Google ’not happy' with Android Market purchase rates, many changes coming | Hacker News Reader

Google ’not happy' with Android Market purchase rates, many changes coming

engadget.com

44 pointsshawndumas33 comments

Nuking the 24-hour return policy and replacing it with a 15-minute one was a huge mistake. I've seen reviews of people who said they uninstalled it because it didn't download within the 15 minutes, so they had no choice.

Sure, some people will return within 24 hours if they got enough in that time... But seriously, if people can get sick of your game in 24 hours, I don't blame them for refunding.

So now those devs are definitely losing sales, where before they just probably were. I know I'm -much- less likely to purchase an app than before since I have to have 15 minutes free to play with it, where before I could buy something spur of the moment and then refund later that day if it's bad.

In honesty, though, I'd be very surprised if the vast majority of Android handset owners were even aware that the 15 minute return policy existed, nevermind that it was previously 24 hours. And in this respect, it still doesn't compare unfavourably to iOS appstore.

The 15 minute return policy is displayed very prominently after you buy an app.

But you're right, since a majority have never purchased an app, they may not be aware of it.

IMO, 24 hours is too long, and 15 minutes is too short. What's a good time? I would think that 60-120 minutes would be about right.

I'd personally like to see a 2 hour window. That gives enough time to wait for the app to download, and to take some time to actually use it and figure out if it actually does what you need it to do, and then return it if needed. You just can't make any sort of reasonable evaluation with only 15 minutes to do all that.

It would be nice if the 15 minutes (or whatever timer) started from the initial opening of the app. You can download a bunch and then evaluate when you have spare time.

That's how the iTunes Media Store works when you rent a movie: You get 30 days to start watching it, but once you hit play you have two days before your rental wraps itself up in the eleventh dimension and vanishes into a wormhole. You an pick a few movies , download them, and watch them later.

I'd still be using it today if they rented HD movies to people with Mac Minis.

Yes, but you can't get a refund once you've purchased it, a la Android Market.

Actually, that 15 minute policy is a big source of piracy. All it takes is a rooted phone and you can get ANY app you want for free. Honestly, from a developer's point of view, Apple's way of doing business is a lot better.

Also, if you're like me, I can get sick of any game in 24 hours. Or at least, complete all the levels (Angry birds just takes a few h), so with the previous 24 policy you could enjoy paid games for free legally.

Wow. That's a pretty dodgy thing to do to a fellow developer.

It's even a bit worse than that because of the Market's restrictive file-size limitations (versus the App Store). Many larger games download data from some other server after they've launched. It can easily take longer than 15 minutes to go from game-installed to game-being-played.

Why not leave it up to the app developer?

I think I agree with this. It would make perfect sense for the developer to specify the return period. I mean, even a choice between 15min/ 60min/ 24h would probably be enough.

I sell A LOT of units (games) in the Android Market.

The 15 minute window has literally been a Godsend and has had no negative affect on sales at all.

I get far fewer people refunding minutes before the "refund window" is over AND I only received ONE complaint from a customer who thought they still had a 24 hour window a couple days after the new Market app went live.

You are still welcome to email the developer and ask for a refund if you don't like the game. I certainly refund money if someone hates my games, I don't want them leaving bad comments in the Market, and I don't want their money if they don't like my product, that wouldn't be fair.

"...where before I could buy something spur of the moment and then refund later that day if it's bad."

I believe this is exactly why it was "nuked". If it took you a couple hours to decide if the game is "bad", maybe it wasn't that bad and the ~$1 to ~$6 you paid for it was adequate for the time you spent playing it - whether you liked it or not.

When you go to an arcade, if you pump $3 into a machine, play for 4 minutes, and decide to get a refund, do you get it? Nope. The App Market is the new Arcade. BUT you get to keep the game to play over and over and over again for just a few dollars.

EDIT: I'd like to add that in-app purchases will be awesome.

I'm working on a android game start-up, would you mind emailing me? I'd love to ask you a few questions, or at least see what you've put out. Thanks!

If I bought a game and hated it, I wouldn't email the creator for a refund. I'd either use the built-in refund interface or give a bad review. I suspect most people are the same way.

You seem to be immune to that because you have created good games, but that is far from the norm on the market.

Also, you have no idea how many people didn't buy your game now that they can't refund within 24 hours. Just like piracy, it's impossible to measure actual lost sales. You can only make a guess.

Both app stores have room for improvement, but here are three areas where the Android app store fail in my opinion:

1. On my iPod Touch I have JUST the apps I use. I've removed everything else. On my EVO I'm stuck with apps I don't want because my carrier thinks I shoud have them (even though they'll NEVER be launched). It degrades the experience and reduces my overall perception of the value of the apps on my phone because it's a mix of stuff I want and stuff that's just total shit.

