Hacker News Reader

Comment by kylec | Hacker News Reader

I don't consider $3.88/month to be "making money with Android". Granted, it's only the first month, but if this was on the iOS App Store at $0.99 he'd only have to sell 6 copies to make that same amount of money (18 if he wanted to offset the monthly cost of being in the iOS developer program) rather than 965 total Android installs.

View on HN

That's true, I chose the advertising method for this app, although its probably slower than selling a paid app on the App Store or Android Market. The biggest factor that led me to decide on a free app was the ability to gather some useful analytics. Publishing a paid app might make more money in the short term, but only get a total of a few dozen installs. Since this was my first app, I thought it would help to do some market research first. Now there are about 1000 active users which gives me a good indication of where to focus future development effort. :)

You need a bigger organic marketing push:

1. How many android app preview websites did you contact and send a demo to?

Haven't contacted any at this stage - thanks for the tip though, I'll definitely look at doing that in future. I guess with this app I was just so focussed on the development side of things, and getting the whole process working that I didn't spend much time marketing the app itself.

Does anyone have a recommendation for some good app review websites? I've seen a few spammy ones around, just wondering if there's one or two sites people actually find useful?

He chose the advertising route, it is a lot harder to make money that way on either platform, unless he has a big hit.

So why would you not immediately switch to a paid model?

Because only the citizens of a handful of countries are allowed to sell applications on Android market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com