Monetization is the most important part of the mobile development lifecycle. Without a well-thought model of getting money it is impossible to become profitable.
There are 3 main monetization techniques for mobile applications:
- Paid applications (with trial version of the app)
- Free-to-play applications
- Mobile advertising
It turns out that most of mobile apps are free. It means that the first way of monetization (paid apps) is used rarely. You can read more detailed statistics in this article from the Flurry blog (it is a company which provides tools for gathering analytical data. You can find more about mobile app analytics here).