What are your experiences selling on the Android Market?

Question

I've been hearing some good things about Google's Android Market recently, and I might look into developing for android (currently develop for iPhone OS) at some point. Are any of you Android Developers, or simultaneously developing for iPhone AND Android? What have your experiences been for developing and selling your apps on the Android Market? Does Google have their act together in their app approval/deployment process? How does being a developer/merchant on the Android Market compare with the that of the App Store? Are you making money? Do you see this market as promising? Love it? Hate it? Share your experiences on the Android Market.

Answer 1

I actually coded up a couple of apps for the Android market, both paid and free. So let me take the questions in order you presented them.

Q. Are any of you Android Developers, or simultaneously developing for iPhone AND Android. I am starting out to develop for the iPhone just now. On the opposite side of the coin, I know several people who have been developing exclusively for the iPhone, but due to the congestion at the iPhone app store, are starting to develop for the Android as well.

Q. What have your experiences been for developing and selling your apps on the Android Market? Developing is fairly easy. You download the SDK, Eclipse, Android plugin for Eclipse and you are in business. The SDK comes with a ton of samples including a full blown game. You really do not need the phone. In fact, I didn't see an actual G1 phone until well after my app was up on the Android Marketplace and I was curious what the experience was, so I dragged my butt over to the TMobile store.

I first developed 2 free apps. The second (called "It's not Funny") has been a pretty good success. The download numbers, considering the amount of people that own the G1, have been pretty good. Despite the fact, that the application was brain dead simple. I actually added ads to the application and so it's been a small income of $200 per month or so. Nothing to write home about, but pays for a couple of bills.

Then I developed, what I considered to be an actual useful application, at least to me (called "Better Deal") and that has been an unqualified flop. The app was 99 cents and I think to date there has been 20 purchases. On the bright side, the app is also pretty simple and didn't take long to develop. I've heard similar laments from other Android devs as well, vis a vis paid apps not selling all that well.

Q. Does Google have their act together in their app approval/deployment process? It's $25 to get into their store, then another $20 (iirc) to enroll in Google Pay and the moment you upload the app, it is available to be downloaded and purchased. Flat out awesome. Very little bureaucracy.

Q. Are you making money? A. From ads, not from purchases.

Q. Do you see this market as promising? My initial enthusiasm waned a bit, as the onslaught of android phones did not happen, but I still see it as promising.

My only gripe is that if you are stuck and no one can help on the android forums, you are pretty much stuck. I disagree with the API in a couple of places - it could have been done better, but all in a all, an excellent v1. Version 1.5, aka Cupcake, just hit the scene and addressed most of the gripes, plus speed, etc...

Other than that, the development rocks.

Answer 2

As a moderately successful android developer (top 25 game)

• Android is a nice platform. It has a few warts (java code is pretty slow. Hopefully they add a jit in the next version) but if you are not processor bound you can write apps pretty quickly compared to the iphone, winmo or palm.
• I make almost all of my money off of ads. Sales have been in 100-200 copies a month at 1.99. Ad revenue has been around 50 dollars a day for an app with 20k+ downloads. Pretty much all (I am not aware of any overseas) of my sales have been to US customers. If you look at ads served, about 10% are in Europe.
• The market is great. You can post your app and it shows up instantly
• The market sucks. You have like 255 characters to describe your app, no way to do screen shots, you can't respond to comments,...
• Long term I don't know if the ad model is sustainable. I think it is a lot easier for iphone users to buy software (itunes is better for most people than google checkout) so I am not sure if the paid apps will ever take off. If google could get the apps to show up on the phone bill that would change things a lot. I am counting on more carriers (ATT, Verizon,Sprint) and phones (magic and samsung i7500) to increase the market size.

Answer 3

I have an app in the Android Market (Loquacious, twitter client). I enjoy developing for Android, the SDK makes it pretty painless.

I've made a few hundred dollars selling a $2.99 Twitter app in a market where there are a bunch that are free, take that for what you will. I'm planning on replacing my time-limited free trial with an ad-supported free trial in the near future.

