It has been generally silently acknowledged that paid apps business model does not work in Google Play.
Instead most revenue are generated by apps with ads. This seems to be the proven revenue generating business model after Android appears in this world around year 2007 ?
Now because of this proven business model, a lot of app publishers/developers turns to all kinds of exotic ad format to include into their app so it can sustain the continued improvement to the apps. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this approach as after all developers still need to put bread on the table isn’t it?
My concern is when developers delve too deep into the monetizing aspect of the app, have they gradually lose focus on improving the app functions and features ?
Why do developers develop apps in the first place? To earn monies or with a noble aim to better the life of users and at the same time receive some monetary to continue your daily life survival?
If the aim of a developer is purely to earn monies then I will be confused. There are other much faster ways to earn monies than to make apps isn’t it?
Online betting for e.g reaps much faster rewards isn’t it? Why spend so much brain cells to monetize your apps when you should channel those brain cells to betting isn’t it?
So this bring me back to the discussion. Marketing for apps is ok but over-doing it is over-kill IMHO. We should tread the fine balance of marketing and also improvement to the app (in terms of functions).
As the name of the forum suggests, the primary goal of this website (and to the large extent the community) is to make money with android apps. So to answer your question: Developers here develop apps with the intent of making money.
Sure, it is a nice feeling when someone out there enjoys your app. It is a much nicer feeling to get that paycheck though.
There are many reasons that each of us decided to make money with apps and not something like betting. For example betting has a high chance of me actually losing my money. And I would need some capital just to get started. The only way I could really lose money with apps is a poor marketing or advertising campaign. I also see my Android development as my hobby. I do it for the fun of developing.
I completely disagree with your statement on not going “deep” into the marketing aspect of apps. That is one of the really fun parts. If someone enjoys doing it, and makes money from it, why can’t he? And why shouldn’t he spend time monetizing what he has spent hours/days/weeks/months working hard and developing?
I’ve just decided to make one game for fun, one game for money, one game for fun, one game for money… and so on. It allows me to keep the work interesting because it seems game I like to play (platformers mostly) don’t make that enough money to pay for themselves.
in this day and age, I don’t think it will matter how much you improve the app, without marketing it will go nowhere. Don’t get me wrong, you can improve all you want but without users playing and giving you feedback, you won’t know what to improve, marketing should be first on your list
If you want to make real money, your focus should be on IAP, not on ads. Ads are going to perform worse and worse in the future and they already doing a lot worse than 2 years ago.
There are some sort of game apps that still perform better as paid apps. Those are for example dungeon like RPGs and retro platformers that usually gain a lot of attention from press websites. Quality is the keyword.
Surviving on this market is so difficult today that your focus should be on monetization in the first place. If the app is going well you still can improve it afterwards, but this also depends on why you are creating apps. If it’s just for fun and as a hobby, or if you really want to make money and make a living and I think you can still make a lot of money with well monetized quality apps. Our talent is well placed on this market.
I agree that IAP will make more money. There are a few concerns for me on this subject. The biggest one is that Google has still not added my country (South Africa) to the list of countries that can have IAP or paid apps. The second would be implementing IAP in an utility app. I have no idea how effective this would be. In a game you can get users hooked to progression and tempt them to buy a boost or power-up. But in an app you would have to leave out features that they need to buy, which would seriously hurt your chances when a competitor has all the features for free.
Yes, I work full time on this. You need to do both. While it was easy when I was beginning now without quality and marketing you can’t get far (one can replace the other sometimes).
To earn using IAP you need to have a lot of money for marketing in the first place since you need to get users in countries where people are rich enough to throw money at IAP (USA, UK etc.).
