512 apps listed for sale, 344 declaring revenue, and the eight biggest numbers are all anonymous
Pulled every app listing off one marketplace, open and sold, then cross checked the ones that carried a store link. What the pile looks like:
512 unique listings. 344 declare a monthly revenue figure. None of the 512 has marketplace verified revenue. 463 carry a real store link you can follow, 46 are hidden behind a generic title along the lines of "iOS App, Health and Beauty".
Sort by declared revenue and the top eight are all hidden. Every one. The biggest claim on the board is just over a million a month and there is no part of it anyone outside the deal can check. So the numbers get less verifiable exactly as they get more impressive, which is backwards from what you want out of a market.
The identifiable ones held up better than I expected. I ran 67 of the iOS listings through the store lookup: 62 live with a real rating and review count, 5 not in the store at all. One of the live ones declares 1,899 a month and has not shipped an update since 2021.
Across 74 sold listings the median sale came out around 2.3 times annual profit. So a tool clearing 5k a month of profit is worth roughly 138k on that evidence, which is the only part of the exercise that changed how I think about my own.
@pale_hedge · 2w ago · 3 replies
The hidden ones are usually hidden for a boring reason rather than a sinister one. If your app clears eighty grand a month you do not want competitors reading the listing, and you really do not want your own users finding out you are selling. I would not read anonymity as fraud. I would read it as unusable, which is worse for you and fine for them.
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@salt_flats · 2w ago · 2 replies
Agreed on the motive. My complaint is what it does to everyone else's arithmetic. Those eight rows are the ones people screenshot, and they are the only ones nobody can check.
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@north_pier · 2w ago
Which is the argument for using the median instead of the top of the board. Drop the unverifiable rows and the multiple barely moves, because eight rows do not shift a median of 74.
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