My Humble Android Sales Figures | Hacker News Reader

My Humble Android Sales Figures

eddiekim.posterous.com

65 pointsedawerd21 comments

Thanks for sharing. I make GPS apps for the iPhone, and this indicates to me that I should continue to wait and see on the Android platform.

I've read that while there are a lot of Android phones, the app buying behavior is much less profitable than on the iPhone. I think iPhone users are just conditioned to spend money!

I feel that there's definitely been a push with the release of Android 1.6 to change the buying behavior of Android phone users. Most noticeably, the Android market app will open to a list of paid apps, instead of a list of free apps.

And screenshots, which can help users make the decision about whether to download or buy easier. Fetching 5 good-looking apps gets better results than downloading 20 mystery ones. Out of those 5, you're more likely to upgrade to a full version.

What is the exposure strategy like? When you update, do you get back on the frontpage? Is there a way of appearing directly to android users like the iPhone has? What about rogue developers and spammers - can they not keep releasing the same app over and over again and appearing at the top of the store?

I'm not sure exactly how it works, and I know Google doesn't disclose any information on this either, but this is what I've experienced: Every time you update your app, you'll get put back on the "Just In" front page list, as long as 7 days have passed since your last update. If you push out an update on your app before then, you don't get put on the new front page.

Like you mentioned, this leads to some unfortunate behavior in the Android market. Some developers will just keep pushing out pointless updates about every 7 days, even though they contain no bug fixes or new features, just to get on the front page.

If you've already downloaded an app, and an update is released, your phone keeps telling you that there is an update for one of your apps. I have almost 20 pending app updates on my phone, and I don't want to spend the time downloading all of them because I know most of them are pointless.

Interesting idea for an app - is there a huge market for this? The biggest parking lot I ever have to worry about is Disneyland or the airport, and I always just snap a photo of the lot ID. Before I had a camera phone, I just wrote it on a slip of paper and put it in my wallet.

So for a 'novelty' app with no marketing, it doesn't seem too bad.

I also just got the Droid, and I'm seeing a lot of "updated for droid" or "not compatible with droid" comments. No doubt the Android platform will open a much broader market, but like the PC, you have to worry about more hardware.

Car finding apps is obviously not a HUGE market that you would want to start a business around, but there clearly are people out there looking for these kinds of apps. I occasionally get emails from users telling me that they've been using it for different purposes, like Geocaching games.

With more phones coming out, on thing Android developers are starting to have to worry about is making sure the app works on a variety of different screen sizes. I guess it's a necessary evil to have to deal with.

Counting yesterday, the ratio of Android to iPhones was about 4:5 among people I personally know. Of course, a lot of them are early adopters and that ratio was changed due to the Droid release.

Counting yesterday, the ratio of Android to iPhones is about 1:200 among people you don't know. Early adopters are nice, but are not really a market niche you can depend on to cover the bills. Android may actually gain some traction, but there is a significant risk that it could end up popping and then flattening out...

I'd support than iPhones are far more popular but I think 1:200 might be pushing it, especially in the UK where better handsets like the Hero have been on multiple carriers for longer than the US.

There were 23000 downloads of the free version, and 220 copies paid for at $2. But it's not clear from the post what, if anything, differs between the two versions.

The free version is merely a trial version that expires after a certain number of uses, prompting people to buy the full version.

I'm not exactly sure if this is a better strategy than simply providing an unlimited license on the free version, albeit with less features.

If you can't cut features, then it's better. Maybe you want to market a kitchen-sink type of app, one that's already trimmed, or that does some thing better than a competitor (showcasing that one thing).

Is there any way of knowing how much use your app is getting?

Google gives one metric: The number of "active installs", which is a percentage of the number of downloads. For the paid app, it's 82%. For the free app, it's 59%. I presume that once the free app expires on a users phone, they uninstall the app, which partially explains the lower active install rate. In hindsight, this may not have been such a good idea, because it's possible (though I haven't confirmed this) that the active install rate is accounted for in my ranking in the app store.

For the free version, I also have the app ping my server whenever it is started. I think I may publish some numbers for a later post.

59% sounds quite high for a trial with so few conversions. How long do you think a user will take to run out of trial?

You call it humble; I call it encouraging.

I've been considering developing an Android application since I got my HTC Hero about a month ago. The only reason I haven't is because... well, I have other things to do. The potential to eat for free for a while is a good push in the right direction :)

From the graph, it looks like the Droid launch was responsible for an order of magnitude jump in sales.

With those kinds of growth rates, the Android marketplace could rival the iPhone very quickly.

That would be more plausible if many other android apps got the same bump in sales on that day. Unfortunately we don't have this information yet. Personally, I suspect that it had more to do with the app advancing to the final round of the ADC2 contest, which happened on the same day.

"I'm attributing the recent uptick in sales to 2 factors: (1) The release of the Droid phone and (2) Car Locator being in the final judging round of the ADC2 contest."

There was a noticeable bump for many apps when the Droid was released:

http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/browse_thread...

The droid also moved 100,000 units in its first week and is no accounting for 25% of Android web traffic already:

http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/11/11/motorola-droid-acc...

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