How much did I earn from my 1st iOS app?
I published my 1st iOS app 4 months ago. In this article, I want to share my journey from learning to publishing and how much I made from my app.
TL;DR, Not much. 30$ in 4 months to be precise
The Beginnings.
It was the year 2021, we were in the middle of a pandemic, and work from home was becoming a norm. I had a day job as Software Engineer and I was working from home. Suddenly I had a lot of free time and I was bored, so I started learning iOS development.
I read the following books published by Apple on iOS development
- Develop in Swift - Fundamentals
- Develop in Swift - Explorations
- Develop in Swift - Data Collections
All these books are available for free through Apple Books app. It took about a month to completely finish these books along with some practice.
The idea 🚀
Now that I have some confidence in writing Swift code, I started to think about some ideas to make an app. I am an iPhone owner myself, so I started writing down all the problems that I have as an end-user.
One such problem is keeping track of all my subscriptions (i have many 😬). I thought that it is a nice idea to have an app for that. So I decide to make a subscription manager app. But before starting the development, I went to the app store and searched for “subscription manager”. Tadaaa 🎉 I found hundreds of apps that do the same thing 😅
I don’t want to be a copycat. Since I got the idea before I knew about the existence of all these apps and since this was my 1st app, I wanted to give it a try. I thought at least I will gain some experience.
Coding 👨🏻💻
Over the next two weeks, I dedicated all my free time to building the app. I started with basic features and then added additional features that I thought I will use (like iCloud sync). It wasn’t easy. In the beginning, I had many blocks. I used Apple’s documentation, Google, and StackOverflow as my learning resources. In the end, I managed to make an app that is working as I intended.
App Store Review 🙈
Now I have the app ready and I want to publish it to the AppStore. So I registered an Apple developer account and submitted my app.
Rejected.
Rejected.
The reason for rejection both times was that my in-App purchase was not working for the person who was testing. I fixed it and then submitted it again.
Approved 🥳🥳
“Pro” Tip:- Read the review guidelines and test the app thoroughly before submitting it for review, you can save yourself so much time
Performance 💰
Now for the moment of truth
Honestly, I didn’t expect a single download apart from myself. I haven’t done any marketing and I haven’t even asked anyone I knew to download the app. This is all pure organic traffic. I am happy with the app performance considering the amount of work I did for this one. So it’s a win for me
The Future.
As long as there are users using the app, I will fix the issues and add some new features.
Currently, I am validating some more ideas. This time I want to put more energy into making a much more feature-rich app and also I may try some marketing as well 😁
PS: I have not mentioned my app name in the article, since I don’t want to use this article as a marketing medium for my app. But if anyone wants to know let me know in the comments
