A surprising new study from mobile analytics firm Vision Mobile, says the average monthly revenue from a BlackBerry app is $3,853, compared to $3,693 for iOS and $2,735 for Android.
In order to paint a more accurate picture of what a typical developer makes, Vision Mobile lopped off the top 5% since those blockbuster apps would greatly skew the results.
But even among the ranks of uncelebrated developers, there’s still a lot of variation in revenues. Vision Mobile estimates that more than half of all BlackBerry developers make less than $500 a month on their individual apps, compared to 34.7 percent of iOS developers — you make less money by developing for the iPhone but there’s a better chance you’ll at least make some.
BlackBerry apps are also the cheapest to develop costing on average $15,181 to bring to market, compared to an average of $27,463 in iOS and $22,637 in Android.
Despite the figures many developers are planning to ditch the BlackBerry OS – 41% of current RIM developers will not leave the OS according to the survey. Microsoft seems to be benefitting from the exodus with 57% of developers surveyed planning to adopt the platform.
Of course the problem for BlackBerry creators RIM is not their OS but their hardware. BlackBerry phones are outdated compared to their Apple and Android counterparts. If customers continue to flee from BlackBerry the profitability of their apps is not sustainable. Developers along with everyone else it seems don’t see RIM making a comeback.
Apple and Google are unlikely to be perturbed by the survey’s results. Developers are always likely to go where the consumers are and the latest figures from comScore show that Android and iOS have 60% and 23% respectively of the global smartphone market.
