>>If you're in it for the money, Android might not be the right platform.
Sadly, I am beginning to come around to the same conclusion, but not just about Android, but increasingly about iPhone and Blackberry as well, if one is focused on consumer (non-business) apps. All these marketplaces are flooded with free apps (with more coming out every day), customer expectations of quality, support and features are high, willingness to pay is limited to nil, and the operators have no interest in tilting the field to favor paid developers as long as there are other developers who will develop for free. The enterprise free open-source model (a la Jboss or Red Hat) of leading with a free product where a percentage of users pay for premium services doesn't extend easily to most standalone mobile apps, and only a few companies have even made a success of it on the enterprise front. I think the only way to to view these mobile app markets is a (loss leading) distribution vehicle to bring traffic to your paid subscription web service (a la Salesforce, Skype) or as a marketing/ customer-stickiness medium (BoA, Citibank, IM/AOL/Yahoo/MSN/Google) that extends the reach of existing services. Only one in 1000 developers of STANDALONE mobile apps has a chance of turning it into a profitable day-job or business. If you have an idea that can garner millions of free users, and can get investment dollars to back it up, then you can go the mysql, myspace, skype, youtube route of building such a compelling free user base that companies with deep pockets and existing services find your customer base attractive enough to buy you. So again my conclusion is that there is no viable mainstream business model in building a bunch of standalone apps for these new smartphone markets whether paid, or ad-supported. I'd be happy to be shown I'm wrong, I WANT TO BE WRONG believe me. I am also considering Ads for my free products, but if Mariano's numbers are correct, I dont know that it's worth the effort. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" 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-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
