The App Store for Apple set a very good precedent for people paying at least something (often 99 cents) for mobile apps. There are a large number of apps, but if you can catapult to the “Top 100” list in iTunes, you can generate some revenue from the sale of your app. $0.99 can add up if you get 500,000 customers. On Android, I see a LOT of free apps and doubt there are as many people buying apps as on Apple’s system. On my first Droid phone, I had over 200 apps on it and I think I paid for 3 of them. A breakdown:
Paid apps - When you buy them on Android, you use Google Checkout and the app manifest is recorded in your Google account. If you ever replace your phone, the paid apps can be re-hydrated for free. An example one – GolfShot lets you use your Android as a GPS and scoring tool on the golf course. $30 is pricey for a mobile app and you need an extended battery to make it through a round, but this app is great. Lets you know how far to the hole, hazard, etc. Also keeps score for you and your friends and emails out a scorecard at the end. Goodbye, short pencil and paper scorecard and $300 dedicated GPS unit. A port of an app that started on the iPhone. Another example: a WiFi remote control that will work with your Tivo. Great if you misplace the Tivo remote:
Donation-ware: Some apps have a free version, and a second version with the exact same bits in it but you can donate money to the author by purchasing the donation version. I bought the donation-ware version of myRemote, a cool app that lets you control a PC running Windows Media Center using a WiFi connection. Time for dinner? Pause the movie the kids are watching in the other room. This is really the same as a paid app, just a different marketing angle. There are also ad-free paid apps that are just the same as the free ones but with no ads.
Most Android apps are free as in beer, you can download and install them free of cost. The installation of free apps are also tied to your Google ID, so your rating and comment for the app will remain and survive install/uninstall and even if you drop your phone and power up a new one. If that happens you will have to manually re-install all of your free apps, though. See below for an example of comments/rating persistence on my new phone.
More notes on free apps:
- You can uninstall and re-install free apps any number of times. Some people seem to have uninstalled the Gong (really?) as our total installs number is much higher than active installs.
- Starting this month if your app is free it may never become a “paid” app in the Android Market. You would have to release a completely separate version to be paid. Note that this might kill some “freemium” models but might still support “in-game revenue” models.
- A subset of free apps have advertising in them as a way to produce revenue. The next article will focus on how to enroll in the different mobile application advertising networks, and implementing the code to serve up their ads. But first, a little more background info…
Ad-supported free apps: A lot of data suggests that across mobile platforms and on Android in particular, mobile ads can pay off as well as or better than selling an app. Recently Android passed Apple in monthly ad revenue according to Millennial Media:
http://www.droid-life.com/2010/10/19/android-eclipses-iphone-in-ad-revenue-for-first-time/
The difference between free and even charging one cent is huge. There is a wealth of information on the web. about the disruptive force of “free”, etc. From our data, the free Gong app reached over 1,000 installs in a month. The paid-for Gong app that existed before us (at 77 cents) has between 50 and 100 downloads. So at the most he made between $38 – $77. If you could beat $77 in ad revenue, you’d be outperforming (but still not terribly lucrative). We decided to see how it worked. We installed ads at both the top and bottom of the page. So far we’re still short of hitting $25 to recoup our Android Market developer fee, but we learned a lot in the process. More in the next post on the “how”.
We’ll back up a bit, to when I decided to try publishing to the Android Market. I had read that the Android publishing system was very open and quick with little to no oversight. This was considered a benefit for the following reasons
- No draconian “App Store” committee to tell you whether or not you can publish your app
- No lag in time for App Store approval – publish when you want
- An open system versus a closed one
- Crowding – fewer apps on Android right now, so it’s easier to get noticed and used
(more depth on this here - http://ezinearticles.com/?Android-Market-Versus-Apple-App-Store&id=4266917)
I went to the main Android market page and clicked the link for developers, which brings you to http://market.android.com/publish/Home. You can sign up to become a developer, all I needed was a Gmail account and $25 on a credit card. I landed on the “upload your app” page, which asks you for an .apk and some supporting files. The following screen is the “update” screen and not the “initial add” screen but you get the idea.
This is a double edged sword that must be wielded with care. In about ten minutes I was able to sign up and upload an apk into the market. It showed up INSTANTLY in the search results in the market and could be installed by users. I had figured when I went to the movies that no one else would search for or download the Gong app. I thought I could consider the launch “semi-private beta”. I was wrong! I made the change to launch the correct class name and used the upgrade feature to launch the “1.1” version of the app. There are two changes you make to your manifest, a VersionName which is the readable name of the major.minor.patch or whatever naming convention you choose for your releases. There is also a VersionCode which must be an integer and must increment in each release. This is what signals the market to recognize an upgrade. The VersionName can’t be counted on because my 1.1 might be your 1.0.1 or 1.0.0.1 which is our second release in any case.
When you log in to see how your uploaded app is doing, here is the dashboard:
I signed up for a merchant account too in case I wanted to do any paid apps down the road. There’s also an offer for you to buy unlocked developer phones that can have the OS flashed if you want as well, they are around $400 – $550.
When I clicked through to see the error reported, here is what I saw
This is what got me to stop looking at how I packaged/loaded the apk, and start looking at the refactoring I did. Renaming my main class to Gong worked. Version 1.1 went up on Sunday morning and there have been no problems since. I uploaded a 1.2 later in the week with some snazzier graphics (icon and gong image). I have thought about some other feature ideas (a widget for direct play, ability to shake the phone to ring the gong, etc.) but haven’t implemented them. I am debating whether to work on those or try doing an iPhone gong. There are already a few in the App Store. There are some interesting articles on the viability of the App Store and Android Market, from a market share and a “how much money do developers actually make” perspective. A sampling:
http://blog.flurry.com/bid/18265/Can-Developers-Still-Make-Money-in-the-iPhone-App-Store
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/android-developer/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2010/10/android-generates-more-ad-revenue-than-iphone.php