Mobile App Developers are Suffering — Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hacking — Medium
"the top 20 app publishers, representing less than 0.005% of all apps, earn 60% of all app store revenue"
“It’s just too saturated. The barriers to adoption and therefore monetization are too high. It’s easier on the web.”
"The app ecosystem has an extremely harsh power law where app adoption and monetization are heavily skewed towards the top few apps. It’s nowhere near 80/20. In fact, it appears to be more like 99% of the value is centralized to the top 0.01%. Let’s call it the app store 99/0.01 rule."
"Discovery Favors The Discovered"
"Paid promotion is completely unsustainable for most apps given that the cost for an active install increased to $4.14 in the last few months"
"The top charts are the biggest driver of the power law, as they are self-reinforcing. Once you make it above the fold in the top six apps overall or within your category, your place is forever cemented in the app ecosystem."
So the platforms (Apple, Google) promote those who pay the most (Facebook),
and in turn this keeps them making profit. Not much different than in other businesses...