2. Half their screen is consumed by the top green carousel thing. It's ugly, takes up WAY too much space, and tries to sell me stuff that's already on my device.

3. No iTunes. Having a desktop-component to the sales process is powerful.

Agree with your first two points, but don't care about the last one. Windows iTunes is the worst piece of software I've seen shipped by a major corporation in 21st century.

Not disputing your point, but if I see an article about an app I like, I can click on a link, iTunes will open to the buy page for that app and I can buy it right away. No bookkeeping, no forgetting, no interrupting my flow to pull out a device. iTunes sucks, but it does have some pluses.

Since the step after buying an app is playing with it, you need to pull out your phone anyways. My phone sits on the desk next to me rather than, so that's easy. And since a "link to an app" on Android is a QR code, I think total time spent is about the same on either platform.

I agree with you regarding the green thing in the Android Market. However, if those apps changed daily (particularly in the Games section) I think it would work out better for everyone.

If they are not "happy" with the purchase rates then perhaps they should start by fixing the performance of their market-app.

I'm on a fairly high-end android (Samsung Galaxy S) and it takes nearly 60 seconds to open the market-app for the first time. Over WiFi.

Yes, a full minute. I kid you not.

And the agony doesn't stop there. Moving around in the shop is choppy and slow. 10-20 second lags are normal. Overall responsiveness is atrocious. And that's without any app-downloads going on in the background. Go figure what happens once the phone actually begins downloading...

I don't think this is the only reason for the relatively low purchase-rates. But it surely plays its part...

Market load time on my HTC Droid Incredible is about 4 seconds. The green carousel thing is laggy for maybe a second longer. After that everything is responsive. No '10-20 second lags' whatsoever.

same on my xperia X10. thought that's "the old breed" since it runs android 2.1 only.

I agree. Exactly the reason, I have given up on anything but really good 3rd party apps, on Android. I have an iTouch which I use for simple apps. Android is for Gmail, GReader, Hacker News, Reddit and the browser. iTouch for everything else.

Your point and the responses so far bring up what I consider to be Android's biggest problem - unpredictability. Since background software can run haphazardly, a single piece of misbehaving software can bring even the most powerful Android phone to a standstill. And that's no good, if a user finds that something is slow, they simply stop using it. Google encounters this everyday with its search results. For some reason, the Android team hasn't seem to have figured this out.

I see that as a hardware problem, not an android problem. It's still the consumer's responsibility to do their homework and not buy devices that suck. Crappy COMPAQs didn't make people stop using Windows.

How about they start with a decent web interface to an App Market. I am iPhone user but for many reasons considered buying Android handset. Now, the main criterion for me is availability of apps, and I would like to be able to browse through app market and see what's there. But web UI is a joke! No browsing, no categories, and (oh the irony!) no search.

I agree. Downloading Doubletwist does give you a bit of the Android Market, but nothing like the iTunes experience. The most surprising thing is how many of the big apps for iOS are on Android. Not all, but enough.

Unfortunately Google doesn't make access to the store as easy as it could.

I've noticed with the Android Market the Top Paid Apps are rarely of general interest. I don't really want to buy ADWLauncher EX Pro. ezPDF, or the various ROM managers for a phone I don't even own. I have no doubt they are the best selling apps but you really have to dig to find general interest stuff sometimes. I think they should probably balance it out so utilities/modifications don't dominate the Top Paid Apps list. Another issue which sounds like nitpicking, but is actually kind of significant, are all the cruddy icons. I don't know how other people respond to this but when I see a $5 game with a bad 90's Windows shareware style icon I instantly dismiss it. Not a big deal for non-games but I don't think it's unreasonable to assume bad icon graphics = bad game graphics.

I think 2 things need to be fixed in order to sell more apps:

1) Fix the payment declined orders problem. There are a TON of these going on.

2) Add PayPal. I know some of you hate it but I get requests constantly from people asking if they can buy my apps with PayPal.

EDIT:

3) The ability to reply directly to comments would be huge.

I think we may be losing sales because of false claims, or support requests in Android Market comments that we cannot reply to in order to show we are supportive, and you CAN do certain things in our apps that the commenter thought you could not.

I'd be happy if only I had the opportunity to buy apps, period. I can only access apps that are free AND not US-only (so no Amazon Kindle for Android app). While I understand that there may be some considerations I'm not aware of, my iphone-owning friends seem perfectly happy and content to buy iphone apps. So if Apple can do it, why can't Google? (I'm in Panama, by the way).

Want to improve my market purchase rates? Get Sprint to remove the giant upsell button right in the middle of the Epic's voicemail app.

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