Moving on to today’s topic – Do you remember the buzz about Flappy Bird in 2014? It was an extremely simple little mobile game created by a Vietnamese solo developer.
While it was on the App Store for about 10 months, it wasn’t especially popular for nine of them. Then, in January 2014, it became the most downloaded game on the store. At that time, it was earning it’s creator $50,000 per day, all in passive income. While the chances of creating such a massively successful hit as Flappy Bird are extremely remote, the chances of making a good passive income from creating apps are pretty good. It’s not even than difficult to do. It only took Dong Nguyen a few days to create his golden goose and, while was already a game developer and so had some considerable experience in the field, copies and derivatives soon flooded the App Store, several of which also did well.
TL;DR
- Passive Income – once an App is released and perfected, it should require no further work while still earning money
- Free – if doing it yourself, it can be little to no cost to develop Apps
- Relatively Easy – it is possible to develop a successful App in just a few days
- Competitive – you will need to choose your niche and your App design wisely, in order to stand out
- Skill Requirements – to create an App yourself requires some easily-acquired programming skill
How Do You Make Money With Mobile Apps?
How was Dong Nguyen getting $50,000 a day out of a free-to-play game? All of that cash came from advertising. Millions of people were watching the short ads between attempts at the notoriously challenging game and its creator got paid a few cents for each view.
What if you’re not a game designer and don’t have any interest in being one? No problem – you can still make a good passive income from developing simple mobile apps to solve simple problems, generating income in a number of different ways.
There are four typical ways you can make money through apps. These are:
– Charge people for downloading it
– Make the app free but show advertisements
– Make the app free and use it as part of your sales funnel to direct people to buy your products or services
– Make the app free but charge for in-app functions (otherwise known as “freemium”)
– Sell anonymous user data
Of these, the paid-for app is probably the most obvious but least recommended. Even if your app is absolutely remarkable and perfect for the function it’s serving, creating apps is so easy that you’ll soon have a dozen competitors, all charging less and undercutting you. A very typical model is to combine the first and second approach by having a paid-for premium version and a free version with ads. Most people will suffer the ads because it costs them nothing personally, but both will earn you money one way or another.
The next two options, involving selling something to users through the app, are a little more complicated, but probably more profitable. Returning to the gaming world, Candy Crush uses the freemium model by giving players a limited number of free attempts that refresh over time, but the time it takes to get a new attempt is a lot longer than the time it takes to squander one, so the temptation is to pay for additional attempts. It must be a strong temptation, given the game’s stellar financial success!
While the freemium model is especially popular in games, it can be applied to other fields. For example, the Headspace app is free and offers a free course to help users learn to meditate, but they charge a subscription to access their other courses.
The final approach in our list is probably the most challenging because you need to comply with complex privacy laws, which can be radically different from one country to another. However, there are plenty of businesses that will pay good money for user data to help them plan more effective strategies.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There’s no point in thinking about how to monetise an app if you don’t have an app, right? Fortunately, actually making one from scratch is theoretically simple. That’s not the same as being actually simple – it’s not the kind of thing you can get your 10-year-old nephew to bash out in a weekend, unless they happen to be remarkably skilled. However, it’s also not the sort of task you need to outsource to an elite team of nuclear physicist and neuroscientists.
Some programming knowledge will certainly help on your journey, but you can easily either learn what you need from free online resources or just outsource the technical part of the process to a freelancer. The important part that you need to do yourself is come up with the idea.
How To Get Started With Creating Mobile Apps
Coming up with an idea as success as Flappy Bird is, sadly, profoundly unlikely, simply because its success was so unexpected. There was nothing especially innovative about it – the single game mechanic it used isn’t original, the title character was taken from one of the creator’s previous projects and the tubes it had to dodge between look like the sort of things Mario was jumping through in 1985. By some bizarre fluke of internet trends, it just happened to be the perfect combination of attributes to create a game so addictive that it’s removal from the App Store actually created withdrawal symptoms.
Instead, the easiest thing to look for is a challenge – some petty annoyance in everyday life that, while frustrating, isn’t enough for you to completely change how you do things. Honestly, not being a programmer may be your biggest asset when it comes to generating ideas for apps this way. The more removed from the world of programming your areas of expertise and interest are, the more likely you are to find challenges that there are currently no apps to address.
Look at what apps have been successful: Ride-sharing and taxi-hailing apps made it so you don’t have to wander around on the streets looking for a cab and then try to explain where you want it to take you. Airline apps mean you can avoid the long queue at check-in. Bookkeeping apps mean you can track your expenses without having to have a wallet full of receipts or try to modify a spreadsheet on a mobile screen. With various different apps, you can find and compare wines, navigate unfamiliar cities, read road signs in foreign languages, shop, bank and, as we found in a previous guide, even earn a small passive income.