I think that because paid apps weren't introduced until several months after the G1 was introduced, the early adopters got used to free apps, and they'll probably never be as likely to pay for something, but I've definitely seen an uptick in sales over the last couple of months and I haven't released an updated since April.

I love that there's no bureaucracy in the Market, so we never hear any of these app store approval horror stories. On the other hand the low barrier to entry means there's a whole lot of junk in there which brings down the overall Android experience. Also, +1 to everything hacken said about reasons the market sucks. Some of these things, I expect, will improve over time.

Long term, I'm bullish on Android. I wasn't expecting a glut of phones to start coming out until the second half of this year, and we look to be on track for that with several more HTC phones and Moto and Samsung offerings. As we start seeing a wider range of phones across all the different carriers, I think Android will start to really pick up.

Answer 4

There are lot of Android Market stuff annoying developers.

• 24h software return policy - because most phone games are meant to be played for just day of two. Most developer are suffering high return rates because of this

• Free apps are favored over paid apps. Most users find it difficult to browse paid apps on market (this is going to be changed in v1.6)

• Really short app descriptions without screenshots (also going to be changed in v1.6)

Answer 5

Here is my input and perspective after selling apps on the Android market for a full year.

I started developing for Android in late November of 2008, my first app went up on the Market in December, when they enabled paid apps on the market in February 2009 I had 3 paid apps ready to go.

I currently have 6 paid apps and 5 free apps up on the market.

Q. Are any of you Android Developers, or simultaneously developing for iPhone AND Android. I am not developing for the iPhone at the moment, mostly because I haven't found it in my budget to purchase a mac for development. Also from my point of view there more developers working on iPhone apps then there are Android developers.

Q. What have your experiences been for developing and selling your apps on the Android Market? Developing apps for Android was not too difficult for me. My Computer Science program stressed learning Java before C/C++ so even though I had not used it in years it was very easy to pick up and start making apps.

Selling apps on the market has been an up and down experience. Initially I had a lot of gripes, but now that I have been selling apps for over a year I am quite content with the process, I make a decent amount daily. At the end of the month I usually make enough to pay my rent.

I have 3 games for sale and 3 utility type apps, 75% of my sales are from 1 game, 20% of the sales are from a different game, and 5% of my sales are spread out between the rest of the apps.

Q. Does Google have their act together in their app approval/deployment process? I feel that they do. Developing the apps is completely free. If you want to put apps on the market you have to pay $25. If you want to sell apps you need to have a Google checkout account (free). There is no approval process; when I list a new app I just fill out the information and upload the package, the app appears on the market within 5 minutes.

Q. Are you making money? Yes I am, it is just a fraction of the amount that I make at my full time job but it is definitely significant. Like I said previously though, most of it comes from 1 game.

Q. Do you see this market as promising? I personally see the market as promising. 1 year ago there were less than a handful of Android devices available to consumers, now there are dozens including some that are considered competitors to the iPhone.

Other Thoughts

It is possible to make some money on the Android Market but I do not think that every single app developer is guaranteed to make a significant amount. The Android Market does have its issues with Developers. The 24 hour refund policy used to be heavily abused, about 1 of every 3 sales were refunded during hte first 3 or 4 months of the Market, now it is about 1 of every 10 sales. The Market applicaiton itself is lacking in the amount of space that you have to describe your app (255 characters) and the fact that you cannot respond to comments or even tell who left the comment is annoying. If you get a 1 star rating because a user is having issues it could be due to a bug that you are unaware of but since you cannot contact the user leaving the comment you will never know. There is no Google supported way of accessing the market without an actual Android device. When I first released apps I had to go to the T-Mobile store to use a demo G1 to even see the comments. There is a website cyrket.com that lets you see the Market from a web browser but that is not an official Google supported site. My last gripe is the Google Checkout service, I would really like to be able to make detailed reports from the sales but the web interface is lacking in being able to export large amounts of data, I ended up writing my own solution using the Google Checkout XML API but I would much rather be able to grab the data I want from their actual pages.

