Android Market does not seem to be profitable at all.

[robertdawson]

Looking through the Android Market, it seems as if there really isn't a good way to make money at all as a developer. Choose nearly any type of application and there are tons of professional level applications that are completely free (supported by ads mainly). I could spend 100+ hours developing a game, price it at a measly $1 (giving me about 70 cents per sale, Google gets the other 30 cents) and some giant company is likely to create a superior game merely for advertising purposes that will make my application almost certainly unsellable. With the Android Market flooded with decent-high quality applications that are also *free* how is anybody making a decent amount of money at all on the Market? I looked at the top sellers last year and I believe I saw something that said the *most profitable* application on the Android Market only made the developer/s $100,000. This amount was also substantially higher than most of the other "top sellers" if I recall correctly.

[EvilMonkey]

I never thought there was much money in app development anyways (regardless of platform). You really have to luck out to break through the noise (not to mention have a good enough app that people are willing to pay for it over a free app).

Maybe some developers can chime in with their thoughts. I don't think there's very many people making a lot of money with it. The most popular apps are obviously developed by companies with teams of developers (think Angry Birds for instance). They have the money and resources to throw at making an outstanding app and the promotion and marketing to go along with it.

Not that there aren't "one guy coded this in his spare time" apps out there, and some of them are even great....but the number that actually succeed in making the developer a lot of money are few and far between (and by "lot of money" I mean enough to quit their day job....as you mention, even if you can make $100k, it's not that much compared to what a talented developer is probably already making coding .NET or something. And it's short term since you'll sell less the longer the app is out there).

And not to discourage...I am still a believer that if you make a good enough product, you can sell it. But don't go thinking you can make a mediocre product and sell it for $1 when other people are giving away better apps for free.

[greydarrah]

I think I read that Angry Birds is making about $5,000,000 per year from advertising that gets clicked on. Granted, they have a lot of downloads to support that. I've read of a number of developers that are making $1500 to $2500 per month with maybe 3 to 5 apps out. Most are free and have ads. Usually they'll have 1 pay app and the others are free. That is definitely not a fortune, but it's a mortgage payment, or a couple of car and insurance payments. The only think that is an absolute is NOT developing any apps will make you no money at all. Give it a try...you might have fun...you might develop the next Angry Birds.