Amazon’s Appstore for Android

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Amazon Appstore for Android is Live!

In case you missed it, the Amazon’s Appstore for Android just opened up last night (March 22nd). As an incentive to get you to use it, they offer a different paid app for free every day. The opening one was Angry Birds Rio, their flagship app. Amazon has been publicizing this app because it is exclusive to their app store, and because it obviously has a lot of popularity. Don’t fret if you missed it, as it appears to still be free. I suspect that they’ll keep it free for a long time, to keep enticing people to download and install the Amazon Appstore.

Before you can get the app for free, however, there are a few things you’ll need to take care of: Continue reading →

App Revenue Sources

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Increasing Income

I talked to Navang from Mobclix a few days ago, and he was very helpful with data about where my ads were being served. Now that Google shares a lot of information on the Android Developer Console (see my previous post about the awesome new Statistics in the Developer Console), I have lots of data to crunch.

This is just a short comparison of traffic and income sources for my app. Keep in mind that this app is exclusively in English, and is text-intensive. I don’t expect anyone to be using it who doesn’t have at least a reasonable grasp of English (yet expectations should always be checked).

Again, these statistics are for Droid Secret Tips and Droid Secret Tips Pro.

App Sales

After a month of the pro version being available, my top three sources of app sale income are from:

  • US – 84.4%
  • Netherlands – 2.7%
  • UK – 2.7%

The lion’s share of income for the paid app is coming from the Google Android Market.  I also sell from SlideMe, where the income was also almost entirely from the US. Continue reading →

Google’s Android Developer Console Adds Statistics!

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Android Device BreakdownLittle Fanfare for new Developer Console Feature

Wow.  I’m impressed.  Sometime within the last day or so, a new link quietly appeared below the download count in Developer Console for Google’s Android Market.

It’s not that no one else has been providing statistics for your Android App downloads.  For example, AppBrain.com shows download counts, release dates, and so forth (it’s the only place that I know of retaining release dates and versions).  There’s also a company called Distimo that tracks app markets and even offers to chart your market downloads.  BTW I decided not to use Distimo, since it would require giving up the keys to my email, developer account, and Checkout account all at once.

The solution from Google fits the bill and requires no 3rd party integration!

As I mentioned, I noticed the unassuming link “Statistics” underneath the download count for each of my apps on the market.  Click on it to see a separate statistics page for that app.

What I see there is amazing.  I’m only going to show you pieces of the screen, rather than share all of my own data (there is so much there!).

All of these screen shots are for either Droid Secret Tips, Droid Secret Tips (Android 1.5), or Droid Secret Tips Pro.  You can see them all on the Android Market here to get an idea of the download counts that are being measured here.  The main free app, Droid Secret Tips, has a download count over 10k so I think it’s a good source of statistical data.

More detailed understanding of install counts Continue reading →

Android Ad Revenue – Mobclix Vs. Admob

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After months of testing, I can say that MobClix has definitely paid me more than Admob.  When I first wrote this article, I was still waiting for payments, but now that they checks are regularly arriving the winner is clear:  MobClix.  Read on for details.

Update:  Check out the just-released Android Ad Network Primer on Kindle and in print for a crash course in getting advertisements into your Android app quickly.  It covers these and many other ad networks.

Update: Mobclix went into bankruptcy, and had lots of trouble paying developers before that.  Their technology has been acquired by Telefonica, and the new platform is called Axonix.  A review for that network may be coming, but poke around here now to find good choices to use instead of Mobclix.

[Update, Axonix is no longer available either]

Major Features – Admob vs. Mobclix

There are numerous other factors that I’m not covering here.  This is a rundown of the major differences that concern me the most.

Admob

  • Easy to integrate
  • No payment until you get to $20.  No ability to convert to ad credit unless you have $50 pending.
  • Payment occurs 6 weeks after close of a month with sufficient credit
  • Good analytics.  Can see geographic location of users.
  • Nice visuals for daily activity
  • House ads – serve when no ads are available.  Metrics on house ads just as with advertiser ads.  Easy to create house ads (text or graphic).  UPDATE the new house ads don’t allow you to just serve ads when no paid ads are available – you must specify a target number of clicks.
  • Single library to integrate into your app

Mobclix

Quickly shrink image files with IrFanView

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This quick tip might save you some time (and would have saved me some time last month if I had found it then).  When I have a lot of photos that I want to keep, but that aren’t priceless (e.g. family and friends), I don’t want them to take up huge amounts of space.  Unfortunately, cameras keep producing larger and larger files as the resolution goes up.  There are some options, however.

  1. Delete the images you don’t want
  2. Shrink the images you have without changing the resolution or visually reducing the quality

The second one it’s possible because the human eye can’t see all of the detail that a jpeg file contains (assuming that is how you have stored your images).  Online services have always taken advantage of this by shrinking files that you upload.  It’s pretty handy to for  yourself too.  If you save photos like I do,  you’ll find that your storage needs are increasing at an alarming rate as the size of photos (and in my case number of photos as well) increases.

Resizing quickly Continue reading →