Android Income Report #7 (Indie dev makes over $1000/month) | Hacker News Reader

Android Income Report #7 (Indie dev makes over $1000/month)

makingmoneywithandroid.com

18 pointsobviator7 comments

Is it just me or does it feel very wrong that this app profits from copyright infringement? Can companies like Apple sue for damages from his Fake iPhone 4S app?

The other Android income report which shows up here often is from kreci who profits from similar prank apps (https://market.android.com/developer?pub=KreCi.net&hl=en) which feed off of ad revenue.

Personally, I try to strive for a higher standard of app which should be the goal of most Hacker News readers.

Agreed completely. It seems crazy that the author is flaunting it too, as I'm sure that will make it more likely that he'll catch legal flak.

Seems hardly worth it for ~1K a month too.

Samsung shamelessly rips off Apple icons (sometimes without changes in promotional materials), makes billions: Apple's the big bad for suing them.

This developer blatantly rips off Apple's icons, makes $1k in a month: Apple should sue this guy!

One of the other income reports that shows up is from someone who copied code for a Space Invaders game verbatim from Mario Zechner's, "Beginning Android Games". It's a great starting point for starting Android Games. Apparently the guy is making over $1.5k per month with 1/3rd from AdMob and the remaining from a more intrusive mobile ad company. It looks like there are some graphics improvements (new OBJ file for the spaceship) and a main menu screen but that's about it. It's a bit annoying, but on the other hand we have a guy almost making a living off of GPL software. (If he refused to release his GPL code, I guess we can be unhappy with him, but otherwise kudos!)

Another one is Frozen Bubble. There are a lot of clones based of Pavel forget-his-last-name's code. I'm not complaining about the existence of the clones as the code is open source.

However one of the developers irks me.

The developer's domain name for his support email was registered to a Kentucky Fried Chicken in San Mateo, CA very very close to Google HQ. I called. No one knew a thing about it. I sent info to Google through the appropriate channels, contacted the develoepr and then gave up after nothing happened and posted a review. All that happened was that my review has now turned invisible to others on the Market and his whois is now anonymized.

Excessive permissions on one his apps as well because of hidden analytics and phone ID mining. (I think if you're sending information off from a phone you should be explicit about it somewhere - at the very least on the web page for the app). He had pushed this app out and had 350 Google +1s almost instantaneously. 3 months later he hasn't even crossed 400. The devloper has seriously gamed the Market with several titles near the top rankings with just "okay" software.

Caveat about the KFC dev: I had a competing (not Frozen Bubble) game. For the first week of it being live it wasn't even searchable by name. Meanwhile his launched at the same time and his stats were reaching escape velocity.

Them's the breaks.

There are several ways to game the number of downloads you get. Some are more ethical and/or effective than others.

I'm Johannes, the Space Invaders guy. To make things clear right at the beginning: I love and support open source, not only because it's somehow making me money, but also because I think, as we are beings living in communities, openness and sharing are the ways. Before Mario published his book, he wrote a German tutorial on game development (which, same as the book, is great), that's where I have the code base from. I mentioned Mario in the app as well as in the Android Market description as well as on my blog and our website and left the game licensed under the GPL of course. There's not much more referencing I can do. I also once took the game off of the Android Market, but Mario told me to put it back on. Regarding the ads: The other ad network I use is madvertise. T me it's interesting that they appear to be more intrusive to you, since their banners actually are a lot smaller than those by AdMob. How come? I also use Heyzap which I also find a bit annoying, especially on small devices, which will be removed with the next update.

Personally, I really like quality apps and think on the long term, even if they are not financially successful, the gain is bigger with these apps than with apps that provide lower quality. However, also prank apps can be of good quality of course and in the end it's the user who is judging. There had been more or less successful fake iPhone apps on the Android Market almost since day one, but most of them don't exist anymore. That's also why I thought David's app would be removed fast, especially when the audience became bigger. This didn't happen so far, which surprises me a little. For David, I hope nothing like a lawsuit or removal will happen, but the possibility obviously will always exist.

Well first of all: kudos!

Secondly, I'm very glad to be corrected regarding madvertise as my European requests are on par with American requests yet my European fill rate has been horrible. Coupled with reading your blog and knowing that you used madvertise, I thought your "read phone state and identity" security permission was a madvertise requirement. (I meant intrusive as in security permissions, not screen space.) Again, very glad to be wrong. Apologies.

One of the things I'm enjoying about Android development is getting a chance to do it all. Artwork takes significantly longer than programming. Even loading the end product onto a couple of app stores can exceed total programming time. I am really enjoying getting to know Blender better.

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