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Comment by opencl | Hacker News Reader

The Android version seems abandoned, it hasn't been updated in several years and there are several reviews complaining that paid features no longer work. Are there any plans to update it?

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I do personally apologize for this. The android app was built by a very close friend of mine as a favor/side project back in the early days, and you are correct, it has been abandoned :( The plan is to just take it down. I need to contact him but don't want to offend him! Let that be a lesson of going into business with friends!

You’re making a healthy revenue, any reason you don’t want to just contract out a few updates? I work full time but I've also run a small contracting business for years, happy to do it at a reasonable cost.

I have considered this, I don't see anywhere near the same purchase conversion on android that I do on iOS. But that could also be due to build quality. Do you have any insight on how successful pay models are on android apps?

This is pretty standard - most Apple ecosystem users tend to be somewhere between 2-3x more measurably valuable, whether App store v Play store revenue [1] or as audience segments in advertising.
You may consider a relationship with another developer where they maintain the Android distro in exchange for some significant percentage of revenue.

1 - https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-1h-20... - source needed, but speaking from experience at scale

This is the norm on Android, and means you have to have huge scale before it's worth releasing a paid or subscription app on Android, which might be viable at much smaller scale on iOS. It's part of why Android's ecosystem has so much prominent adware. Common wisdom (backed up by data) in the industry is that, generally speaking, your "conversion rate" for paid or subscription apps on Android will be a tiny sliver of what it is on iOS, unless your app is very unusual.

There are a bunch of factors that probably cause this, but they're all mixed up and intertwined so it's hard to point at one and go "that's it, that's the reason". Selection bias of the user base (think: socio-economic status, and maybe even average technical know-how or comfort with software); iOS users use their devices way more than Android users, for all purposes (but, is that because of the previous thing? Maybe); it could have something to do with the ecosystems the two app stores have cultivated, causing different levels of trust among the two user bases when it comes time to spend money; it could have something to do with the quality of the experience of using the respective operating systems themselves.

Probably all of those contribute some amount. It's hard to say, though.

Mate - you're making $4k/mo. Budget some Operating Expenditures! Check into "Profit First" to ensure you're handling your business finances in a proper manner. A healthy allocation of OpEx is 30% of your revenue at your size. Start saving $1200/mo for all OpEx, and use some of that to build your Android app. It'll pay dividends!

Isn't building an android app capex?

Curious if you've thought about getting anyone else to take a look at the Android side of things. Seems a shame to just let a working project fizzle for Android.

Do you have a repo or something for the Android app that curious people could look at?

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