Monthly Consumer Spending in This Niche Just Hit $27M
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - Silent Millionaires. Check out the full article for more insights.
Identifier apps are silent millionaires. There, I said it.
Over the last few years, developers have shipped more than a thousand apps that leverage AI to identify different things, from plants to snakes and everything in-between. And there's a lot in-between.
I used Appfigures Explorer to analyze all 1,328 identifier apps across the App Store and Google Play and I hope you're sitting down because these numbers are not small.
We'll start the analysis at the top. According to Appfigures Intelligence, consumer spending on identifier apps reached $27M in the last month. That's what the end users paid and before Apple and Google took their fees.
Next, I analyzed the different types of identifier apps. The analysis resulted in 15 distinct categories, that I had to modify a bit because I didn't want to aggregate too much.
Most identifier apps are for something specific, like animals or coins, while some are multi-purpose.
If you're thinking about building the latter, don't.
26% of the identifier apps currently available on the App Store and Google Play are multi-purpose. That's the largest group in terms of number of apps, but they accounted for just 1.4% of the total revenue. Not a lot. Focus wins. If you've attended any of my live streams you'd know that.
Plant identifiers was the second largest group in terms of number of apps at 23%, and for a good reason. According to our estimates, the category is the highest earning type of identifier app, responsible for a whopping 78% of the total revenue.
According to Appfigures Intelligence, that's $21M of consumer spend right there. No other group is even close!
Fun fact: The Photos app on iOS has a plant identifier feature. It's very hidden and not nearly as smooth as the competition, but it exists and clearly isn't hurting revenue.
There are a few more groups that are making much more than I expected. Coin finders make up 9% of the total number of apps and 13% of the total revenue, having grossed $3.5M in the last month from the App Store and Google Play, according to our estimates.
The only other group to gross more than a million dollars is the rock identifier group, which includes gems, stones, and minerals. There are a few more of those than coin identifiers, but revenue-wise it's only responsible for 4% of the total.
Birds, bugs, and mushrooms didn't get to a million individually, but do if you add them all up, which is more than I'd expected.
So... Should you stop what you're working on now and go build an identifier app?
Maybe.
On the one hand, there's a lot of money in this category. On the other, it's very saturated and competitive. Instead, what you should do is find the next category to take off like that and build for it.
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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.
