Most free iPhone Apps won’t even "buy a sandwich" for their makers

I guess this is one of those stats that doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but AdMob Metrics has released its May 2009 Mobile Metrics report. It shows that 54% of free iPhone apps that Admob serves up ads to have less then 1000 users, and only 5% have more than 100k users.

As a result, according to Silicon Insider (spotted via econsultancy), the money you make from these free apps is in most cases “not enough to buy a sandwich.”

Though I’m most certainly not a software or games developer my take on this is that this is hardly a shock. If you expect to make money from a free app you are almost certainly on a hiding to nothing unless you develop something brilliant….in which case you can charge for it anyway.

Really where free apps work is as a form of ‘app-vertising‘ (ie branded applications that try to ensnare target customers by providing some kind of value – see North Face as an example), or as a freemium kind of model where you give people a taster of what they could be getting if they paid full price for it.