I have gotten pretty tired of people asking “do people make a lot of money selling iPhone apps?” when the answer to that question is restricted to the same per-product marketing variables of just about any other product.

I like writing my app and supporting passengers – I wrote the app for myself first. I far make less per hour on iPhone App sales than any other development job I have had in 15 years, but I'm ok with that.

However, it has held me back from jumping into similar products as StationStops with very limited potential market (Regular Metro-North commuters with iPhones), and a regular maintenance requirement.

Chuckee Cheeses Card …

A quick note about Exit Strategy NYC – it's not a subway map app. It
doesn't compete with the other subway map apps, but instead has
functionality which compliments the other map apps and it's the only
app with this information.

As far as I can tell, reviews and numbers of downloads don't correlate
very well.

A quick note about Exit Strategy NYC – it's not a subway map app. It doesn't compete with the other subway map apps, but instead has functionality which compliments the other map apps and it's the only app with this information.

As far as I can tell, reviews and numbers of downloads don't correlate very well.

I think there is also a major logic flaw in your addressable market… like you said, the MTA numbers do not represent uniques. You have to imagine at least half of the trips on a weekday are round trip – people who go to work, and then back home later in the day. You also cannot assume the Saterday people did not travel during the week as well. If there are 5.2MM rides on the week days, and half of them are round trips, then youve got about 3.9M riders. Ill give you 4MM for people who only ride the subway during the weekends and never during the week.

10% of your 4MM would be 400,000. 3% of that would be 12,000.

Going back to the first point – lets imagine anyone who already has a subway app and has rated it 3 stars or better is going to stick with the program they already have. Looking at your competition, there are 7,057 ratings of 3* or above for other peoples NYC subway applications.

Leaves your plateau point at about 5,000 downloads. Not saying you wont get more downloads then that, but at that point I would guess your daily sales would flatten out.

At $2.99, with Apple taking 30%, looks like revenue totaling about $9,000.

Of course… thats only iPhones. Good luck!

One of the best speeches I've ever seen is David Heinemeier Hansson's “The Secret to Making Money Online”. He talks about people shooting for the stars with a 0.01% chance of succeeding (trying to build the next facebook) and then more modest 'lifestyle' business ventures that fill a small need and have a very good chance of being steadily profitable. An app like Exit Strategy isn't 'the next facebook' — it's a lifestyle business. We knew it would be pressworthy and get buzz and therefore would do sales approx in this range. I wasn't expecting to make a million.

Exit Strategy NYC was built by a very small and scrappy team working on a shoestring budget, putting in only a few thousand dollars and a few months of time to develop the app across four different mobile platforms. It paid back its costs on our first two days of sales and has sold steadily since then — it fills a need for new yorkers, and will likely continue to sell steadily. It's been a great experience.

Objective-C does indeed suck.

I did a little further digging, and Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem stated 11 million installs in a phone call with TheAppleBlog in June. http://theappleblog.com/2009/06/10/tap-tap-reve...

My guess is that Decrem is referring to total installs for all seven available versions of Tap Tap Revenge. I'm pretty sure Tap Tap Revenge 2 was a new install instead of an upgrade from Tap Tap Revenge, so all of its install numbers are probably just being added to the pile. My guess is that the total install numbers for the original Tap Tap Revenge game to date are around 7.5 to 8 million and the numbers on Tap Tap Revenge 2 are much less. 3 or 4 million would be a fair guess.

None of this really matters much other than to say that obviously Admob's device estimation in April was way off, and I'm fairly certain that comScores numbers were as well. I think if we had actual top 100 overall free install numbers, apps at the bottom of that list would be at 2 million installs or less. 2 million is still nothing to sneeze at, but it is far off from the numbers quoted. And as you mentioned in one of your comments, if you take the total number of apps in the store and compare it to installs, average installs per app are in the 20-30k range.

Bottom line for free apps is that you either have to be willing to give it away, or you have to have a business plan that focuses on not just getting lots of installs, but keeping those people using the application regularly. That is the only way the ad or in-app purchase models really work.