iPhone owners are paying millions for QR code readers
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Trend Busting. Check out the full article for more insights.
People ask me if there are still opportunities to make money with apps and they're somehow surprised when I say yes.
I recently stumbled upon an app that most people don't even think about, yet it's making almost a million dollars every month!
The app is Scan QR Code and it's only available for the iPhone. It earned $937K of net revenue, according to our estimates. Net means what East End Technologies, the developer, gets to keep after Apple's fees.
According to our App Intelligence, since its release back at the end of 2022, the app has been downloaded 3.5M times and earned $9M in net revenue. For a feature that's built into iOS. Really.
Side note: The QR reading capabilities built into the iPhone are not great...
Having discovered this app I was very curious to see if any other QR code scanners are commanding such revenue so I jumped into Explorer to find all apps that mention "QR" in their name, which I then filtered down to only include apps that made more than $1,000 in the last 30 days.
Can you guess how many apps I found?
63! 49 on the App Store and 14 on Google Play, published by 62 developers. One is double-dipping.
In the last 30 days, these 63 apps generated more than $4M in net revenue from the App Store and Google Play, though the majority of the revenue - more than 90% - is being generated on the App Store.
The answer is clear - You can definitely absolutely clearly still make money with a simple app. You just need to find the right niche.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
