[Journey] Building an iOS & Android App Empire

Yapaz said:
So you decided to scale in quality and traffic and not the quantity of the apps? Why is that? I thought you were trying to find this "one time hit".
Click to expand...
I already found 3 really good converting apps/niches, but I need to scale the downloads. Unfortunately, creating great creatives takes a lot of time. Its all about A/B testing, testing different audiences, and so on.

But yes, I already plan and prepare to make new apps.

There are two things I should do:

Focus on my time management and split my time to focus on ads and developing separately OR hire someone who creates ads.

Maybe I will try to hire someone through Upwork, but from my experience its always a hit and miss....I just don't want to waste my already limited time with dealing with some dork who doesn't know how to create converting ads better than me.
 
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GL nakamura, so no more playts0re? dose appstore have that traffic that can boost the app organicaly or you have to use paid ads with every app. and if you dont mind Ive a Q in private if you can dm.
 
Firstly, Thanks for the time and effort you put into making these journey posts.
I've just spent hours reading through the posts and making notes from your journey, and i've got 2 pages of gems so thank you.

I've got afew questions if you don't mind answering them:
1. Are you still blocking Thailand and India?
2. Do you only publish on Apple and google nowadays? if so, were the other platforms not worth uploading too ?
3. Do you still test in tier 3 countries first?
4. Where do you buy installs for testing?
5. Have you switched to IOS 17 yet ?
6. Would you use flutter or react native if you started again? or does it not matter.
7. i saw you mention that making apps is only 30% of your entire revenue streams (not sure if this is still valid). Do you think app dev is a good place to start? or is there another model like SEO blogging that has more potential? I have been a full-stack dev for 5 years, so have experience in the dev field

Cheers
 
Dank19 said:
Firstly, Thanks for the time and effort you put into making these journey posts.
I've just spent hours reading through the posts and making notes from your journey, and i've got 2 pages of gems so thank you.

I've got afew questions if you don't mind answering them:
1. Are you still blocking Thailand and India?
2. Do you only publish on Apple and google nowadays? if so, were the other platforms not worth uploading too ?
3. Do you still test in tier 3 countries first?
4. Where do you buy installs for testing?
5. Have you switched to IOS 17 yet ?
6. Would you use flutter or react native if you started again? or does it not matter.
7. i saw you mention that making apps is only 30% of your entire revenue streams (not sure if this is still valid). Do you think app dev is a good place to start? or is there another model like SEO blogging that has more potential? I have been a full-stack dev for 5 years, so have experience in the dev field

Cheers
Click to expand...
1. No, for iOS apps it doesn't matter. I only do it for Google Play.
2. Only for Apple. Google is too much of a pain, too random. Extremely malicious. I wouldn't develop Android apps only to publish for Huawei, Amazon, Samsung Galaxy, and so on. Not worth it.
3. It depends on the app and niche. Sometimes yes, to see the user behavior. But the money is all within the Tier 1 (and some Tier 2) countries.
4. Google Ads mostly. Facebook/Meta ads require a lot of testing and creatives.
5. I target iOS 16 as minimum version since a few months
6. Flutter. But I think native is the best. For example SwiftUI.
7. Apps now make 70% of my entire revenue since I scaled it up a lot. Yes, its still a great place. SEO blogging is dead in my opinion, because Google completely lost the plot when it comes to ranking and indexing. Blogging and SEO were great back in 2010-2018, but now its a hit and miss. Before you could do great SEO and expect a certain result. Now you need a good high DA domain and even then Google might randomly deindex or punish you. I would do web developing or SEO as a service. But I wouldn't get into SEO blogging myself. Results (if any) take way too long.
 
Update for July 2024

Last month has been very slowly for me. I spent most of the time creating creatives for Meta/TikTok ads. I don't really like video editing, and so on, even tho I am good in it. Its just so time consuming, especially if you wanna make it as best as possible.

For some apps, the creatives were really good and they gave me a low CPC and CPI. Lower than for Google Ads. But somehow I have the feeling that the traffic through Google Ads is purchasing more IAPs. I run multiple tests. Switching between Meta and Google Ads. With Meta, I get more downloads, but with Google Ads, I get less downloads but higher revenue.

Lets get into the numbers now. I try to make it more simple:


Ad Earnings: $3500

Mostly through Admob. Using two accounts.

IAP: $14000

Total Earnings: $17500

Spendings: $4000 for paid ads on Google Ads and Meta Ads

This month I spent more on ads because of testing all the ad creatives.

Total Profit: $13500

Whats next?

In August I wanna spend more time updating my existing apps. Optimizing them to get a better ROI and increase the conversion rate. Also I try to work on two more apps. Plus, I want to finally finish the ebook.

