Freemium Apps: A Profitable Model For Developers?

By Author: Yancy Marry
Total Articles: 185
Comment this article

A freemium app is a mobile application that is available free of charge to users apart from the premium that one has to pay for accessing the advanced features of the app. A recently concluded study highlights the fact that the freemium model of a mobile application is gradually emerging as one of the most profitable options for app developers. The idea first came to be recognized when basic versions of gaming apps were released for free, and small amounts as fees were charged only for the additional in-game content. Since the gaming apps were initially available for free, it helped to generate publicity & a huge user base; it led to huge profits for the gaming app development company. Though the concept was introduced in the mobile market as an experiment, it has fast caught on the imagination of the target consumers, generating profits for the developers. Today, thousands of mobile apps are initially available for free; an alternate monetization strategy is adopted as the user base expands, thereby proving that the freemium app model is successful.

Top Grossing Applications are Freemium
One look at the top ...
... selling apps running on Android and you will notice that more than 50 percent are available for free. The same theory applies to the gaming apps running on iOS. Since the top two OS platforms conform to the concept of freemium apps being the most popular ones, it is evident that developers are profiting from releasing the freemium apps. An estimate released at the end of this year shows that the number of freemium apps in the mobile market will shoot up to 64 percent in 2015 from 39 percent in 2011. In fact, the income generated from paid mobile applications has stagnated for major OS platforms and several among them are gradually being redesigned as freemium models.

Freemium is the Way to Stand Out in a Crowd
The mobile app market is very competitive. For instance, both the Apple App Store and the Google Play host more than 500,000 gaming & other applications. It is needless to say that the apps available in both stores are reliable & of high quality. But what is that one aspect which will help these apps to draw the attention of the existing & prospective customer base post release of an app? The more the number of free apps, the bigger is the audience base. This is the reason why the designing of freemium apps has increased over the past few years.

However, it is true that the freemium concept of mobile applications is more visible in the area of gaming apps than in other categories. But again, it is also true that gaming apps are the most downloaded & hence the most popular & most used mobile apps of this generation. The freemium model is being adopted in non-gaming mobile apps too, and if reports of analysts are anything to go by, in-app purchases may soon become the most popular trend in the mobile market.

Though there is a section of developers who are not prepared to agree that the freemium model can be adopted for designing apps for every category, the trend which involves no upfront costs to install apps on mobile devices is gradually becoming permanent in the mobile world. It is true that users are prepared to pay for a good product, but the absence of initial costs surely helps make the product more popular

Copper mobile is an mobile apps development company with offices in Dallas, London, and India. It is one of the trusted mobile app development companies with niche in providing mobility consulting to education, enterprise, government and various industry verticals. The Android app development company has created over 300 applications for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and major platforms.