7M Downloads: Why Angry Birds Is Free on Android
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The iOS/iTunes ecosystem is incredibly accessible. You don't need a credit card (important for minors; a huge market). You can buy credit everywhere. iOS users seem willing to part with cash.
Google Checkout on the other hand is not available everywhere Android is. People seem less willing to use it (eg 50k paid from this post). You can't buy credit in the retail chain. Google gives developers 95%.
The last one is actually a huge problem. Google's 5% will never pay for retail distribution (Apple's 30% clearly does).
Developers have come to the obvious conclusion: they'd rather have 70% of (potentially) a lot rather than 95% of much less.
iOS has the option of paid and ad-supported. Android only having ad-supported (realistically) is a major disadvantage.
The only way Abgry Birds could make it to Android is on the back of the success of iOS. I wonder how much money their experiment is really making.
Not according to my Google account, it's the same 70% as Apple. Although I have heard that Google gives most of their 30% share to mobile carriers, which troubles me; I really don't like the user-hostile carriers profiting from my work.
Android only having ad-supported (realistically)
That's not the case at all. With zero marketing my paid app makes in the high hundreds of dollars per month (after Google's cut), which from my understanding is much better than the median iOS app. Yes, there are plenty of things Google should be doing better with the market, but it's far from impossible to make decent money with paid apps.
I wonder how much money their experiment is really making.
Apparently enough to continue development.
~CA$1.96
~CA$5.08
~CA$3.05
~CA$1.01
It's completely irrational, but I actually find myself less willing to buy for "untidy" prices. I didn't fully understand why Apple has its tiered pricing system, but now I do.
Back to the point: while I'm pretty comfortable with translating Canadian dollars, British Pounds, or Euros to US dollars, that's about as much as I can do in my head. I'm much happier seeing ~US$1.17 than ¥99, and I'm much more likely to buy the app.
So while I can see your point, I think it was definitely a change for the better, and it probably resulted in increased sales.
Here is a summary of the price brackets: http://www.mcmnet.co.uk/news/the-app-store-explained-news
What Google really should to if they want to get people buying apps is to make a deal with the carriers so that apps I buy show up on my phone bill. If they did that then there would be no barrier at all for anyone to buying apps and I no doubt would have bought several by now.
2) Carrier billing was enabled for T-Mobile several months ago. My understanding is that it will be coming to other carriers as well.
iPads and iPods require the use of iTunes which pretty much requires an account. You have to do this in order to use the devices. Apple pretty much has a system that once you are using their devices you've got an account. So when a user is searching for apps they've already got an account. There is no extra hurdle at that stage.
So as far as I'm aware, you do need a credit card to buy apps, at least in Ontario.
Apple is able to sell iTunes cards in retail stores because they operate the store that the cards are redeemed at. The monetary value of the card does not change from the price I pay for it at my local grocery store and the amount I am able to redeem from the online store. I can buy that card and buy any app with the value of that card.
If a third party was to create a similar system for Android it would be horribly broken. I don't even want to give any scenarios because there are thousands to describe how unmanageable and frustrating any system would end up being for end-users, from activation codes being incompatible between apps to apps not having redeeming capabilities built into them.
Google would have to start its own system to deal with store credits. I would rather they start fixing the problems developers have been complaining about for a while than try to implement additional features in an already un-polished (broken, dare I say?) system.
Also I think prepaid credit cards exist (not sure how exactly they work, though).
Furthermore, who said it should work for the whole Android store?
We have an app with over 1.2M downloads and around 500k active installs. I think the active install rate is low because it is a LITE version. Only - I haven't put ads on the game yet, and have been wondering whether it's worth it or not. If it only makes a little per day, then I'd rather just leave my free users alone and stick with the paid upgrade.
I'd also like to know what kind of revenue they are making from ads on Android. I feel like if we made our game completely free, we'd reach over 2-3M downloads pretty quickly and triple our active install rate, and if that meant we were making as much in ads as paid downloads, then I think we'd consider going that direction. It's just too big of a maybe, and we can't seem to get any inside info about ad revenues to make the leap - even when emailing Mobclix and Admob, we get no response to this question.
Worst of all - I wonder if we are leaving money on the table by not being an ad supported app.
Ho hum.
It's all about live installs... not just downloads.
I could start slow, with just ads on the home screen, then maybe put them throughout.
Is your Android device not quite top of the line? I read recently that Rovio felt that they'd aimed a bit high with their required specs, and that they would focus on increasing performance on mid-range devices in the near future.
In fact, my EUR0.02 is that native-inclusive apps (just like any Java apps which rely on native libraries) are worse, in my opinion, because it limits the number of platforms that one can execute the apps upon. And as a huge Linux fan, current Mac user, and user of x64 Windows at work, I can assure you that I get left out in the cold a LOT.
It's one level of bad to tie your app only to Windows, which coincidentally includes 90% (last metric I heard) of the world. It's another thing entirely to say, "oh, sorry, your Android isn't the same as my Android: too bad for you."
1 = unzip -l AngryBirds_1.3.5.apk|grep -i \\.so
That's interesting - are you sure about that? There's a big difference between a static translation JIT and the more modern and memory-intensive progressively-optimizing JIT's that are used outside mobile. My understanding was that Dalvik's JIT was a one-time-only translater. Its difficult to find any comprehensive benchmarks of the 2.2 JIT - there are plenty of benchmarks showing the 2.1 interpreter eating CPU cycles compared to native code (think 20-to-1), and Google themselves claimed that the 2.2 JIT would mean a 2-5x improvement in CPU efficiency, but I'm still waiting for a set of comprehensive cross-platform benchmarks.
So presuming that you're talking about the "Full" version, and considering that there is no lite version, I'm curious how such a difference of perceptions could possibly be.
If every action is a special case, the game is frustrating to any player trying to build a mental model of the cause and effect relationships within the world.
Now on the other hand, the premise of a game and it's basic interactions may be enjoyable, or at least conceptually enjoyable, by themselves. There need not be the call for the player to accept the gestalt as it is.
Personally, I'd like to see an Angry Birds clone that made it a little easier to understand what's going to happen when you launch a game object in a particular way.
I've got three stars on every level through the first ten worlds, and only a couple of levels seemed to require lucky breaks for maximum points. 3-1 was the one time I gave up and found the three-star solution on youtube.
I would GLADLY pay to get the ads to go away. Maybe they should add a premium, ad-free, version
Personally I suspect that once the hive mind gets to work even ads will stop working and Android will simply not have any commercial-grade software whatsoever.
The mobile app market is still pretty limited. Getting beyond $10 million revenue over all is incredible but nobody has any experience on sustaining success in the mobile market in the long run.
Investing in the brand, on the other had, gives Rovio a lot more options - licensing deals, a movie deal or whatever. It is a tried and tested model.
If Rovio got 7 million extra fans and alot of free media coverage by releasing it for free on Android, that in itself might be a better deal than a half a million in revenue from sales, even if you don't count the advertising revenue.