I feel like to a large extent this is just techcrunch being techcrunch and writing link-bait articles.
My thoughts on this:
1) Just about everyone is "interested in making money" from their apps. I'm not sure how they're filtering the developers in the survey, but I'm willing to bet the amount of effort put in, and the actual methods used to "make money" differ wildly among those developers. Apples to oranges.
2) 5-10k per app per month for a single developer with a full-time job doing this in his spare time is pretty good. For a 300 employees company, not so much. Similarly, millions a month will sustain a large company and make an individual developer extremely wealthy. What are we comparing?
3) I'll go out on a limb here and say that games make more than any other category on the app store. They also tend to require a higher budget and production value: better graphics, sounds, a storyline, etc... Maybe the 100 flashlight / todolist apps competing for the same spots don't make much money but they also cost nothing besides a weekend of work and the $99 / year ADC membership. I also wouldn't be surprised if most of that "1.6%" were game developers. Lumping every app together and trying to get stats out of it doesn't tell us anything about how much the developers are spending to get those apps out.
4) Obligatory plug: Storm8, the company I work for, is recruiting. We're a mobile games developer (on the App Store we tend to be better known as TeamLava) and have been profitable and fully bootstrapped for over 5 years now through rapid growth. We're all very passionate about creating new games and refining our existing ones and have a lot of interesting projects to work on. We're looking for developers interested in learning more about the mobile games industry, no experience required. Email is in my profile if interested :)
My thoughts on this:
1) Just about everyone is "interested in making money" from their apps. I'm not sure how they're filtering the developers in the survey, but I'm willing to bet the amount of effort put in, and the actual methods used to "make money" differ wildly among those developers. Apples to oranges.
2) 5-10k per app per month for a single developer with a full-time job doing this in his spare time is pretty good. For a 300 employees company, not so much. Similarly, millions a month will sustain a large company and make an individual developer extremely wealthy. What are we comparing?
3) I'll go out on a limb here and say that games make more than any other category on the app store. They also tend to require a higher budget and production value: better graphics, sounds, a storyline, etc... Maybe the 100 flashlight / todolist apps competing for the same spots don't make much money but they also cost nothing besides a weekend of work and the $99 / year ADC membership. I also wouldn't be surprised if most of that "1.6%" were game developers. Lumping every app together and trying to get stats out of it doesn't tell us anything about how much the developers are spending to get those apps out.
4) Obligatory plug: Storm8, the company I work for, is recruiting. We're a mobile games developer (on the App Store we tend to be better known as TeamLava) and have been profitable and fully bootstrapped for over 5 years now through rapid growth. We're all very passionate about creating new games and refining our existing ones and have a lot of interesting projects to work on. We're looking for developers interested in learning more about the mobile games industry, no experience required. Email is in my profile if interested :)