And, yes, you can also disrupt your boredom by directing a pixelated yellow bird through a series of narrow gaps in green tubes.
It’s worth mentioning that trying to make money with a new app in some of these areas is a fool’s errand. Unless you have something unique to offer, you’re not going to be able to compete in oversaturated markets that are already dominated by well-established names. There are, for example, a lot of fitness apps, online radio apps, money management apps, photo editing apps and so on. If you want to make a good amount of passive income from your app, you need to find a challenge that hasn’t already been solved in thousands of functionally identical ways.
The next step is, of course, figuring out how you can use an app to solve that problem. This is where things get a bit more technical, and you may need to hire an expert if you are not one yourself. Unless you know what is and is not possible with a mobile phone, you might not be able to come up with creative ways to conquer your chosen challenge. However, using other apps and even a simple list of typical phone features might help direct you. Virtually every phone now has forward-facing and selfie cameras, large-format multi-touch screens, accelerometers, Bluetooth and voice recognition functions. Can you do anything with all of that? Do you even need to?
Perhaps the easiest course of action, if you’re not a programmer yourself, is to combine the planning and development step into one ‘create the app’ step, then outsource it. There’s no shortage of developers out there who can help you out here, for a fixed fee or for a share in the profits. Just head to freelancing sites like Fiverr, Upwork and others and see what you can find. If you are not a programmer but also don’t want to outsource your idea, Apple has a few tutorials, there are plenty of online courses and there are internet forums where budding new developers can get help and advice.
Once you’ve got and thoroughly tested the app to make sure it does what you want it to and doesn’t break when you try to use it wrong, you just need to post it on the App Store (or others, depending on the format you chose to work in). Give it a couple of weeks to be approved and then market it in the appropriate places and you’re basically done. Keep an eye on reviews and feedback, though, as you may need to release updated versions if there are bugs or if additional features that would make your app more successful are suggested.
Unless you’ve accidentally developed the next Flappy Bird, you’re not likely to make a massive amount of income from a single app. While there are those who make five figures out of creating mobile apps, they tend to be those who have multiple apps on the market. One app may flop while others fly. The more you try, the more you’ll succeed. Making more and more new apps also gives you more practise with programming, so you will almost certainly find that later apps get better and better, assuming you’re either doing the work yourself or using the same freelance developer each time.
Things to Consider before using Mobile App
The biggest obstacle in creating apps as a source of passive income is the need for some degree of programming skill to make something usable. If you are not a programmer yourself and have no interest in trying to learn a new skill, you’re going to need to outsource. This creates two big hazards: you firstly need to find a programmer – someone who has the skills you need and who you can communicate with effectively enough to explain your vision. More importantly, you need to commit to an up-front expense. Depending on the cost of the freelancer, this could potentially be a big investment that, if the app is a flop, you may never get back.
As apps are relatively simple to develop (if you know what you’re doing or know someone who does), the market is extremely saturated, so you might find it difficult to come up with an original idea. Of course, as illustrated by Flappy Bird, your idea doesn’t necessarily have to be totally original – just better executed. However, unique and successful ideas rarely remain unique for long. In the case of Flappy Bird, hundreds of clones appeared on the market within weeks of its success getting media attention. So, even if your chosen market isn’t saturated when you release your app, it may become so soon after.
Finally, note that an app is not necessarily the sort of passive income source you can just release and forget about. You may be called upon to make updates if there are bugs, if the operating system is radically changed or if important features are missing or could be improved upon. You may have to provide some tech support and customer service, though that really depends on the app. The simpler it is, the less extra work you’ll have to do later.
How Much Does It Cost To Get Started With Creating Mobile Apps?
In theory, it is free to release an app and start making passive income. However, that theory relies on you doing all of the work yourself, which is challenging. Even if you’re a good programmer, you might need art assets created, text written and edited, marketing and other additional tasks completed in order to make it a success. Fortunately, few of these skills are absolutely necessary in every case.
However, if you have none of these skills, you can still make a passive income by creating apps, but you will have an initial expense from hiring freelance talent. Depending on the complexity of the app, this could be as little as a couple of days of a developer’s time to weeks of work from a full development team. It’s best to start simple to minimise the potential loss.
Learn more about Passive Income Apps
If you are interested in learning more about Amazon FBA and how it can create you a passive income, check out these links:
Appypie – No coding platform for building digital products
GoodBarber – Native Apps and Progressive Web App Builder for eCommerce and Content Management
MobileRoadie – Mobile Apps for Excellence
Appery – Everything you need to make your own App
AppMachine – Build your own App or build App’s for others