OK I got a mail from huq industries
This is how they work
When you create an account and integrate our SDK, your apps provide us with retail market information from your users.
We then package and sell this retail market insight to a range of industries - including financial services, retail and others.
Those sales provide revenues that allow us to pay you between £5-10 per 1000 active device installs on a monthly basis.
So, if your apps were cumulatively on 100,000 devices, you could expect to earn between £500 and £1000 a month.
Ok so my app has been using this SDK since the middle of September 2016 and so far everything is fine. I make users aware of what the SDK does and give them an opt-out option in the app. I wanted to be completely transparent and ensure it complies with Google policy. Although I went to great lengths to ensure this was the case questions like this still make me slightly uneasy, wondering if I’ve missed something and Google will take offence to it.
Regarding Huq themselves, I have had a few conversations with the guys there during integration and they’re very helpful and I got a good feeling from them in general. Integration has been fairly simple, and apart from a number of users outraged that the app would be collecting anonymous usage data (1*, uninstalled etc.) when the update was released it’s been plain sailing.
The the earnings calculator with a pinch of salt
The first month’s data was for just two weeks and although I tried to accurately estimate my unique users/month earnings fell well short of the figure quoted on their website. Funny thing about this, when I was looking at them initially the calculator was estimating £2.3k/month…but a few days later it changed to $2.3k/month, which I thought odd for a UK based company. I was told they were moving to dollars and the value would be adjusted at some point. It hasn’t. It’s still $2.3k/month, and I can tell you that even though I’ve had more unique users than estimated, the earning have fallen rather short of the estimate. Apparently it’s less than the estimate because not everyone will connect to WiFi and be able to provide data, which is fair enough.
The first and second months units were sold for around the same price (within 10 cents), but last months units were sold for just 30% of that price…a huge drop, meaning a large reduction in revenue for a greater number of units provided last month.
So yeah so far so good, the service works well but i’m very disappointed with how the earnings have dropped off considering the app is sending them more data from unique users.