My experience selling apps on the Android Market

Don't worry about it, it's still early for you.

My first Android app made $198 in 6 months. My second app made $65 in 5 months. Then another is at $256. (all games)

I have some more games out that don't have this problem :)

It's like throwing darts at a board and hoping one sticks, then after one sticks, and you have it figured out, you start going for the bulls-eye.

NOTE: To hit the bulls-eye you'll need to create something of great value and high quality, plus it should take time and passion to build. My best app took the longest amount of time to develop, has the most polish, required the most logic, and I am still updating it often.

Thanks for the post!

It seems like you have a great opportunity, at low risk, to try some things:

    - Cranking the price up to say $5
    - Adding in license server code, and logging piracy
    - Defeaturing your free version.

Any of these tests would make for a really interesting post, and also indirectly promote your app.

I'm not at all disparaging your efforts, but it seems like an instapaper client should be able to make a lot more money than $130.

I'm also wondering whether, in general, quality Android apps will settle out at higher prices than comparable iOS apps, just simply due to there seemingly being fewer people willing to spend.

If I were you, I'd explain what Instapaper is on your post. I had to google it separately. Basically, it lets you save a website page to read later on any computer you have the plugin installed on.

Can you--or any other Android app developers--share what your active install* percentages are? I'm curious what's normal for the Market.

You're fairing a lot better than I am. I put my first Android app out a month ago (Gas Log) and have made a whopping total of $2.80 in ad revenue. (With an active install rate that fluctuates in the 40%-50% range.)

* active installs are the number of people that downloaded the app and kept it (i.e. did not uninstall or return the app).

For anyone interested in getting detailed metrics on revenue, I just released an app for making plots of income from the Android Market over time. It grabs data automatically from Google Checkout, allows you to distinguish between apps, and overlays price curves.

I've made about $5K over the last year on 4 paid apps. I've posted a bunch of revenue plots here: http://sites.google.com/site/droidful/my-apps/devrev-develop... There's also a QR code for the revenue tracking app.

Thanks again for Hard Copy. It's the best Instapaper app for Android. Well worth the price. :)

here are my numbers to compare, including install base, etc. I wonder how representative these are of the market as a whole.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1620072

Interesting post.

How many hours would you say it took to write the app?