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 <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 6:15 PM, Michael A. <[email protected]> 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! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
