Of course, you can make money from mobile applications development. Here are 3 ways to make money out of it:

1. Make money from Ads. Think carefully about where you put your ads, and how many. Experiment, check your stats, see what's working. If you get it wrong you could risk bad ratings and uninstalls. This will not help your downloads.

2. In-app purchases. An in-app purchase is great, but if you only have one, once a user has purchased it, that's it. If you then calculate how much money you are making per download, (total money received minus tax you have to pay to your government) divided by total downloads. If this only comes to say ten or eleven cents, then this is the maximum you can spend on advertising your app. Anything more than this and you are losing money. You need to think of a way you can make more per user, you want to be able to advertise your app in the future. Either has more than one in-app purchase or offer a subscription. Add content that your users are happy to pay for.

3. Advertising your app. As mentioned, depending on how much money you are getting per download, this will determine what types of advertising you can afford. If you don't get No.5 right you may not be able to afford to advertise at all And eventually, your app will get stuck at a certain point. AdWords universal app campaign is a good place to start. It's easy to setup and you have control over how much you pay per install. But before you pay for advertising I recommend you max out 1 to 5 first. Make sure your app is generating downloads in its own right. If your users don't think it's worth sharing, then paying for ads is probably a waste of money.