Android Income Report | Hacker News Reader

Android Income Report

droid-blog.net

62 pointsandroidoka8 comments

It's very interesting to see data like this, but in other ways it's a bit disheartening when I compare his install numbers to my own efforts. I've put a few apps that I feel are unique into the Android store, but it feels like throwing a pebble in the ocean. Nobody notices. Anybody have advice on how to get visibility? I've sent app review-requests to the various Android sites, but I know they're inundated and I've never had any response.

I have taken a look to your free and paid applications and they are promising. In fact, you seem to be doing quite a number of sales of your "Social Media Ticker" application. It seems that you are lacking behind in free applications. I can give you some free advice based on my own experience developing applications for the android market.

First, I see you have published one free app a wednesday, and another a saturday. In my experience free applications launched friday night have better exposure than midweek. It can deepen on the application, but usually when I launch or update a friday night I get better results all the weekend than launching any other day. It might be the case that there are less applications in the new category to compete, my theory, most updates happen in working days.

Secondly, there is no way of knowing what the users want in advance. It seems they are not interested in saving pictures to the SD card or settings a screenshot as a wallpaper. I believe your abstract photo painter is a fun application with bad marketing. You can benefit from a name with more grab. It could even be doing too much: too many effects, too powerful. You could potentially advertise just one effect like "warhol-ize your friends", but make it easy. Social might help you: share your patenting on Facebook. Tweet it. whatever… at least, change the icon. A smiling female showing your effect can be a good idea. Even the "mona lisa". But your current icon looks awful.

About Android market SEO. You have long descriptions describing what your application does, which is good. Try to check if there is keywords related to your product on mobile search. This could increase your installs. A good starting point is the adwords keyword tool. You can set the results to only mobile. And don't use generic words on the name of the application unless you are king of the hill. Users searching for wallpapers are not going to notice your "Wallpaper Share" among the ton of results.

Thanks a whole lot for taking the time to check my apps out. That's about the only feedback I've ever gotten, and I'll see if I can incorporate your suggestions. I tend to throw the apps out into the store, send out a few emails and social-posts and then sit back and wait. I need to iterate to see if I can make significant SEO changes when the current descriptions aren't getting the job done. As an engineer, I realize I suck at marketing.... sigh...

Thanks for posting these!

I just launched my first 2 apps in the Android Market today (a DJ application called DJPad, currently only for tablets, free and paid versions). DJPad's been in the WebOS app store for about a month so I was planning on doing a similar income report for my first month (spoiler: not great ;) )

Have you looked at all at Airpush's advertising platform? I google'd Admob and it came up as an ad on the search results. It was easier for me to implement Airpush at this point since my app is 100% NDK with just a Java wrapper for launching it. Integrating Airpush was just adding the airpush library and launching the service in my onCreate().

They offer some interesting advertising verticals like ads showing up on the notification screen or home page instead of in the app. Kinda spammy but probably effective if you want to advertise and your app does not get long engagement.

Please do not Airpush. Users hate it and apps are almost guaranteed to get one-star reviews because of it.

Thanks. At first it seemed like a great idea (instant integration, better payout)...

Until I installed my app and experienced what they consider advertising. A cloned google search icon called "search" on my home screen that brings me to some scam site? woah. I'd be embarrased to tell people to go get my app, so I don't think it's worth it.

Time to switch my app's free version to AdMob.

Yes, that's my experience too.

So you can count on each of your Android users generating less than $0.0027 in revenue for you?! (Actually, I guess it’s even less if you factor in the existing customers.)

THAT ANDROID’S A DAMN FINE PLATFORM!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com