How to buy your first mobile app: a beginner's playbook

Start with a budget you can lose. First-time buyers typically deploy $5–30k on a small utility or content app rather than betting the farm on a $200k subscription business they can't operate yet.

Pick a category you actually understand. If you have never shipped a mobile game, do not buy a live-ops game as your first deal — the operational load will crush the unit economics.

Do the due diligence in this order: revenue reports, retention curves, review sentiment, code quality, transferability. Stop at any red flag — there is always another deal.

Ask every seller six questions: why are you selling, what breaks first if nobody touches it for 6 months, which third-party services are single points of failure, what's the refund/chargeback rate, who else has access to the accounts, what is the last thing you'd want a buyer to discover after closing.

Close through escrow. First deals go wrong in boring ways — the wrong Apple ID on the transfer, a domain locked at a registrar you can't access, a Firebase project owned by a personal Gmail. A broker catches these before money moves.