Is it really profitable to develop applications for mobile phones?

Lately much has been said that it is very cost effective to develop applications for smartphones for the future of business, but how true is that it is very profitable? although there are impressive success stories how Instagram which was bought by Facebook for a billion dollars, but what about other applications, as there are thousands of them.

For in App Promo have done a study using surveys of mobile application developers and got a very revealing data as it shows that most developers do not even get back what you invested in developing the application.

And to illustrate this information they have created an infographic called “ Wake up call ”:

These are the hard facts that we can see:

• 80% of developers does not recover their investment.
• 59% of applications do not generate any profit.
• 68% have invested $ 5,000 or less with their most successful application.
• 63% of developers have less than 50,000 downloads for their successful application.
• 52% spent less than 5% of the time in promoting apps.
• 52% spent $ 0 on marketing.

Although we also see some data are less successful and failures, but not all doom and gloom, because as we can see a point less exploited is the marketing application. For it App Promo have also created a guide called “The Necessity of Mobile App Marketing: What It Really Takes to Succeed with a Mobile App”.