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Android Alternate Market Review: Appia

ProjectJourneyman Posted on by

Appia Android App MarketNext in the Android Alternate Market Review series is Appia.  You may not have heard of Appia – but that doesn’t mean that you haven’t seen Android apps through their partners.  Appia purports to supply apps to over 40 app stores.  Piping your Android app into a large network sounds enticing – read on to see if this is the right place to put your Android apps and games.

Update: The Appia app store will be closed as of the end of 2013.

One point of entry

Having a single place to upload your Android app is a good thing.  One of the reasons I focus so much on evaluating each Android app market is that I want to choose the best ones for my app and save myself the time on all the rest.

Earlier this year, Appia got $10M of funding, so obviously they are doing something right.

However, I’m not completely sure how much exposure I’m getting with all of those app stores.  It’s possible that Android isn’t their strong suit yet, but it might also simply be that my app isn’t best suited for this market.

Primary points

  • The Appia network deploys to over 40 sites
  • They offer additional features, such as pay-per-download, ‘cross-sell’ to offer discounts for those that purchase multiple products from you, and volume licensing.
  • They support many languages for listings, but some must be approved.
  • They offer the ability to add an app store to your web site

I’m not sure how long it takes to get approved for alternate language listings, but my Spanish listing has taken about a week so far.

Obviously the large network of app stores is a good thing.  The jury is still out as to how effective their network is, though.

Negative points

  • For paid apps, payment is withheld until $250 is reached
    • UPDATE after over a year on Appia, I haven’t met this threshold.  Downloads of free apps are decent, but Appia might not be good for lower-volume paid apps.
    • Further update: The store is now closing, and I will likely never get paid for my app sales on Appia
  • The submission process is a pain, and not intuitive – can’t have any assets with the same name between two different apps, and have to puzzle out the difference between OTA files and download files and figure out where the .apk file should go (hint: for Android apps add the .apk as an OTA file).
  • Required graphic asset sizes are non-standard
  • App submission requires explicitly indicating compatible devices, screen sizes, etc.
  • Download rates are somewhat low on main Appia site, but those numbers aren’t to full picture. Handango doesn’t list DL count, while AndroidGear seems to show a reasonable DL count. PocketGear shows decent download counts. Reports are separate between the sites still, so you have to visit PocketGear separately to see reports for it.

Update:  It looks like the systems have merged.  Or, at least they killed developers.pocketgear.com so it’s a moot point – you can’t check download counts there anymore.

To get download numbers from Appia, go to “Manage Products”->”View/Modify your Products” to see download estimates.

While there is some confusion as to the download rates, I still think this is in the secondary tier of Android app stores.

Is Appia for you?

Due to the international distribution and the large number of affiliated Android app markets, I suggest that Appia stay on your list.  I don’t think it should be at the top of your list though, as I’ve reviewed a number of sites that have given me a larger number of downloads.  Take a look at some of these reviews.

I have just released my paid app to Appia to test how it performs vs. the free apps.  I’ll report on how well that does after a few months (or sooner if it’s doing well).  Update July 2011 – so far, I haven’t see very good download rates at all for my paid app.  I’ll still give it a little time, but I’m not very impressed so far.

Update November 2013 – Appia is closing their app store at the end of 2013.

Comments

Android Alternate Market Review: Appia — 18 Comments

  1. We’ve tried appia and got surprising results on many ways. The couple of apps that currently are live have a decent amount of downloads. But when we tried increasing apps we started receiving e-mails for some apps from their partner Handango claiming that our apps violate copyright somehow – however no details were given. We’ve tried to get them to answer to us what they are referring to, but the do not answer any e-mails. To us it seems somebody else might have published our apps on their site, but as they refuse to answer we cannot know. It’s a strange situation to be in as obviously they have some important information that they will not disclose to us.

    In any case you have a great site and good articles – keep up the good work!

  2. Another week without reply from appia or handango on this. Be careful with these guys.

    • Thanks for sharing your experiences. I’ll keep an eye on them, and this information certainly keeps me from giving Appia a solid recommendation at this time.

