Hello everyone,
I’m a new forum member and thought I should introduce myself.
Brief (TL;DWR)
I just joined yesterday but I’ve been browsing this forum on and off since February end this year. (Appodeal was the hottest thing being discussed at that time and I guess it has gained some cred here now.) So, I was finding myself coming back to the forum again and again and thought I should sign-up. I hope to learn from all the experiences you’ve shared here and the ones yet to come, to avoid making rookie mistakes in my own pursuit of making money with Android, and to share my own experiences along the way.
Inception
So, last year around mid-December, I decided to dive into Android and make an app. I had been using a Samsung flagship for about two years already and had seen the platform explode into the giant it has become today. But, trust me, monetization wasn’t on my mind then!
I just thought it would be fun to pick a hobby project on the side. I had about 8 years of experience in Java EE already so choosing Android was an obvious decision. I was also looking for an app at the time and the only one I liked didn’t have the features I wanted. So, I thought maybe I can make this… and since there’s just one app in the market that I liked, I guess people are gonna like to have another option.
So, I began working on it in my spare time and in about two months had a rough prototype going. Honestly, it wasn’t the walk in a park I expected. I had some prior experience with Java UIs too (SWT/Swing, RCP) but I still had to spend time learning the ropes. It took some effort to wrap my head around things like the app kinda never exits and the orientation change destroys and recreates the UI on-screen. I was like WTF! (I had a ViewPager with three tabs and their fragments and one more fragment nested inside the second one and I couldn’t believe that I’m supposed to recreate all that just because the user rotated their phone.) 
But anytime I ran into these oddities, I never tried to cut corners. Like when majority of StackOverflow posts I found suggested to just use configChanges and be done with all the orientation issues, I wasn’t comfortable doing so. I would think, what if my app actually needed to load alternate layouts when in landscape? (And it does now btw!)
So, I’ll sit for hours reading documentation, android blog articles, StackOverflow posts; not moving until the last iota of my doubt disappeared. I had time and rolling out an app was not my priority. Learning Android and doing things right the first time itself was. I can’t tell you how much I smiled the whole day seeing my app rotate with all of its state intact! 
So basically, I was into following all the best practices right from day one. Like I worked with fragments from the start, used AppCompat to support legacy versions etc. It was frustrating at times but all these problems taught me the nitty-gritties of the platform. It almost became an iterative approach where I kept on refining the proto with all the new stuff and best practices I was learning each day like migrating to Android Studio and using Gradle, replacing library projects with product flavors, obfuscation and stripping logs with ProGuard etc.
Rendezvous
So while my app was still taking its ideal shape, I would get ahead of myself and think (read daydream) about publishing between the breaks.
What would I name my app? Which screens would I use as screenshots? Typing away draft app descriptions, reading about how to open a Google play developer account etc. It was all thrilling; like the process of getting yourself something you’ve always wanted. Sometimes doing the search, reading reviews about the options you’re confused between and the whole “this one, or that one” is much more enjoyable than the actual buying itself!
And finally I searched for the inevitable, “free vs. paid app”… and oh boy, I was in for a shock! All this while I thought I’ll be publishing a paid app. That was how my idea of monetization was growing alongside my app. (Yeah, you can laugh at me here!) But, all the numbers online suggested otherwise; that Androiders don’t like to pay for their apps! That going free with IAP, or both free and paid is a must or I’ll be just another dev who tried his luck against the over a million apps published already.
So that’s what got me searching for mobile ad networks but I struggled to make sense of all the CPC, CPI, eCPM acronyms coming along the way. And the hundreds of ad networks weren’t making it any easier, each projecting themselves as the holy grail of mobile advertising. That’s when I chanced upon MMWA and I really liked how all the devs were simply cutting through all the marketing razzmatazz with the only thing that matters – the net revenue they actually earned.
Game Over?
So, the more I read online including MMWA – the inside stories, the earning reports, the play developer experiences – the more I realized that things are far from rosy everywhere. From developers getting banned left and right without a clue what the real issue is, to ad networks terminating accounts near pay day, to pirates with one-click tools to de-LVL paid apps and game IAP systems, it’s hard to shake off this feeling that one has entered shark-infested waters! 
I’m told, 2011-2012 were the golden years. Apps were churning out the dough and with just banners. It was easy to top the charts or at least get listed and stay there for a while. Now it’s like playing Minesweeper; you never know which one of your accounts would blow bringing your revenue down by a half or two-thirds or even wiping you out completely if you had all your eggs kept in one basket!
Gusto
But that buzz of excitement isn’t dead yet. From calling setContentView() for the first time to running the app on my own device. From Eclipse to Android Studio, to Gradle build variants, to ProGuard, it has been a fantastic learning experience; one a regular day job falls short to measure up to. I’m feeling the same rush in picking which SDK to integrate first, which network mediation to use, go with banners, interstitial or native ads.
What’s the first day on Google Play gonna be like? Will I be able to score any downloads? What’s my very first review gonna say? These first few days won’t come back ever! So, I’m going to let myself enjoy these moments as much as possible.
So, in closing, that’s why I’m here. I might screw this up and I’ll need help. I’m new at this and my inexperience could cost me dearly. I hope to soak in what you have shared here so I don’t trip very often. I could still make mistakes but I hope they are far, few but new, and that I get to share my experiences along the way to help someone new just as I am today. If you’ve made it this far, please know that you’re awesome.
Thank you for reading.