How To Make Money By Selling All Or Part Of Your iOS App

There are many different reasons why you might want to sell all, or part of your mobile app. Maybe you have other commitments that are not allowing you to develop an app to its full potential, or perhaps you just want to cash out and move on to your next project.

Whatever the case may be, there are several options for getting paid for your efforts. This post will review those options and help you figure out which one is best for you.

You could sell your app on eBay, like BuckShot did, but these marketplaces are much better at providing an app-specific buying and selling experience.

Have The Whole Deal Brokered

If you are looking to sell your entire app and have the deal brokered end-to-end, then there is basically only one website to use: Apptopia. They help facilitate all aspects of the sale including the transfer of intellectual property (IP). They pull real time data from the app store, so buyers know exactly what they are getting.

Things To Consider

Selling or buying an iOS app used to be a big hassle, as Jonathan Kay of Apptopia mentioned back in May of this year. But since then, Apple has made the transfer process much easier, you can now sell just one app in your portfolio and all of the ratings and reviews will carry over.

When you are putting your app up for sale, think about why somebody would purchase your app. Is it already performing well? Is there a lot of room for improvement and therefore is an underperforming asset? Are there simple ways that you can improve your keywords or screenshots to increase the number of downloads before the sale?

Then check out the previous sales of similar apps to get an idea of how much your app might sell for. Also try to figure out what the apps that sold for top dollar did to sell for such a high price.

Sell Your App Source Code

Another way that you can make money with your app is to sell all or parts of your code to other developers who do not want to spend the time coding it themselves. Some sites allow you to either sell outright or license your code. Technically, you are selling your source code with Apptopia, but these sites provide less of a full-service solution.

Some of the big app source code sites are: Chupamobile, AppSplit, SellMyApplication and SellMyApp.

Appsplit is marketed more as a crowdsourcing site for apps, but they do have an option to sell your app outright. Just list your app as 100% for sale.

Things To Consider

Buyers who are looking for source code will either want to improve it, use a component or re-skin your app. Think about which site will be best for what you are trying to sell. Some of these sites also allow developers to sell Blackberry and Windows apps, so find out if a site is trying to be too many things to too many people.

Conclusion

Regardless of your reason for wanting to sell all or part of your app, getting some cash in your pocket can compensate you for the time you spent on the app and help you move on to your next project. In a future post, we will talk about how to buy apps so you don't have to start from scratch.

If you have sold an app before, what did you learn from the experience?