ProjectJourneyman on Android Income

Google Admob Update to 4.1.0

Posted on May 25, 2011 by ProjectJourneyman

Admob

Just a quick note in case anyone else has had problems with the new Admob 4.1.0 SDK for their Android app. I just updated from 4.0.4, and was having problems.

Adview missing required XML attribute "adSize"

I found this link showing that some changes need to be made from your previously working AdMob setup in your Android app. The changes aren’t shown in the documentation yet.

Changes:

Remove attrs.xml (or if you need it for your own custom attributes, remove the parts related to AdViews).
Change the namespace in your layout from xmlns:ads=”http://
schemas.android.com/apk/res/com.your.packagename”
to xmlns:ads=”http://schemas.android.com/apk/lib/com.google.ads“

In addition, by adding this

ads:loadAdOnCreate="true"

You can remove this from your code (which I just added to accommodate the previous Google Admob SDK update). This restores the “just load an ad at startup” functionality that the Admob SDK previously had.

AdView adView = (AdView)this.findViewById(R.id.admob_adview);
 if(null != adView) {
     adView.loadAd(new AdRequest());
 }

And just like that, I’m using the new AdMob SDK and am getting ads again in my app. I’m glad this release simplified things a little bit.

As a side note, it might be good to hold onto the previous version of third party libraries until you know the new one works. You often can’t get the old one after the new one goes online, and you might just be too tired to figure it out right now. Luckily that wasn’t one of those situations this time.

Asset Reference Chart for Deploying Your Android App

Posted on May 21, 2011 by ProjectJourneyman

Android App Market Assets Here’s a preview for those of you reading this blog. I’ve been developing a reference chart showing what assets are needed when deploying your Android app to various app markets. For example, the Amazon Appstore expects different icon image sizes than the Android Market. Actually, every app market expects a different size.

While this isn’t a huge amount of work when you have one app and two app markets, what happens when your Android app collection includes a dozen apps on a dozen app markets? It can get to be a bit or work to keep it all straight.

The time it takes to deploy new apps as well as app updates starts to grow if you’re not careful. When you update screenshots, did you get all of the right sizes? Is your new promo video the right size for the different places you want to show it?

To keep it all straight, I created the Asset Matrix and started jamming as much info as I could into it so I can keep all of the markets straight. Now I can just look up what I need and create all of the icon images at once. I can also verify that I have everything I need before deploying.

I’m not done with the entire chart, but I have finished it for my favorite Android markets that I have put my paid app into.

Android Alterate Market Review: Amazon Appstore

Posted on May 16, 2011 by ProjectJourneyman

Amazon Appstore for Android You’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 Rio And then, suddenly, Amazon launched the Appstore on March 22, 2011. Continue reading →

7 Steps to Greater Android App Income Part 2

Posted on May 9, 2011 by ProjectJourneyman

Android income dollar army This 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

Posted on May 6, 2011 by ProjectJourneyman

Watch your Android Income Grow Getting 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.