Mobile) iOT products and services offered or planned were Android and Linux based.
Microsofties are still blowing smoke out of their anuses.
More abuse of stats by a marketing dweeb. The average by it self means almost nothing. To truly get good information you need to know the average, the mean, and the mode. This article could just as easily said that Windows dev's make less per capita, due to the relative size of the various markets.
Given that you* trot out the exact same "joke" every time there's a Windows Phone related article, I would wager that even a Firefox OS developer would earn a better living that you would as a stand-up comedian.
* I'm guessing that this is the same person posting as an AC every time. I don't hold much hope for humanity if it's actually two or more people who are this banal...
Probably lots of Android developers in countries with lower cost of living, so they can make a go of it for less than someone based in the US or UK could.
The share of Windows phones sold into the corporate market, and the share of apps purchased for that market, has to be a lot higher than for Android or iPhone. If for example 1% of Android app sales, 5% of iPhone app sales and 20% of Windows app sales are corporate focused apps - which would be sold for more - that's going to raise the developer's average revenue. There are probably a lot more iOS devs doing corporate apps than Windows devs, but they are still a small percentage overall, with their revenue averaged down by the low revenue from devs doing what they love (i.e. games) even though there's less money in it.
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