The Decline of the App Millionaire

It is a fundamental law of economics that oversupply drives down prices. Which means those creating whatever is so abundantly available tend to reap less from what they sow.

The logical market-based antidote is supposed to be that fewer of the aforementioned assets get generated as the cost-price ratio comes within spitting range of zero.

Which leads us to apps. There are many theories about why the market has not yet reflected the surfeit of extraneous - and sometimes even useful - programs designed to improve the speed and convenience of daily life. Maybe app developers are psychologically incapable of stopping themselves. Or maybe they are afflicted with the profoundly delusional belief that their creation is so special that the laws of supply/demand and possibly even thermodynamics simply dont apply to them.

It is even conceivable that the supposed shortage in potential coders with good tech skills is actually just a marketing problem. Maybe if companies with a variety of tech needs just advertised for app developers and then assigned them to other tasks, the economy would quickly achieve full employment. Maybe there's even an app for creating that matchup. Just dont tell anyone you know in tech or they'll all try to build a better one. JL

Erin Griffith reports in Fortune:

More than 80% of the 1.4 million apps in Apple’s AAPL 0.86% App Store are “zombies,” meaning they can’t be found on any of the company’s thousands of top rankings (and thus can’t easily be found by users). Most people dont even download one new app per month.

Smartphone apps are sucking up more of our time than ever (a 65% increase over the past two years), but we really use only a few of them. Facebook alone consumes 10% of our time, and most people don’t download even one new app in an average month, ComScore reports.

That’s bad news for aspiring app-reneurs. According to analytics firm Adjust, more than 80% of the 1.4 million apps in Apple’s AAPL 0.86% App Store are “zombies,” meaning they can’t be found on any of the company’s thousands of top category rankings (and thus can’t easily be found by users). Most will languish in obscurity. Getting rich quick: still no app for that