Android reloaded

In my last blogpost I explained how my income was divided over iOS and Windows Phone. The missing platform of course, was Android.

So let’s talk Android, and we’ll start with some history.

2013

In 2013 I ported the iOS version of my apps to Android. That was easy enough as the app wasn’t very complex at that time. I published it in the Play store and all was well. I didn’t really advertise the app but the concept of these networks is well-known in the cycling and walking community so downloads picked up naturally.

Every cycling or walking route that is created in the app is also saved on the backend. One of the route meta items that is logged is the platform it was made on. The platforms I’m logging right now are iPad, iPhone, WP8 and Android. So at any time I can pull a list of all the routes, do some simple math and get a nice chart with platform percentages.

In no time Android’s share of planned routes went to 20% so that was good. Then the mails started coming in.

Support

All my apps have had a support e-mail address built-in so people can contact me if they don’t understand something or things go wrong. Doing support has been a lot of fun and I’ve got a couple of blogposts coming up to discuss the support issues I’ve had.

Support for Android, however, is what eventually lead me to pull the app from the Play store.

I don’t want to downtalk Android too much and some of the issues that were reported were very likely a result of my Java code. Mails would usually go like this:

Feature X doesn’t work on my phone Y.

I did manage to fix a lot of issues and of course releasing fixes on Android is nearly instant, so that was good.

However, as time went on I got more and more e-mails with problems that I couldn’t solve. Bizarre issues on phone makes that I had never even heard of.

Important to know is that I made the app free at the time because I really wanted to get it in people’s hands. So if you add two and two together support became frustrating and there was no income to show for. So I pulled the app and that was the end of that. A fun fact is that routes are still being logged from the Android app so there’s still people out there using it.

The future

If we put all the arguments of iOS vs Android aside then there’s no denying that Android has a very large user base and is an interesting platform to develop for.

So, a couple of months ago I decided to give Android another (final?) shot. The Android version will be nearly identical to the iOS version feature wise, with its own visual identity.

I’m no longer writing the app myself. A dedicated Android developer is building the app this time. We’ve got alfa versions going back and forth and I’ve tested them on a slow and cheap device. The app works great, it’s fast and I’m very happy with it. It should really fly on more expensive devices.

But you can’t make money on Android!

Well, that may be true. Or not. As usual different apps produce different numbers and we tend to remember the blogposts that fit in our belief and/or religion. The purpose is to release the Android app for free with a trial period built-in. When the trial expires the user can pay to continue using the app or the app will stop working.

Our first plan was to make in-app purchase bundles for 1, 3, 6, 12 months with prices per month decreasing as the subscription length increases. But in the end we decided to go for a more simple approach: people will be able to pay for one month or one year. That’s it.

We’re working hard on the app as I type this and the plan is to have it in the Play store before the cycling season kicks off. All the SQLite databases that are in the iOS apps can be reused in the Android apps so the plan is to get one app as bugfree as we can, release it and then port all the other apps.

2016

I’m very excited about having Android versions of the apps again. I’m really curious about user’s reactions and — of course — how much money they’ll make.

The goal of this blog is to share real life experiences of selling apps and how to make money from them. If the Android version is successful, I will blog about it. If it isn’t, I will blog about it too.

The plan for 2016 is to have a blogpost on income every month and blogposts on the AppStore ecosystem in between.

Until next time.