There are two things any app developers can do to improve their chances of scoring a hit: Make a mobile game. And give it away free. But building an original game is a lot of work and the app store is cluttered with games. So there is a third thing the developer can do—”flip” an existing app. Buy the source code for existing games, hire someone to give it a new look, cram it full of ads and, in the short term at least, profit. It’s not pretty. But it works.
Carter Thomas, a professional app-flipper lays it out in a blog post titled “How I Went From $1,000 to $200,000 With Apps.” Thomas recommends buying the license to the code of games such as endless runners (think Subway Surfers) and then “re-skinning,” or giving it a new look, several times over. The first three reasons he lists for choosing an “endless” game—one that has no ultimate goal, are:
- More opportunities to advertise
- More opportunities to advertise
- More opportunities to advertise
Indeed, the whole point of app-flipping is to churn out apps at as low a cost and high a volume as possible, with the sole purpose of using them as vehicles for advertisement. Thomas recommends multiple full-screen ads at the start of the game and at the end the end of each level. Moreover, he suggests displaying the score at the end of every round as a counter that ticks up rather than an instant number: “That way the user has to wait for 4-5 seconds while the scoreboard gets to their score…while they stare at the banner ad.” It’s all fantastically cynical but worth a read for its honesty.
Thomas also suggests not spending too much on the game once it’s published. He gives it just over a month to double his investment before losing interest in pushing it any further. Of course, Thomas’s enthusiastic proselytizing may have something to do with the app-flipping kit he sells along with a partner. But the phenomenon is real, with several sites and forums dedicated to the practice, and designers and developers selling their services on freelance sites.
It’s not as if app-flippers are rolling in it. Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData, a games and apps analytics firm, suggests that app-flipping accounts for less than 1% of total app revenues. A cleverly re-skinned app may yield about $1,000 in advertising revenue. That’s a big deal only for an individual developer who spent $500 producing it, but meaningless to a large development studio or publisher. Still, a surfeit of such apps “runs the risk of polluting the app stores, and exhausting and alienating the user base,” says Van Dreunen, comparing apps specifically designed to make a little money in a short period of time to the late-night infomercials that air on cable television.