$4.99 app ‘Redacted’ hits #8 spot for paid apps on Mac App Store with just $302 in first day profit, suggesting profits on platform are low
and it's shockingly low Dave Mark / The Loop : A cold splash of water on Mac App Store sales
Context & Ripple Effects
'Redacted' reaching the #8 slot among paid Mac apps yet clearing only $302 on day one was an early warning that App Store chart position says little about money earned — Dave Mark called it 'a cold splash of water' on developer expectations. The same Mac App Store had already shown its strictness by pulling Calendar 2 over guideline violations, so developers faced both thin revenue and rigid rules.
What looked like an anecdote in 2015 hardened into a pattern the corpus keeps confirming: an indie developer's [[a:874222|revenue maps show advertising rising from roughly 10% of his app sales in 2012 to nearly 80%]] as paid downloads faded, and a RevenueCat report across 75K+ apps finds most never reach $1K/month within two years.
First-order effects
- Indie Mac developers learn directly that a top-ten paid ranking yields trivial income, resetting expectations for anyone pricing a $4.99 utility on the Mac App Store.
Second-order effects
- Developers respond by abandoning upfront pricing — the corpus shows ad-based monetization displacing paid sales for at least one prominent indie, and subscription-first tools becoming the norm.
Third-order effects
- Thin per-app economics feed Apple's own defensive posture: the company later hired economists to argue its commissions aren't anti-competitive and commissioned an Analysis Group report showing iOS apps are rarely category leaders, while analyses peg Apple's monthly revenue per user far above Google Play's.
- Utility-category apps face a squeeze from both ends — weak direct sales plus the [[a:867758|Appfigures estimate that OS-level features could 'Sherlock' away some $393M in annual revenue]] from trail apps, grammar helpers, and similar small tools.
The trend: App Store paid-download economics have stayed structurally thin since at least 2015, pushing independent developers toward ads and subscriptions while Apple works to defend its commission model against regulatory scrutiny.