I believe that the key for success depends more on promotion than on the effective quality of the application. This is confirmed by the infinite number of fart applications that often have a number of downloads above 1M.
This means basically two things:
- the average intelligence is very low
- we should spend more effort on promotion than programming
I dedicated half year to learn Android programming, how to put ads in the applications and how to use Paypal to receive donations. In this time I developed a few applications that I submitted to Google Play just to see how the market reacts to new applications and how is the best way to monetize.
These are the apps
Forget me not: it is a clone of Simon; I have chosen this as first app because it is simple to program for a beginner. I deliberately choose to not promote it in any form and the result is that in six months I got only 275 total user installs and 60 active device installs. Nothing compared with the number of downloads reached by the dozens of clones in the market.
I used AdMob to monetize it by showing a little banner on the top of the screen and till now I earned $2.93.
Corriere della sera leggero: it was an application to read a famous Italian newspaper. The app reads the web page from their site, remove all the adds and presents on a webview the clean version. I promoted it only on a single forum and in a short time I reached almost 1.000 active installs. Unfortunately I was contacted by the lawyers of the newspaper and I had to remove the app from the market.
I used AdMob to monetize it by showing a little banner on the top of the screen and till now I earned $40.27.
Repubblica leggero: same as above but with another newspaper. Till now nobody contacted me asking to remove it from the market, also because I think it is legal as I do not transmit or change anything in what they provide from their website. I just present it on screen in a different way.
I promoted this application via the same forum as before and I also advertised it on my previous application. This gave me an audience of 1000 extra people. As expected the downloads grow much faster than before and now I have 4.667 total users installs and 1.916 active installs.
I used AdMob to monetize this app and till now I earned $77.43.
Digital eBook Library: this is an ebook reader with126 books available for free download.
I promoted this app through a half dozens of forums and also via auto promotion on my apps. I got a fast initial grow of downloads but after a couple of months the number of active users went down. Recently it started to slowly grow again. Total user installs is 11.759, active installs is 2.857.
To monetize this app I changed schema; I wanted to see if spontaneous donations could be a valid method. The answer, so far, is no.
I put two buttons: one for a Paypal donation and another for Tapjoy. In four months I did not receive any Paypal donation and just $0.07 from Tapjoy.
Recently I discovered that I made an error that caused the servers of Tapjoy to ignore my application, so probably the revenue could be higher. I correct the bug and next month I'll check if Tapjoy was a good choice.
Hypnotoad: this was just a test app to learn how to use the multimedia playback on Android. As it was not an important project I did not promote it and, of course, the number of downloads is very low: total user installs is 283, active installs is 50.
In five months I earned $0.94.
And finally we arrive to the present days with my latest application: GPS, find me!.
Soon a new post describing the application and how I got in the range 10.000-50.000 downloads.
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