My free games have a decent amount of downloads, over 1 million on my most popular on and over half a million on my 2nd most popular one. There are paid versions of theses apps, the conversion rate of free:paid downloads is about 1% for my most popular game and about 0.2% for my 2nd most popular one. I am currently using Google Adsense ads, I get over 100,000 impressions a day and am making almost as much money from ads as I am from sales.

Paid applications went live in Feb 2009, sales were rather steady from Feb to November of 2009. The Droid was released on Verizon in mid November, since then my sales have gone up 250% and they are steadily rising every month.

Overall the Android Market is a good experience, just about anyone can develops apps using Windows\Linux\Mac and sell them for only $25.

Answer 6

Are any of you Android Developers, or simultaneously developing for iPhone AND Android?

I am an Android developer.

What have your experiences been for developing and selling your apps on the Android Market?

I currently have 1 free app with no ads (so no monetisation of app at all), 2 free apps with ads provided by AdMob and 4 paid apps.

Getting to grips with the SDK was easy, I use Eclipse so I downloaded and installed the SDK, then I checked Android website for developers at Android developers, read through it and more particularly, read through the examples to get an understanding of it. It didn't take me too long to pick up the basics and be in a position to start on my first app (I was familiar with Java before but I didn't have a huge programming experience).

The emulator is quite good and sufficient for most apps but you'd probably want a handset if you develop games (or apps with a lot of fast interaction). You've probably heard that that Android phones come in different screen sizes: you can emulate these with the emulator so it's not something to agonize about but it's definitively something to think about and this may add a little bit of development work.

I like the quick cycle - for example, yesterday, I finished coding an upgrade for one of my apps, I published it last night and I woke up to a nice pile of money this morning. So it's very rewarding because you don't have to wait for approval.

Does Google have their act together in their app approval/deployment process?

Google doesn't actually approve your apps, it goes straight onto the market within minutes of you uploading it to the system. They have removed a few apps for the market, most notably one that allows users to root their phone. The official reason given was that some users might install it by mistake and it could have bad consequences for their phones.

The deployment to the users, that is the Android Market, is improving but is still considered to be behind the Apple app store. Generally speaking, there is a lack of search facilities (which is ironic considering how Google made its name), the categories are a bit confusing (more are added overtime) and more worryingly, some users have reported problems with the payment system (Google Checkout).

Users are allowed to cancel their purchase within 24 hours (soon to be bumped up to 48 hours I believe) - this is a good thing I think because it encourages people to try out paid apps, however it does mean that you do see some cancellations sometimes.

Google Checkout payment is very good. Once the cancellation time has lapsed, the amount (price paid by user minus 30%) is added to your account and you get paid directly into your bank account. You can choose to get paid daily, weekly, every 14 days or every 28 days.

How does being a developer/merchant on the Android Market compare with the that of the App Store?

Can't help you out with this one as I have no experience with developing for the iPhone.

Are you making money?

Yes, but not a full time living wage (I make what I consider to be a half time living wage but note that I'm not a full time Android developer). Mostly, I earn it from app sales because ads revenue has been going down over the past six months (this is probably more to do with AdMob than with anything else, so not really relevant to Android itself).

Do you see this market as promising?

Yes, very promising. In fact, sales for apps I haven't updated recently have been going up - I attribute this to the huge surge in Android users.

When you make a sale, Google Checkout indicates how long ago the buyer registered with Google Checkout. Of course, the user might have registered with it before getting an Android phone, or they might have registered with it when they buy their first app, which might be a few weeks or even months after they first got their phone. Nonetheless, this is a good guestimate of how new they are to Android and, in my experience, a fairly high percentage of them have registered less than 100 days ago (about 60% as an estimate).

Love it? Hate it?

Love it but I hate the amount of spam apps on the market (sexy wallpapers etc) and there are also many things I'd like to see changed on the Market itself (mostly speaking as a user here but of course, how users feel about the Market affects developers as users not liking the experience isn't good promotion for the platform in general).

There is also a good community of developers (the mailing list is quite active). At the moment, there are huge posters for Google Android phones all over mobile phone shops (in the UK) and so it feels great to be part of that (the same way as I'm sure it felt great to be part of the iPhone community of developers when it came out).