

An Android Success Story: $13,000 Monthly App Sales - edawerd
http://eddiekim.posterous.com/an-android-success-story-13000month-sales-0

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DenisM
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.

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edawerd
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.

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gcheong
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?

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edawerd
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.

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dpcan
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.

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trajan
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.

~~~
dpcan
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.

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metachris
> 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.

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credo
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 ?

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edawerd
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.

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jsz0
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.

~~~
edawerd
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.

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yrralman
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

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

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kqr2
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...](http://eddiekim.posterous.com/android-sales-figures-after-winning-the-
andro)

