[android-developers] Re: How much money do you make?

I've never seen my app in the featured apps list even though it is in
the 20-30 highest rated paid apps in its category on AppBrain. When I
first published my app about 18 months ago, I would get one order
every few days. Raising/lowering the price did not seem to affect the
number of purchases. Before the Motorola Droid came out, it had risen
to coffee money per day. There was a large spike in orders when the
Droid came out,
which raised it up to gas money per day. There was another small
spike when the Nexus One was released, and a more significant one when
the Galaxy S came out and paid apps became available in South Korea.
My best day of sales was about $150, which occurred when my app was
featured in a Droid X root video on YouTube. It is normally
significantly less than that.

The most interesting thing is piracy though. My app is 95% pirated
worldwide, and 66% in the USA where paid apps are available. Over
half of the users for my app are in China (100% pirated) and since I
published my app in the Shop4Apps store (Motorola apps store in China)
there has not been a single purchase. I am not sure if I priced it
right (just did the $USD to RMB conversion and rounded it off) so
maybe it is way overpriced, I don't know. Even adding LVL has not
helped the situation much, since there are still many older versions
of my app still floating around on the pirate sites.

I had an Ad-supported version of my app for a while. It made less in
several months than my paid app made in a day. Not worth it IMHO.
The conversion rate from free to paid was very low from what I could
tell. The only good thing about that free app was that I got a free
Nexus One out of it. That, and I used to use it for testing my app on
new phones in the wireless store when they came out.

In an attempt to help paid app developers, I'm now mostly using paid
apps, the best of which I've found with AppBrain. I try to buy 2-3
apps per week. I'm also not publishing any new Free apps.

When third-party apps came out for the iPhone, most were free. Now
I've heard that the majority of iPhone apps are paid (don't know for
sure since I got rid of my iPhone.) I guess this will happen in time
for Android as well, as long as paid apps become supported in more
countries, and more payment options are supported. It would also help
to be able to filter apps better in the Market client, and if apps
were actually sorted reasonably in Market. There is one app spammer
who has five identical free spam apps which come up in Market search
results above mine, despite his having 2-3 star rating and mine being
north of 4.5. Go figure...

-Howard

On Sep 18, 3:18 pm, Mark Murphy <mmur...@commonsware.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Michael A. <michael.aki...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have also had a
> > few individuals donating money for the app which really impresses me,
> > since the Android Market TOS forbids me to offer any incentives to in
> > return for such donations (and I note this in the app).
>
> Out of curiosity, what clause in the TOS do you think applies in that
> case? If you want to give donors a T-shirt, I'm unaware of any TOS
> clauses that would prohibit this.
>
> --
> Mark Murphy (a Commons Guy)http://commonsware.com|http://github.com/commonsguyhttp://commonsware.com/blog|http://twitter.com/commonsguy
>
> _The Busy Coder's Guide to *Advanced* Android Development_ Version 1.9
> Available!

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