Is This your day job?

Hi guys,
I was wondering how many of you develop for android as their day job… and how many as money from the side?
Also, what’s the average income for you guys from android?

It became my day job last year. Before that I was a freelancer but right now I’m doing very little freelancing. The revenue is high for me - because I live in a poor country, for someone from USA or Western Europe it might not be enough - but I prefer not to state the exact figure.

Hell yeah! Been doing online marketing for 4-5 years now, Done almost everything, App’s is kind of my 2nd income…I do PPC/Media buying in mobile for my other source, but my app income is quickly catching up. As for my Android income…let’s just say it pay’s the bills then some

I’m a college student trying to make some cash and I don’t have enough time to get a job. I hope that it can one day become my day job, but as of now I don’t generate enough revenue.

no, not even by a long shot, unfortunately:( if i get 50 people to sign up for this ads company i just found ( well they have been out for years , but new to me) and those 50 people have apps with 100000 downloads - yep ,this will be my ONLY job:) check them out - easy to implement and not as brutal as airpush or leadbol. StartApp - Developer Register

I quit my job and started studiing, and now my android revenue catches up nearly to the amount that I have earned when I had a normal day job in the IT.

Just a side “business” …I mean hobby.

If I was being honest though, it’s all about the money for me. If there was no money, I’d find something else to do.

It’s hard to make a living at this but it can happen. Been full-time myself since last summer :slight_smile:

Yup, quit my day job last Sept.

Nice to know some of you are making real money, so I guess it’s possible. At the moment, this is nowhere near a business for me so it’s mostly a hobby. However, if it doesn’t start bringing some money at some point, I’m not going to keep this hobby up for eternity. So, we’ll see… one problem of course is that it’s hard to put enough time to make it profitable while having a day job.

I think one quickly realizes that there are a lot of variables required to get profitable.

  • choosing the right game/app/niche or wide
  • making a good app
  • how to handle reviews
  • how to handle android device variation
  • how to handle monetization (this is a whole field in itself - and is not naturally aligned with some of the skills that may propel some programmers to make apps)

So there needs to be execution on all these fronts.

But perhaps choosing the right app to begin with is probably very important. And monetization is a minefield because it is not spelled out and every developer winds up treading much the same path to discover what pays what.

High monetization apps also are leveraging things that many self-motivated programmers will not generally start off with - though with low monetization they may also start to see what the monetization stuff is about - and why some type of apps seem to be profitable (leveraging of whales etc.) - some of which will not be palatable to the nice-guy programmer.

But eventually even a nice-guy programmer will get pissed with the bad monetization and over time everyone winds up doing the same think - trying to milk the users one way or the other (since if they don’t milk, they don’t give milk - thanks to the lack of micropayment monetization solutions).

So even small programmers wind up having to do what the big app producers do - i.e. milk the non-interested users with AppWalls and “More Apps” - and milk the real users by monetizing.

A consistent theme I am seeing with the “successful” huge-hit apps are that they offer one way of doing something - and then they offer “shortcuts” for doing it - most programmers are not used to thinking like this - but this MAY be tapping into the cheating mentality or shortcut mentality of a certain percentage of the public (or perhaps who have money and think money can and should buy them everything) - so these apps cater to that and these users become the “whales” - i.e. they are willing to pay to get shortcuts and not really play the game (in the honest way).

This is totally counter-intuitive - since the real players wind up basically not even being part of the monetization cycle - the apps are all trying to monetize these type of outliers.

So there is something really screwy going on - and perhaps the reason this happens is that there is no way to charge users $0.01 per day of playing a game. IN FACT, even if you charged that much you would be making LESS than some of the mega-hit games are making i.e. some of the top (leverage the whales type of apps/games) are making $0.45 per user (!). Not that users are paying that much but their whales pay huge amounts - maybe there really are that many rich people (or they are spending their retirement savings ?) or are kids of mafia guys or whatever. But it seems most mega-hit companies say that you need to monetize on your whales and you should have a way to charge $10 or $100 per user.

Thanks for sharing those thoughts and findings! I definitely agree. I guess, I try to be the nice-guy programmer and try to find ways to profit without milking the money annoyingly. At least I am annoyed, as a gamer, when games offer shortcuts and direct benefits to be purchased that put players to unequal position. I mean if you are competing against others and it is possible to succeed better in the game if you are just willing to pay. In a players’ perspective, what’s the point in “who can pay the most” kind of games? On the other hand, in developers’ perspective, that kind of game sounds pretty good, eh?

Anyway, clearly it’s not easy to balance between great games and making a living out of it… or at least I haven’t cracked the code (yet).

In a players’ perspective, what’s the point in “who can pay the most” kind of games? On the other hand, in developers’ perspective, that kind of game sounds pretty good, eh?

