I sat down and wrote a little bit on my early experiences in Android development, and publishing. I thought someone here may be interested to read it.
http://chriswstewart.com/2010/08/13/paid-vs-free-my-early-experience/ "I’ve just recently submitted my first applications to the Android Market for distribution. Interestingly enough, one app is free and the other costs $2.99, and because of that I’ve been able to experience both points of view as a publisher on a mobile app store. Lets start with Social Updater. It’s a simple concept that was more or less the typical “developer scratching an itch” scenario. I thought that other people may find it to be useful as well, so I planned to release it into the wild once it was somewhat battle-tested. Taking a step backward, I want to talk about my philosophy on pricing and how I landed at Social Updater being an ad-supported application. I’ve always considered it pointless to give away an application for the mobile phone. Whether it be the Apple App Store or the Android Market, it just seems that anything worth pouring many hours of your time into is worth at least $1. The notable exception being the truly useless applications such as fart apps, and similar. While some may find value in that, I’m really aiming at truly useful applications that serve a purpose (subjective, I know). So with that, my initial thought was to release Social Updater with a price of $0.99. It’s a utility that saves me a few seconds, numerous times a day, and gives me a nice user experience. I find it analogous to things like a notepad, tip calculator, and so on. They’re not mind blowing experiences but rather utilities that serve a specific purpose and ones that someone put real hours of work into. I was set on $0.99 for Social Updater. Yet, quite literally the hour I was set to publish it to the Android Market, I changed my mind and opted for AdMob advertising at the bottom of the app’s main screen in exchange for a free download. Whether I will be right or wrong, far too early to decide that, I did it for a very specific reason. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that releasing it for free would yield a far better download rate and that over time the sheer usage of those downloads would surpass the fraction of downloads I will have gotten with the app having a $0.99 barrier to entry. Additionally, the goal of Social Updater wasn’t about making money, truly. The goal is to get it into as many hands as possible and if I get something in return, fantastic. Whether it got a single download or not, I was going to use it daily, and so I set out to build it for myself initially. Having others benefit from it and enjoy using it is all a plus in my eyes. Moving back to today, Social Updater has utilized one set of tools for analytics that I want to talk about. I’m using Flurry for usage analytics, AdMob for advertising, and the Market Publisher for download and retention statistics. I’ve found Flurry to be a phenomenal tool that I simply couldn’t do without. I get valuable information from it such as geographic distribution, Android framework levels, carrier and handset usage, automatic error reporting, certainly basic usage statistics, and likely so many other things I haven’t even ventured into yet. Putting on my business hat, I look at Flurry and think of one hell of an acquisition if I’m Google. Speaking of Google acquisitions, AdMob has been a little more of a two-faced experience for me. I have one experience that really got under my skin when trying to integrate AdMob into Social Updater. I happened to set up my AdMob account on my netbook, so I went through and created my app in their system on that machine. I then went to my desktop, where I do all of my development, to download the SDK and get to work. Well, go ahead and try to find a download link for the Android SDK for AdMob on their website. Search around the basic site, or even log into your personal account and find a link. I’ll wait. It’s nowhere to be found. The only place I found that link was when creating an actual application in your AdMob account. The download has your application key embedded in a text file I believe (or something similar), and so perhaps that’s the reason, but I find it unbelievable that the bridge between their customers and their bottom line is so difficult to find on their website. There should be a massive button on the front page of AdMob.com for each of their SDKs (Android, iPhone, Blackberry, etc). It’s not good that it’s easier to find information about the acquisition by Google than it is to find the SDK. Now on the other hand, once you’ve integrated AdMob’s SDK into your application, which I should note is rather easy to do in and of itself, the reporting functionality for AdMob is quite good. It can be slightly confusing navigating their “Marketplace” which is what you’d use to either display ads on your application, or create a campaign to display ads on other people’s applications. I do think there’s a reason why you’d want to break those two things out into more clearer silos. It’s like having Google AdSense and AdWords nested into the same application, into the same tab on a website. There’s room for confusion. The last tools that I used with Social Updater was the actual Android Market interface for publishers. It’s a very simple to use dashboard for your Android applications. You have the ability to add two screenshots, an absurdly short description, and off you go. Once you choose to publish the app it will show up in the Android Market immediately. The one big issue I have with this process is how short the description is. It’s only 325 characters, which is simply not enough to explain what these applications do, provide insight on updates, and more. That’s why this site exists today, to provide an extra level of detail on my applications. Overall my experience with developing, publishing, and tracking a free application in the Android Market has been bliss. There’s very little friction along the way and if you can build something that people really want to use in mass quantities, I think there’s potential there for you. It’s far too early to tell in the case of Social Updater, but the numbers already look promising. Fantasy Football is my paid application the Android Market that goes for $2.99. With this application, the only real difference from Social Updater is that I’m not using AdMob and I have been using Google Checkout for my sales portal. With that, I’ll focus on Google Checkout here and how the experience has been different. Google Checkout has been a mixed bag for me. I can say it’s not quite as full featured as I’d like when it comes to easy reporting. I think the product would be served well to change up the dashboard some. I’d like to visit the orders screen and see an aggregate of daily purchases with total revenue, instead of a list of the last 20 orders. I think the issue boils down to the fact that Google Checkout wasn’t built to support the Android Market. It’s been around for awhile and serves a lot of purposes for a lot of different kinds of businesses. It does OK for an Android developer but I think it could be tailored to do a lot better. On the positive side, I love the fact that Google Checkout pays you early and often. Contrast to the Apple App Store, which may have changed since I’ve last looked, and you’ll find a hugely different situation. With Apple, you’ll wait until you reach a certain amount of money to be paid and even when you hit that mark, it will be another month cycle before you’re actually paid. On top of that, it’s broken down by country so if you’ve earned $98 in the US, and $97 in Brazil, you’ll have been paid nothing from each country until each respective country’s revenue hits $100. With Google Checkout, I’m getting deposits daily for my Fantasy Football sales and I think the first came in about two business days from when I published the application. Where Google Checkout really falls short is it’s availability across the world. It comes down to this, if Google Checkout isn’t available in a specific country, nobody in that country can buy your app. That’s a huge issue and thankfully my Fantasy Football is highly targeted to an American audience that it hasn’t affected me yet. Hopefully Google is working feverishly to expand Checkout into the vast majority of countries around the world. Like you may expect, I spend far more time looking at the statistics for Fantasy Football’s sales than the download numbers for Social Updater. What may surprise you is how much time I spend looking at the analytics from Flurry for Social Updater. Once Fantasy Football gets into more hands, I’m sure my time spent will level out. :)" -- Chris Stewart http://chriswstewart.com Fantasy Football<http://chriswstewart.com/android-applications/fantasy-football/>- Android app for fantasy football fanatics and MFL owners Social Updater<http://chriswstewart.com/android-applications/social-updater/>- An easy way to send your status blast to multiple social networks -- 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
