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.

 

[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.