What one is hearing from the big app (profitable) ones on blogs etc. is that they make 90% of their revenue from “whales”. And you should have ability to charge a single player $100 or $1000 or such !!

Now this is something completely unimaginable for a person coming to this arena with pre-conceived ideas from their reality.

But apps seem to be in this area where (unless such activity gets outlawed or something - because I wonder who these “whales” are - do they have addiction issues or are they just wealthy kids of mafia folks ? Or is this essentially a punishment of the criminal element of society - basically whales being people wanting shortcuts - and these big profit app makers are milking those folks ?).

I think eventually there will be a study on app addiction and spending - and examination of who these people are - right now they are under the radar. If it turns out they are people maxing out their parent’s credit cards or people facing bankruptcy then there could be a move to crack down on such exploitation of “whales” (“save the whales” ?).

If it turns out they are just the silicon valley elite spending their days on CoinDozer, then that would be another thing.

As it stands some of the most successful games are getting revenue of $0.45 per user (I guess this would be Active User base then as reported in Google Developer Console ?).

You can’t make this type of money with AppWalls and such - where actual effort is required. This type of waterfall flow of capital can only occur if the transactions are painless - i.e. are actually happening in CASH.

With AppWall or GetJar/Sponsorpay type payment - there is real effort involved in earning $0.10 by the user in gold to pay the app. However, even here it COULD be possible to build up the revenue over time.

BUT it seems the money these big apps are earning is from the $9.99 and $99.99 type of purchases - and this is cash purchase - nothing else with that capital “density” can match cash.

The “whales” are not paying with AppWall/GetJar/Sponsorpay etc. - they are spending cash.

Those who don’t have this model - ARE still able to make money - and they make it by showing ads for those apps. That is you show AppWall for CoinDozer and you make a fraction of what they are making that way.

So this seems to be the food chain it seems (?).

Whales are most likely similar to those who play hazard games. I make games for a virtual casino for my client and they mostly have such players. They spend a lot on games, some of them (the larger whales :slight_smile: ) are celebrities (but they play anonymously) from what my client claims.

Interesting.

In any case, is the concept of “whales” applicable to all types of apps - or do whales-behaving users congregate only to certain types of apps ?

Because in a naive analysis of apps like CoinDozer, one DOES learn a lot - that of offering some features for pay (or GetJar/Sponsorpay whatever) - BUT keeping in view that to not alienate the bulk of the non-responding user public, to allow a way to still play (i.e. game gives coins to the user to play every day etc.) - but to create a concept of a shortcut so those with money (and who think they can afford to bypass that limitation - and gives them some sense of power or whatever) to have those people pay.

So in that way one could see it as applicable to perhaps all types of apps - even tool apps etc. - but there may not be the potential to perhaps have folks spend huge amounts that way.

In any case, if you don’t have access to Google Checkout - and are relying on GetJar/Sponsorpay type of “earn gold coins” - then that completely ruins that whole model. Because you are basically asking the user to do something else (effort) to earn those coins and then to pay you with them in order to get that “shortcut” - but all that extra effort is not going to make the user think it was a shortcut.

So a user who has plenty of disposable cash (celebrity or whatever) - they will NOT be able to use their real-world ease of dropping $10 or $100 at will in your app - but REMAIN limited to effort-to-earn coins.

This is why (perhaps) the earn-gold-coins will NOT be a solution to the problem.

And Google needs to expand their pay-with-cash option to all locations - otherwise they are damaging their own ecosystem of developers.

I personally like games with IAP that are solvable without paying a cent. For example Towers&Trolls is great - very challenging to finish without paying which makes the game really enjoyable. :slight_smile: The same goes for Turbo Kids. Although in Towers&Trolls they have another trick - if you don’t pay anything you need to farm gems which can be tiresome, but you can buy gem doubler which makes it easy to earn gems. So you have a choice:

  1. Not pay a cent - hard and might require “gem farming” (solving the same level 10 times to earn enough gems) - for those who don’t pay a dime.
  2. Pay only for the doubler ($2) - the game is hard, challenging, but getting enough gems to play is reasonably easy (great choice for those who prefer to pay for a game once).
  3. Pay for everything - the game is very easy then depending how much money you spend - for those who like spending money on games and for whales probably.

I’d like to add another entry to that list:
4. Pay to do better than other people in a realtime competitive game (with an upper limit on how much you can spend per game round)

I’ll let you guys know how well it works (if it works at all!!!) once I launch my second game.

All this is really interesting stuff, and also something that I haven’t realized before. At least to this extent. There’s no way anyone can spend more money than 0,99€ with any of my apps… so maybe there’s room for improvement. The ethical issues are also interesting. I wouldn’t mind charging $100 from someone who is happy to pay it and has the money, but designing mechanics that would hook people with addictions and no extra cash is another thing.

Look at it this way: those people would lose their money on another game instead. :wink: