Favorite Android Alterate Market Review: Amazon Appstore

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Amazon Appstore for AndroidYou’re probably already aware of the Amazon Appstore market for Android apps, and its potential to earn you money.  Still, I’d like to introduce it quickly for those who aren’t familiar with it or why they should be putting their Android apps in this market.

Update:  Also check out my success story in ranking #1 in the Amazon Appstore.

“Another” App Market

When rumors flew around that Amazon was going into the fray with their own app market, there were a lot of opinions on the subject.  There were already a lot of alternate markets for Android apps, and this was certainly going to fragment the market further.

Android’s market ecosystem has one particular strength over the iPhone Appstore, however:  competition. Each awesome new feature any market puts out causes the others to work harder to continue the arms race.  We’ve seen a lot of new app store features come out over the last year, so I tend to be excited to hear about new app markets, particularly when they’re from serious players.

Surprise Entrance

Amazon didn’t share much information about the launch dates of the Appstore, but opened the developer site for all to use.  Since the $99 yearly fee was waived for the first year, there wasn’t any penalty to throwing your app into the fray.

In fact, it was good to get in early, since it helped get beyond the initial rejection cycle if you made the same mistake I did – linking to the Android Market anywhere in your app.  Once I got my app accepted, I mostly forgot about it.  I expected for there to be some ramp-up before the actual launch.

Angry Birds RioAnd then, suddenly, Amazon launched the Appstore on March 22, 2011.  Continue reading →

7 Steps to Greater Android App Income Part 2

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Android income dollar armyThis is the second part of this article on making more money from your Android apps (see here for the first part).  This part of the article covers the release and the steps afterwards.

There is a lot of money out there in the Android app market, waiting for you.  You do need to go find it, though.  After you implement the tips from the two parts of this article, you’ll be much more likely to get your share of that income.

In the first part of the article we covered steps to get you ready for releasing your app.  Now we’re ready to make it available to the world!

4. Deploy Your App to the Android Market

Remember all those graphic assets we prepared in part 1?  They’re going to come in handy now for a quick upload to the Android Market.

Now, if you are starting from scratch, there are a few things to get out of the way.  Continue reading →

7 Steps to Greater Android App Income Part 1

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Watch your Android Income GrowGetting the most income from your Android app involves more than just throwing your app up on the market.  However, that seems to be about all many developers do.  That may be good for you, though, because there are a few things you can do to put yourself ahead of the crowd, and make more money.

The process to getting more revenue from your Android app starts before you even release the app.  This is the first part of a two part article.  The second part focuses more on what to do after you release – however, it’s not too late to do these things if you have already released your app to the Android Market!

1. Get Your Assets in Order

Your app requires assets – specifically graphic assets.  A small subset:

  • Icons in three sizes: 36×36, 48×48, and 72×72
  • A super-sized icon at 512×512
  • Images that you show in your app at different resolutions (e.g. to look good on both tiny and huge screens).
  • Promotional images (optional, but highly recommended)
  • Screenshots (make them look good – they get looked at!)

Another good resource is Google itself, which summarized the required assets in a forum post.

2. Prepare Your Marketing Copy

Your icon, app name, and screenshots will already do a bit of selling.  That’s not enough, though.  Continue reading →

Favorite Android Ad Revenue: MobFox Review

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MobFox isn’t as MobFoxwell known of a player as AdMob or Mobclix.  However, they specialize in extremely high CPC (cost-per-click) ads in Europe and When they say high CPC, they really mean it.  I’ve seen 24-cent clicks, which is rather exciting if you’ve been seeing 3 cent clicks on AdMob.

Today I’m reviewing MobFox and using it for Android apps.

In my continuing quest to get the absolute maximum I can from my apps, I have been running them all head-to-head.  I have compared AdMob to MobClix in the past, and have also talked about getting paid by those two.  I also have compared ad income to paid app payouts.  Getting the money in your hands is an important thing.

Initial results caught my attention

Immediately after releasing an update to my low-traffic app using MobFox, I saw an increase in the revenue over AdMob.  Not only was the CPC higher, the CTR (click-through-rate) was higher as well.  That doesn’t take much math – higher income per click, and more clicks means more revenue.

MobFox day 1 incomeSo, within a few hours of uploading my app, I already had confirmation that this ad network showed promise.  Obviously, to make real money I’ll need more traffic and more time.

In fact, over the next week I started seeing eCMP (the approximate amount you’ll make per thousand impressions) jump around between $4 and $10!  I got Continue reading →

Android Market Developer Console

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Android MarketQuick update – Google just released some updates to the Android Developer Console.  This might be if interest to you, particularly if you’ve been wondering why the Developer Console hasn’t been updating any of your stats for your apps lately.

The developer blog for the Google guys responsible for the Android Market shows this post about the new feature they just added.  I find this relevant to the missing updates on the download stats because the last time this happened, we got the new Statistics feature.  I found the statistics feature immensely useful.

Android Market Merchant SalesThis new report is a .csv file showing a lot of data about each of your app purchases (taken from Google Checkout), separated by month.  This could be useful as you are analyzing when and where people are buying your apps, so you can find out how to make more sales and increase your revenue.  Of course, I personally use Appmonger to track this directly from my Droid right now.

I’m not sure about the market report yet, but it’s still neat to get more features.  I’m glad the arms race continues between the app markets.  App developers like us are the winners.