Thanks for reading
 
nakamura said:
1. No, for iOS apps it doesn't matter. I only do it for Google Play.
2. Only for Apple. Google is too much of a pain, too random. Extremely malicious. I wouldn't develop Android apps only to publish for Huawei, Amazon, Samsung Galaxy, and so on. Not worth it.
3. It depends on the app and niche. Sometimes yes, to see the user behavior. But the money is all within the Tier 1 (and some Tier 2) countries.
4. Google Ads mostly. Facebook/Meta ads require a lot of testing and creatives.
5. I target iOS 16 as minimum version since a few months
6. Flutter. But I think native is the best. For example SwiftUI.
7. Apps now make 70% of my entire revenue since I scaled it up a lot. Yes, its still a great place. SEO blogging is dead in my opinion, because Google completely lost the plot when it comes to ranking and indexing. Blogging and SEO were great back in 2010-2018, but now its a hit and miss. Before you could do great SEO and expect a certain result. Now you need a good high DA domain and even then Google might randomly deindex or punish you. I would do web developing or SEO as a service. But I wouldn't get into SEO blogging myself. Results (if any) take way too long.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the response.
Have you ever used an "ad waterfall" I Steven Cravotta talk about how he used it on his apps.
 
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Dank19 said:
Thanks for the response.
Have you ever used an "ad waterfall" I Steven Cravotta talk about how he used it on his apps.
Click to expand...
No, not really. My primary source are IAP. The ROI is just so much higher than for ads.
 
Hello, Quick Questions
1- for 13K profit is it all from 1 application in IOS or multiple applications.
2- do you publish in iOS and android too ?
 
kieragerlach4 said:
i'm interested in the process of publishing to the apple store
Click to expand...
You must read the documentation on Apple developer site.
All the info is there. If you have specific questions, then make your own thread about it.

If you are serious about this, then start working on getting dev account.
Dont forget that it costs $99 for license of 1 year.

Its very hard to get dev account on Apple.
For me it took 2 weeks (I almost fell into depression because of this), lots of chatting with support etc, but I got it finally, some people wait 1-3 months or more to get account.
Apple forum is full of messages like: unable to pay for dev account, unable to activate, nobody activates my account, unable to pay etc..

Its a struggle.
 
olivier said:
You must read the documentation on Apple developer site.
All the info is there. If you have specific questions, then make your own thread about it.

If you are serious about this, then start working on getting dev account.
Dont forget that it costs $99 for license of 1 year.

Its very hard to get dev account on Apple.
For me it took 2 weeks (I almost fell into depression because of this), lots of chatting with support etc, but I got it finally, some people wait 1-3 months or more to get account.
Apple forum is full of messages like: unable to pay for dev account, unable to activate, nobody activates my account, unable to pay etc..

Its a struggle.
Click to expand...
Im from the UK and my account was approved instantly the other day.
I think your location has a huge impact on the approval times from what people are saying in the forums.
 
biomo said:
Great journey. Thanks for sharing your updates. Good Luck. Let's hope for the updates.
Click to expand...
Thank you!

Mus4shi said:
Hello, Quick Questions
1- for 13K profit is it all from 1 application in IOS or multiple applications.
2- do you publish in iOS and android too ?
Click to expand...
1) Multiple applications
2) I have a few Android apps, but they almost make no money and I didn't publish or update them for more than one year. So I focus mostly on iOS and they make 98% of the money.

kieragerlach4 said:
i'm interested in the process of publishing to the apple store
Click to expand...
The process of publishing? You mean creating screenshots, finding keywords, and so on? Or what process exactly?

olivier said:
You must read the documentation on Apple developer site.
All the info is there. If you have specific questions, then make your own thread about it.

If you are serious about this, then start working on getting dev account.
Dont forget that it costs $99 for license of 1 year.

Its very hard to get dev account on Apple.
For me it took 2 weeks (I almost fell into depression because of this), lots of chatting with support etc, but I got it finally, some people wait 1-3 months or more to get account.
Apple forum is full of messages like: unable to pay for dev account, unable to activate, nobody activates my account, unable to pay etc..

Its a struggle.
Click to expand...
Yes, it can take kinda long. Depending on how hard you are pushing on it. My first account it took around one week. My 2nd account (company account) it actually took a bit longer, but it was because they always wanted to make an appointment with me to get on a call with me. And I just tried to avoid it, but somehow they were pushing for it and we had to do it. So a woman from Ireland called me and she asked me a bunch of questions to verify its my company, its my address, I choose the correct name, and so on. Basically double-checking together with me.

Dank19 said:
Im from the UK and my account was approved instantly the other day.
I think your location has a huge impact on the approval times from what people are saying in the forums.
Click to expand...
Really hard to say. My personal account is from Germany. My other account is from Hong Kong. But in both cases, someone from Ireland called me.

hexagonal said:
At that revenue per month have you been thinking about raising funds?
Click to expand...
Good question. I should do it, but not really sure where to do it. So far I have only focused on making the apps, making new apps, creating ads, and so on. Its only me who do all the work, didn't hire anyone. Its all self-funded as well.
 
Currently I started running some tests to rank my app in the top charts of some countries.
 
Maybe consider black hat promotion via keywords of other brands that have similar apps on social media.

Sample:

3 apps to do xyz - title of video
Place your app as 1st, dedicate more time to it, highlight key advantages.

Make 1000s of videos like that.
Bank $1 daily on each video.
In total bank $10k a day.

Maybe try to figure out how to create an independent ecosystem of apps if Google Play causes issues.

Maybe do in-browser apps.

Simply experiment more is what I would do.
 
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