An Android Success Story: $13,000 Monthly App Sales | Hacker News Reader

An Android Success Story: $13,000 Monthly App Sales

eddiekim.posterous.com

68 pointsedawerd25 comments

He got featured on the android market. This isn't something you can plan for, so the $13k/mo figure is not representative. Just because there is always someone winning a lottery doesn't mean playing lottery is a god business plan.

Of course knowing that increases confidence in the platform somewhat.

How is this any different from the iphone app store? Seems like he took advantage of opportunities (entering and placing 3rd in the developer challenge). I'm not a mobile developer but I think its safe to say these are "wild west" times, all he's saying is it's worth looking into ...

Totally agree that being featured is not something you can count on. I was shocked myself to find it on the featured list one morning. I just wanted to share some of my figures, and point out that there is potential out there. We hear a lot of iphone success stories, but not a lot of Android ones.

And I am thankful for that. Just pointing out the difference between regular ol' success story and "we got featured" success story.

I didn't get featured on iPhone store and I make half as much. Keeping the crucial difference in mind I can be confident that Android is not worth my time (yet).

Were you also the first to do a car locator app on android? It seems there are quite a few on iPhone already and I'm just wondering how much of a "first mover" advantage you may have had, if any?

There definitely were other car locator apps on the market while I was making one, so there was no first mover advantage. I've also seen a few more car locator apps popup after I released mine. So I'm somewhere in the middle.

Hard to say, sales are sales, people paid real cash for his product. The promotional boost is nice, but if the product was no good, no one would buy it either way.

Reading this gives me hope, but leaves me dumbfounded.

I've seen about $30 in two weeks from a simple game I have in the Android market. It's not a terrible game, but it's not great either. The free-version reviews are not very good (technical reasons), but some people who bought the paid version left raving reviews.

Like everything else, it's about quality and marketing. Once you leave the "just in" page in the Android market, you vanish. If you want to make this kind of money, I "guess" you better be good enough to be featured, have a 4-5 star rating, and find ways to get noticed (blogging, etc). That being said, I haven't done any of these - so it's all assumption.

As for price, I can attest that for my second game I put out, lowering my price killed sales. The numbers weren't high enough to say what price works or not, but statistically, lowering didn't work. The price was raised from $0.99 to $1.99 again today and I'm waiting for new results.

My team has a game that's doing well on the quality side (~100 reviews and 4.74 average rating), but the marketing is pretty tough. We've got a near-perfect substitute for a massively popular game that's missing from Android - if we could only put it in front of the casual gamers who only look at the featured and top ranked list, I'm sure it would be a bigger hit than most of the games currently featured. I'm hopeful that the great feedback and very good sales relative to our position that we receive will eventually catch someone at Google's notice, but until then we'll just keep making the game better.

On a down note, the recent rating reorganization seems to make it tougher for newer apps in our position to move up the list - a lot of poorly rated and abandoned junk from early in the Android platform's life is above us again now that the ranking algorithm seems to value raw sales above all else.

Still, things are worlds better than they were 6 months ago. We'll continue to bet on Android for the future.

We are on the same page. Our second app was a puzzle game that (we feel) is WAY better than some of the games they have featured right now. It's entertaining, endlessly playable, and has multiple levels of difficulty. It's a new puzzle game that nobody has really played before, but we're losing to games of much lower quality.

Plus, our downloads are very low, but I blame this on the fact that there's a single "Brain & Puzzle Game" category for EVERYTHING!

I could scroll for an hour and probably never see my game.

The "Just In" category was all that I had, now, I don't even see a way to get noticed at all after getting pushed out of there (which I did by someone who posted about 50 different crossword puzzle apps in one day)

Very frustrating, but I too am sticking with Android for the long haul.

I was thinking about trying to advertise with AdMob maybe - so our paid game shows up at the top of some other free games.

> after getting pushed out of there (which I did by someone who posted about 50 different crossword puzzle apps in one day)

This is a real problem on the Android market; I experienced that myself. In almost all categories there are people pushing 10 or 20 (mostly poor) apps in one day, driving all others out of the first pages... Maybe a submission timeout would help.

This is problem is avoided pretty well by Apple's approach, although I prefer the open market of Android.

FWIW - every roughly 2 weeks, an update to your app pushes you to the top of the Just In list.

Just curious, but how did you come up with 4.74 rating? Is there some place that I'm not looking to get that info?

Google doesn't make it officially available, but http://www.androlib.com tracks it for each app. This is also how we read our international comments.

> but the marketing is pretty tough

Especially when you don't mention the name of you app!

I didn't want the point to be overshadowed by seeming like I was just talking up our app. If you're curious, it's aTilt.

* The free-version reviews are not very good (technical reasons), but some people who bought the paid version left raving reviews.*

People value things for which they paid more.

That's a significant bias, but perhaps a more significant one is that most people buying the game have probably already tried out the free one and enjoyed it enough to want to pay money for it.

Congrats on the success.

Btw you mention that your app averaged 20$/day when it was first released. It looks like winning a spot Google's ADC contest, getting featured on the Android market etc. has increased app revenue by a huge factor

At this stage, do you see this as a one-off or do you see it as a sustainable business for yourself. IOW would you quit your day-job to work fulltime on Android apps ?

It's most definitely not a typical result. While I did put a lot of hard work into this, I think a lot of luck came my way with placing 3rd in the contest and getting featured.

I'm surprised more people aren't using the trialware model for mobile apps. If someone downloads this app and uses it 15 times they probably won't be too worried about 1.99 vs. 3.99 for the paid version. The people who don't use it more than 15 times would have never bought a "full edition" if you had gone the lite model. Seems like a good way of doing it.

Even more surprising: For a while I had a bug where the free version had unlimited uses, making it the same as the full version. People were still buying the full version. Didn't notice the bug for months because it barely affected sales.

I just launched on android after having great success with a golf instructional iphone app. While my professionl golf partner got hot and that helped sales, it exploded when iphone made the app new and noteworthy. It came out of nowhere. i guess i'll have to get lucky with android although i do lots of one on one marketing and contacting bloggers

Would have been nice to briefly describe the App and what did he did to make it successful. The latter one in more detail.

He has two previous blog posts which describes that in more detail:

http://eddiekim.posterous.com/my-android-app-sales-figures

http://eddiekim.posterous.com/android-sales-figures-after-wi...

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