  3. Thanks for this useful information! Added one of my apps with Appia today and it’s already gone live 🙂
    Hoping to see some good results as I have some localised apps.

  4. Hi,
    we are starting a CPI campaign with Appia – do you have any advises and recommendations? What is average CPI per US install? What’s your experience as to relations and support/troubleshooting with Appia? thanks 🙂

    • I haven’t done any cpi campaigns yet, so I really don’t know. Please share how your campaigns go! The main advice I’ve heard is to carefully track performance. Hopefully you have a way to track your per-user revenue from those paid installs.

  5. Great information! I am on the same path.. from IT to app development.
    I have an Andriod app (3D game) that I believe is suitable with international audience. It is on google play. I am thinking of uploading it on Appia. Two questions.
    1. Their upload page has tons of compatible devices. Is there any easy way to see how devices are android compatible for my app.. or just go thru them one by one? I am not sure about device compatibility. there are many international devices that I have no idea if my game will work on.
    2. When I submit the game to Appia (I believe .apk file), does it have any size limits?
    3. How do I know they publish the game on their partner sites?
    Thanks and keep up the good work!

    • I think that asking developers to go through that entire list of devices is negligent on the part of Appia. That’s what the manifest is for! I actually just enabled them all. Unless you have an idea of incompatibilities (screen size, processor, android version, etc.) I tend to start from the assumption that an app should be compatible. Of course, I can’t see ratings and feedback through Appia so it’s possible that there has been some complaint.

      I don’t recall if there is a limit on file size, sorry.

      Once your app is set up, Appia takes care of handling their partner sites. There isn’t much you need to do on that front.

      For international exposure I also suggest you check out Samsung Apps, which I have had better luck with recently. It has its own quirks, of course.

      • Thanks for the reply. This brings a different question that I came across as well. Appia claims to be marketplace for Samsung apps too. I also found one more distributor called Mondia Media for International apps. Their fees are much attractive than appia. But my question is – If there are overlapping publishers for different marketplaces, how is the priority detected? e.g Vodafone works with Appia and Mondia, if I publish on Appia and Mondia, what happends on vodafone app Market?

        • The Appia news on Samsung is old (and Samsung apps has been building up steam lately), so that relationship may not be ongoing. You raise a good point however – I submitted a question to Appia support. I don’t know anything about Mondia, though – I suggest submitting a question to their support team. If you have good (or bad) experiences with Modia, please share – I haven’t investigated them yet.

          I would hope that Vodafone uses those two aggregators for separate markets – e.g. using only one or the other in each region. No guarantees, though. They direct users to Appia for the emerging markets pages that I saw.

          This kind of thing can be a problem – when Handster got a contract to convert all uploaded Android apps to BlackBerry, I had to opt out – my apps were already on BB (I reminded them after I caught a duplicate entry).

          • Reply from Appia: “The stores we power are exclusive from other stores you may be distributing through. For example, if we are working with Vodafone and you’re also submitting to Vodafone your apps can be in the Appia Vodafone store and the Vodafone store.”

  6. Hi,

    You post is very informative with practical results. I recently released my game to PlayStore with ~10 downloads in 2 days. But got 100+ downloads from sites like apkbrain.

    I am going through appia right now with hope of getting more downloads. I request please keep posting updates regarding your store experience. We are Indie-developer community, and after google’s “new games / just in” section removed i see indie devs wihtout marketing funds in darkness right now.

    Also investing in marketing is not that profitable if the content is normal quality with regular theme. 100s of $ disappear in minutes. Only CPI based ads are te only way.

    • I agree that marketing is often money thrown away (particularly if you don’t have well thought-out plan to track and measure results). Don’t give up on Google Play just yet though, since I still see it as an important component of your app’s reputation and as a source of downloads. It might just take a while to find the right factors to get noticed.

  7. So to publish a free app through Appia, are there any fees involved (like developer fee, distribution fee, … etc)?

    Thank you for this blog, I found it recently and I have already read all of it! Keep it up!

    • There are no fees to publish with Appia (their commission comes out of the sales price for paid apps), although there are optional services you can use that may involve fees. The main cost for me in using Appia is working with their somewhat slow interface.

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