How to create an app (and make money from it)

Alan just wants to get rich. A project manager for a tech company, he says he’s sick of seeing ideas he’s had but has failed to act upon launched to huge acclaim by others. “I want to quit my job,” he says. “I thought coming here might give me a push. I have a lot of ideas.”

He is one of a crowd of twenty and thirty somethings who have gathered at Dublin’s Twisted Pepper venue for a recent event called “How to Build an App” run by a group called Made It (http://www.madeitseries.com/). And interest in the subject goes far beyond these walls. Online searches for “how to make an app” or “how to create an app” each return more than two billion results.

As various entrepreneurs and experts give their considered thoughts and tips on the maturing app market, young men and women lean forward in their seats or tweet on their smart phones (this is permitted as long as they turn their ringers off).

Over interval drinks, Alan tells me it hasn’t been as uplifting as he’d expected.

"They're being a bit downbeat," he says. Earlier, one of the panellists, Clare Dillon, Microsoft Ireland's head "developer" mentioned a report that suggested only .01% of apps would be a financial success (this was research released by Gartner Inc). There was a flurry of similarly downbeat statistics.

“I think some of the people who came along really think apps will make them rich,” I say to Dr Susan McKeever, who teaches mobile software development at DIT and spoke at the event.

“Yeah, I could tell that from some of the people I spoke to as well,” she says. “There have been some high profile winners in the app market, particularly in the early days but as you heard, it’s only one in a thousand will make money from an app so there are huge number of redundant apps sitting in the app store that nobody downloads and nobody knows about.”

Those high profile winners include well-known game-changers – Angry Birds, Whatsapp, Instagram, Hailo, Tinder – but there are also some forgotten, lucrative success stories from the early days which had simpler appeal.

There’s iFart, for example, which is an app that can fart (variations of fart include “Brown Mosquito” and “Burrito Maximo”).

“There’s another I remember,” says Simon Judge, co-creator with Chris Judge and James Kelleher of the Lonely Beast educational apps. “It was just a pint glass that would empty as you tilted your phone.” He laughs. “That was very popular.”

These are all vastly different services, ranging as they do from taxi-coordination to flatulence emulation. And as I write, the Samsung app store’s “hot” apps include the familiar-sounding Clumsy Bird, the Tamagotchi-like digital pet Pou, the free telecoms app Viber, a talking Tom Cat, a weather app and something which provides funny ringtones. Among the new apps is a paid-for “Lie Detector” app, which can’t really detect lies (it admits as much in itself in its blurb, which is very “on-brand”).

All these App Stores amount to really, according to James Kelleher, is clever software delivery services. “I mean, we’ve had apps since the dawn of computers,” he says. “An app is just a bundle of code and assets tied together and presented in a package. It’s a thing that does a thing on your thing.

What Apple did, back in 2008, was create something "frictionless". "It was very easy to send in your password and buy something and get billed for it," says Kelleher. And it was also, just as crucially, an easy platform for producers to put products on to.

Apple essentially created a viable free market for buyers and sellers where previously there had been none and their competitors quickly followed suit.

Chris Anderson, Wired magazine's resident futurist, quickly declared the world of standalone applications to be the future of the internet and not the more interlinked world of websites.

“The web is dead,” declared his magazine in 2010.

"It was a revolution," says Stephen Conmy, co-founder of the five year-old Appys competition. "Out of the open sourced democracy came a revolution. It democratised the process. I don't think even Steve Jobs anticipated what that app ecosystem would do."

David McMahon and Conor Winders of Redwind Software had a movie quiz app ready to go on the very first day of the app store. They didn't even have a business plan, says McMahon.

“We’d always been into games but it seemed impossible for us to make a game and put it out there and have people playing it. Until that point if you wanted to publish a game yourself you needed a distributor and physical copies of the game.

“This was the first time you could make something yourself and put it straight into a store and start making money from real users. All we wanted to do was to get it up there.

“We were early enough that we were getting users just because we were there. It got a lot harder very quickly. You couldn’t release an app now without a marketing budget. Back then just being there was enough to get you a user base.”

At the time, McMahon and Winders made enough money to quit their jobs, establish their company and devote themselves full-time to app development. He doesn’t believe they’d have been able to do this today.

Things have changed a lot since the early days. Apple’s app store is no longer the only market for apps. There’s the increasingly popular Android, as well as a number of other burgeoning platforms. And as smart phones proliferate there are more app consumers. But there are also increasing numbers of people creating them.

“I just ran a transition year lecture this morning and they had all created apps and in theory they can go home and load their app up on to the app store,” says Susan McKeever.

There are a lot of apps out there – over 900,000 on Apple and 800,000 on Android – and there have been close to 100 billion downloads across both platforms (Android edges Apple here).

Many of these are useful, but many are badly made or are clones of other apps.

“There’s a bunch of dreck in the App Store,” says James Kelleher. “At one stage I heard that there was a Flappy Bird clone being uploaded every 24 minutes.”

(Alan tells me he had been in touch with some developers in India who spend their spare-time cloning apps that are successful on one platform in order to launch them on others).

There’s also an issue with companies buying into the hype and launching unnecessary apps when what they really need, says Stephen Conmy, are “good responsive websites”.

“Is the app industry flooded with a lot of apps that never make it or don’t have utility for people?” he says. “Absolutely. There’s no used in denying it. The vast majority of apps up there go unnoticed. Only the few can make it.”

The ones that do flourish, he says, increasingly tend to be “those who have the bigger budgets and who advertise more” not lone mavericks working from their bedrooms.

The wider economics of the app market have also changed.

“What you saw happen very quickly in the app store,” says David McMahon, “was prices started to shoot down. Indie developers kept pricing the stuff lower to get higher downloads and get higher in the charts. It ended up becoming this race to the bottom . . . now people don’t even charge for apps. It’s all about in-app purchases and virtual currency and stuff like that.”

Redwind quickly moved into client services, becoming app developers for hire (one of the few reliable ways to make money in the business), usually working in partnership with other companies.

Kelleher and Judge are very proud of the success of their Lonely Beast apps but say they were surprised at how much marketing they had to do once their products were made. “I think there is a gold rush element, in that a lot of people think there’s easy money to be made,” says Kelleher. He laughs. “There’s not.”

The reality is the market has matured and mature markets tend to favour more established companies over plucky upstarts and steady incremental gains over overnight windfalls. This is part of the cycle of life in the business world.

“For success you have to fulfil a need and the need initially was simply ‘It’s really cool that you can download an app, let’s see what they can do!’ ” says Susan McKeever. “But now that people are more used to their phones and apps, their needs have become more sophisticated. They’re harder to please.”

There are still occasional outliers who come from nowhere to have a huge hit, people like Nyugen Ha Dong, Vietnamese creator of the wildly successful, notoriously difficult Flappy Bird game. This was so successful, its overwhelmed creator withdrew it from circulation last February (it was replaced by dozens of clones). Such examples serve to give hope to those who dream about digital fame and fortune hope.

“The myth is stronger than reality,” says Conmy, “but the very possibility of underdog success means the romance is always there. In the same way they used to say that everyone has a novel in them, there’s also romance in the idea that one day your app will be developed and be a huge success.

“But the gold rush has stopped and the frenzy to must have an app has stopped and there’s a maturity coming to the sector which I think is really good for it.”

In fact, he says he doesn’t mind that the market is oversubscribed. He sees app creation as a great training ground for much-needed developers. But none of them are going to become millionaires? “

They might!” says Susan McKeever. “With the right idea they might. I’d never want to discourage them.”

Made It’s next event, How to Get Published, is at the Twisted Pepper, Dublin 1, on July 10th