I'm not a mobile app dev, but I could have sworn that I'd heard until recently that no one made money from this stuff. Obviously this article implies that many people are like that, but it also seems to imply that there is a transition area -- a middle tail if you will -- in which independent devs can make money without becoming Zynga or Rovio.
There certainly is. I know from how well our iOS apps chart based on their sales numbers that there must be a huge long tail making nearly zero. 10 paid downloads a day is enough to break the top 1000 in many categories, so that leaves 20-70,000 apps in those categories that sell less than that.
There's a lot of doom and gloom about the big guys pushing out the indie developers, but I believe that there will always be a middle to the market where a small studio or single indie developer can grind out a living on niche apps that aren't big enough for the big guys but are big enough to be worth pursuing. The hard part is finding the right size niches.
yeah, there is definitely a middle tail. The recent app changes have unfortunately moved even more revenue to the top, but there is room for people to make a salary type living on the app store.
