Is It Still Possible/Profitable To Make A Passive Income With Apps?

[ombrocapelo]

Hey


I would like to know if it's still profitable to publish/sell apps and make a passive income (5000$ > a month).


These are the ways I could think of, but neither of them is really promising:


1. Publish high quality apps and buy ads/reviews/installs to get them trending/ranking and get organic downloads

=> high risk that you will never get back what you spend, accs/apps gets suspended or your apps never get enough traction​

=> you probably will never get a higher LTV > CPI, if you just buy ads from adwords/facebook, even with many ads and IAPs​

=> sell them for 0.99$ will get you nowhere, also these customers will except the world​

2. Publish huge amounts (1k-10k) of low quality apps split over several accounts and just get organic traffic

=> average low quality apps make less than 1$ a month, buying source code even for as low as 10-15$ is therefore not worth it​

=> it is very time consuming, even if you reskin these apps several times​

=> you will have problems hiding your fingerprint, and there will be chain-bans​

3. Sell your source code on codecanyon, cupamobile, ...

=> you either effectively sell your code for like 4$ and make like 10 sales (40$) and have to also provide support and documentations​

=> or you try to sell your code for effectively 50$ and probably make like 1 sale (50$)​

=> your code gets pirated and resold​

It seems to me that the good times are over (2012 - 2014) and the market is now oversaturated, for small indie devs.
The only ones, that currently make serious money are these who have been around since < 2012 and still rank for the good keywords, or those who can buy themselves to the top for millions of $.


So, can someone enlighten me? Is it still somehow profitable? Or is it time to move on?

 

[amoon]

hi

I agree with you that those time of 2012 to 2014 are gone, and also the dev who started earlier are the real money makers

but I think IOS is promising now, if you can do some quality app, and work in some marketing like social media, you can make a good income,

btw, you cant judge in something if you do not test it ,

 

[ombrocapelo]

Hey, thanks for the response.


I tried the 1. and 2. method for some time now in the goole play store. (I also looked in the 3rd party stores, but neither of them worked out for me.)


And I assumed that the grass was greener in the apple store, since there tend to be higher eCPM for iOS users. So, maybe I will try my luck there as well.


I also thought about marketing in social networks like (instagram, kik, whatsapp, ...), but assumed that the installs won't convert since these users would be untargeted. (And spamming there, could easily kill my account)

 

[amoon]

Hey, thanks for the response.


I tried the 1. and 2. method for some time now in the goole play store. (I also looked in the 3rd party stores, but neither of them worked out for me.)


And I assumed that the grass was greener in the apple store, since there tend to be higher eCPM for iOS users. So, maybe I will try my luck there as well.


I also thought about marketing in social networks like (instagram, kik, whatsapp, ...), but assumed that the installs won't convert since these users would be untargeted. (And spamming there, could easily kill my account)

Yes try some for ios , for me, I switched from android to ios now, quality users and high ecpm, and you should invest some money in marketing because that the diff. some developers invest money and do good SEO to rank higher