Hacker News Reader

Comment by shimfish | Hacker News Reader

I am increasingly surprised that anyone bothers to make Android apps.

I have a successful kids app on iOS that I recently ported to Android. The Android version made 5% of what the iOS version made last month.

If rankings are anything to go by then virtually nobody can be making money from paid Android apps. During its first week, my app peaked at 50 sales in one day on the Amazon app store. That put it at #120 of ALL PAID APPS and #3 in kids apps just under some Dora app. The app is now idling around #400 of all paid apps with around 10 sales a day. By way of comparison, I need to sell around 100 copies a day to break into the top 400 of all paid apps in the US on just the iPad rankings.

So, from a purely financial perspective, why are people writing Android apps?

View on HN

For a while, Rovio postponed making a paid version of Angry Birds for Android because ad revenue * free players was much higher than app price * paying players.

Also, a lot of the apps I use on Android are "companion" apps for services or web apps that I already use. Eye-Fi, Smugmug, Mint, Facebook, Pandora, Tweetdeck, etc.

So based on 1 data (from your own app), your conclusion is that it is not worth building apps on Android in spite of more than a 100 million devices out there.

Is it possible there are already established apps on Android in your category?

Do you think it would be different if you actually ported your app at least a year ago?

I think the problem is that this application was released solely on the Amazon App Store whereas most Android users are purchasing from Google Play.

edit: apparently this is not the case, though the OP didn't make that clear initially

The app is on Google Play also. It sells more on the Amazon store.

Not exactly. The conclusion was based on the fact that selling 50 copies in 1 day meant it ranked 120 in all paid apps on the Amazon store.

What's the name of your app?

"Hmmm. Would love to say but worried abouthttp://www.jacquesmattheij.com/So+you+are+making+good+money+...

----------------

I thought you're not making money.

Post your app here. I bet a lot of people would be able to point out why you're not making money on Android.

Are you really trying to argue that the Amazon app store offers a comparison to the iOS app store? Do you have numbers for the performance on Google Play?

The most I've sold on Google Play was 8 in one day. This was sufficient to make it rank around 200 in the Entertainment category.

You stated in another response that your app was targeted at 2-8 year olds. I'm not sure that target audience is a good base of comparison between Android and iOS.

My 7 year old daughter has an iPod and she get's iTunes points for gifts. I am NOT however, going to give her an Android Phone. Until there is an Android version of the iPod and a way to buy gift cards for market purchases, I don't see the under ~15 market being lucrative in the Android space.

EDIT: I would also bet that 100% of your sales on the Amazon market are from Kindle Fire users. THOSE are the only small form factor Android devices that are cheap enough to give to children, thus your success there.

I think you are missing the point.

If such are sales are able to get you to into the top 200 then it is indicative of low sales across the board.

Top 200 in a specific category, not overall. I've no idea how this compares to the App Store though.

On Android it is usually better to make the app free and use advertising to make money, with eg Admob or AppBrain AppLift ( http://www.appbrain.com/info/developers)

Do any other developers find this somewhat distasteful? I mean obviously the goal of selling software is to make money, but for me personally I just don't like the idea of carefully crafting a nice looking and useful application and then slapping a bunch of advertisements on top of it.

There is always the possibility to make a paid version then without ads. Or to upgrade via in-app-billing to remove the ads in the free version.

The app is aimed at children from 2 to 8. I'm not going to advertise at children.

That "apart from a purely financial perspective" went full loop there. Because apart from a purely financial perspective why do people create apps for any plat at all ? Would the reasons be shared by plat or are you expecting to probe the "other side" with this exploratory question that puts money out of the equation. You are also extrapolating a lot while not providing basic information for; number of kids on each plat, age of buyers on each plat that went and got your app, etc. That would help bring perspective to your anecdotal example and provide basic input about what sort of market it is that you are trying to analyze.

Myself, I write some software that runs on Android. Mostly Biz Intel and Rich Media deployed from servers that runs on Android enabled smartphone running clients, so none of the App Store experience here, but I like to develop for it because it is something I genuinely love to do. And the money is good too.

Sorry. I fluffed the last line. I've removed the word 'apart' to make it closer to what I meant to say...

No worries, makes sense.

Wait...Amazon App Store? So you didn't put it in Google's Play Store, too? There are roughly 60x more users with access to the Play store than Amazon Appstore. I don't know what you have heard about Amazon's app store - probably that is more "efficient" at making money "per app" than Google's Play Store, but Amazon has a much smaller user base. We're basically comparing 350 million users (Android) to 5 million users (Amazon).

Also, if you do port it on the "real" Android and the Play Store, you should try an ad-supported free version, too. The problem with paid apps on Android is that Google doesn't have a very large Checkout/Wallet user base, and it's a huge obstacle for people who don't have this account to make it right then for a single app that they may want. They are building the userbase now with ICS, since they are asking everyone to sign-up for it, but ICS only has a 7% market share so far, so it will take a while until everyone has Android 4+.

It's also worth noting that if his app is relevant to non-US customers, there are more than a few regional app stores worth looking at. Not to mention the Nook Store (B&N had better children's books than Amazon for quite some time, so that might be an important market for a kids app).

I've just added it to the Nook store though I had to do this via a friend as they don't accept non-US developers.

It's on Google Play also. It sells even less on that than the Amazon store.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com