[Journey] Building an iOS & Android App Empire

nakamura said:

Hi, thank you for the nice words. It has been a really rollercoaster, ups and downs all the time. But now I can say I have made it. Currently my ARR is 550-600k USD the business is worth over 2 million USD already.

Yes they are like strikes. Its better to remove the apps when they message you otherwise you can get into deep trouble. In some cases they immediately terminate the Apple Developer account, so you already got lucky with this one. Try to avoid have any other infringement.

Probably whats going to happen when you publish another app with such words, they will immediately terminate the account because they think you do not care about the guidelines and you have been warned twice. So yeah, do not use copyrighted names etc in the title.

Its more important than ever to play after the rules. There is a such a big influx of new developers and apps that Apple and also Google do not really care about anywhere whether they suspend an app or terminate an account. Their tolerance got way lower. Well, Google were assholes before as well as you can probably see from this thread .

Yes, mobile aps with ads and iaps would work well, but games are difficult. you need other hook the players. most players try a game for 5 minutes and then immediately uninstall it.

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praxxx213 said:

@nakamura how much you make profit monthly from ads , and how much from IAP ?
from like ios and android users each one how much it generate profit ?

and there is no cost at all ? as running fb ads

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nakamura said:

i would say iaps are 98% and ads are 2%. but my apps are optimized towards iap. believe me, you will make MUCH more money with iap subscriptions than ads.

why? because you only earn from ads if the user is actually using your app and doing certain actions with the app. with subscriptions its different. the user can make a weekly/monthly subscription, close the app forever and get charged over and over again until they cancel the subscription.

but this eavily depends on your niche and app. you can not make a iap subscription for a quick hypercasual game. but you can make one for a pregnancy tracker. most people hate to watch ads. me too. i added rewarded ads videos as a ragebait attempt to push them just subscribe to the app.

about the profit and earnings:

apple takes a 15% cut from their iap purchases (small dev program)
google takes a 15% cut from their iap purchases

from middle of july until now i havent run any paid ads, but will run soon.

api costs per month around $1-2k

spending on marketing and saas tools depends. few days ago bought backlinks and featured articles. saas tools cost per month maybe 100-200 USD, not more.

oh yes, I am also subscribed to Claude Code Max 20x which is around $200, but this is the most expensive subscription per month i ever bought. but totally worth it tho.

so I would say if I earn around $50k revenue per month i keep around $40k profit

i have waited a few months to fill my companies bank account just as security, etc. so I can pay myself a decent salary for the next years even if things start to look very ugly. just for security.

June, July, August are always bad for apps, also for paid ads. From end of august and september i will start to heavily invest in paid ads (tiktok ads, meta ads, etc.). right now i am optimizing my app store listing and run some test on the paywall (different videos, images, fonts, wording, etc.) luckily revenuecat makes it really easy to a/b test different paywalls for the same app.

these days i have published a lot of apps and done a lot of work for SEO on my landing pages. keyword research, optimization for llm, blog posts, etc. to get organic traffic/downloads through the landing pages to my apps.

this was more like a general update than just answering your questions tho.

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nakamura said:

i would say iaps are 98% and ads are 2%. but my apps are optimized towards iap. believe me, you will make MUCH more money with iap subscriptions than ads.

why? because you only earn from ads if the user is actually using your app and doing certain actions with the app. with subscriptions its different. the user can make a weekly/monthly subscription, close the app forever and get charged over and over again until they cancel the subscription.

but this eavily depends on your niche and app. you can not make a iap subscription for a quick hypercasual game. but you can make one for a pregnancy tracker. most people hate to watch ads. me too. i added rewarded ads videos as a ragebait attempt to push them just subscribe to the app.

about the profit and earnings:

apple takes a 15% cut from their iap purchases (small dev program)
google takes a 15% cut from their iap purchases

from middle of july until now i havent run any paid ads, but will run soon.

api costs per month around $1-2k

spending on marketing and saas tools depends. few days ago bought backlinks and featured articles. saas tools cost per month maybe 100-200 USD, not more.

oh yes, I am also subscribed to Claude Code Max 20x which is around $200, but this is the most expensive subscription per month i ever bought. but totally worth it tho.

so I would say if I earn around $50k revenue per month i keep around $40k profit

i have waited a few months to fill my companies bank account just as security, etc. so I can pay myself a decent salary for the next years even if things start to look very ugly. just for security.

June, July, August are always bad for apps, also for paid ads. From end of august and september i will start to heavily invest in paid ads (tiktok ads, meta ads, etc.). right now i am optimizing my app store listing and run some test on the paywall (different videos, images, fonts, wording, etc.) luckily revenuecat makes it really easy to a/b test different paywalls for the same app.

these days i have published a lot of apps and done a lot of work for SEO on my landing pages. keyword research, optimization for llm, blog posts, etc. to get organic traffic/downloads through the landing pages to my apps.

this was more like a general update than just answering your questions tho.

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Rally09 said:

Could help me with the pricing dilemma? Are you pricing based on your API costs or based on your customers buying potential? Some pricing might be cheap to specific customer segment, does that affect your conversion ratio?

Does SEO still work well in traffic generation and you just setup the websites/landing due to formal requirements?

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