New to the store

Hey,

I’m in the store for maybe 1 or 2 months now. I got 5 apps for Android and I also released one of the Android apps for Windows Phone to test the potential of the store.

When developing my very first app I was sure my app is something special and would become popular very soon. Unfortunately the first time didn’t look so great. I was afraid to fail and I immediately started to build another app. I wanted even more revenue and I created the other apps. The apps I spend the most time on got the worst rating whereas the apps I finished in one day or so got the best rating. Very confusing stuff.

I did the marketing all by myself and I posted to several webpages but especially YouTube. Right now I’m earning around $ 40 per day (> 100k impressions, ~1k clicks and like 1k downloads a day). But I feels like its getting less every day. Today I’m going to publish an update to some of my apps. Mostly minor changes but I hope it will be enough to stop this trend.

All in all I’m a little upset. Revenue was increasing on a daily basis and I thought it would keep on. I’m not even sure if that trend just is because of the end of the weekend. But maybe I’m thinking too much and maybe I’m even complaining on a very high level. Maybe I can even say that I already maked it successfully into the market. I’m not sure.

I really would like to hear some of your opinions. Furthermore I really would be interested in how to improve my revenue. Should I just publish even more apps? My first two apps are generating more than 80% of the total revenue. I’m unsure if more apps would really increase my revenue.

Thank you

Well it depends on what revenue return you were expecting for your time spent. $40 per day sounds pretty good if your time-spent was as a ‘hobby’ developer. I look at my time-spent as a ‘hobby’ and my daily return is approx. $25-30 per day. I don’t rely on the money and also have a full time job. Any money earnt is for ‘fun’. I only write apps when I have the time and usually while watching TV. My apps are usually written in one or two evenings - 3-5 hours.

The irony is that some of my apps have taken less than 2 hours to write and generate the most ad revenue. I have one or two apps that took me me 5 or 6 nights and generate hardly any income. I too have Windows Phone apps and the ad revenue is dismal. Google Play is the only game in town for ads.

Are you using interstitial ads? I went from pennies to dollars just by switching from banners to interstitials.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your fast reply. Well I first didn’t expect anything because I always read that you are not going to earn anything because the gold rush is over and developers cannot even pay their bills and stuff like that. Thats why I probably would have been satisfied with just $ 5 a month at the start. But once things became better I started to expect more and more. Natural thing, I guess. And of course I thought the climbing statistics (revenue, installs, impressions, …) would just hold on a little longer. I imagined that the increasing installs would also lead to even more installs.

I really don’t know the reason why it suddenly stopped and now it seems it is even getting less every day. Had been about 9 days after I published my last update. Thats why I published updates today. Maybe users thought nothing new is going on or stuff like that. I’m very excited if there will be a difference.

I’m doing it as a hobby and I got a full time job. But I got some plans of course. I want to study medicine in the future and I will need every penny then. Thats why I would like to build a stable income source. Might not be the best idea and I’m going to backup but as long as it works it’s going to help me a lot.

Right now I’m using interstitial ads in all of my apps but in my good performing apps I show them only once after the splash screen. In my other apps I show them more often. Maybe I should take the risk and show them in all of my apps more frequently.

I don’t really care about my Windows Phone app. I don’t even know if it’s working. I don’t own a device and I cannot launch the emulator because of all these stranges hardware requirements… But it’s generating some pennies and I haven’t got a bad review. Probably all is fine.

I am having the same problem these days…my first app was getting 200-300 download a day for the last 3 months, basically since the beginning…then, all of a sudden, 2 days ago, just when i released a new patch, the download completely stopped…it went from 150, to 90 the day after, 50 yesterday and 10 today…i really don’t know what has happened…i find it impossibile to believe that an app having a constant stream of new users for 3 consecutive months, all of a sudden completely stops like this.

I am still having a semi-decent population due to the people that have it installed and still play, but with new downloads completely halted, it wont last much…

P.s: i would jump if i managed to gain 40$ a day…i am doing like 4-5 :smiley:

Don’t give up, if you got a good idea for an app, try to spend more time on it, make it more “beautiful” (it’s really easy), don’t use bad quality icons (you can find free icons here: https://www.iconfinder.com/). Don’t show so many times ads, they will piss your users and won’t generate you more income, yes you will have more impressions, but eCPM won’t be high and users will run away if you app is just an ad placement itself. Take care a bit more of your product and revenue will come to you.

September is going to be a good month :slight_smile:

thanks for your support ernestofndz but my main disappointment lies just in that…i made a graphic update a month ago making the game way prettier than before and was expecting an increase in download…but it didn’t happen, they stayed more or less like before.
Then, all of a sudden, with the last update, in which i didn’t change much apart for some tweaks and a prettier icon, the organic downloads totally stopped from one day to the next, for no reason that i can understand…how is it possible that an app doing 200ish daily downloads, all of a sudded become an app with 10-20 daily downloads? something made me become less visible in the store…but i don’t get what :frowning:

Thats very interesting because I’m experiencing something similiar. Just before the month changed to September my downloads started to drop.

Had been phases they dropped before but they always got back and mostly increased. But right now they are just falling… And I also don’t know a reason why. It suddenly happened and I feel a little bit sad because I think its getting even worse…

I think there was some test on the algorithm search for the last few days.

For a specific keyword, on friday (29th august), my app ranked 5th.
On saturday: 13
Today my app is back at the 5th position.

Maybe it’s why your downloads decrease.

That could explain a lot. I even can confirm this. When I noticed the dropping I searched for my app and I found it almost out of the Top 100 (ranked 98 or something). Now it’s back in the Top 50 (ranked 45 or something).

Maybe things are getting back to normal. I really hope so.

Hello,
i wonder how you manage to programm an app within one day and get even revenue out of it…this is really impressive!
What kind of app was that? An app or a game? Would you be so kind to provide a link to your apps?
I worked for about 1 month for my first app, it’s in the market for about 4 days now and it’s not generating any money at all (i have barley 30 installs).

Grettings
mbr

Hey,

Right now I’m focusing on games only. Furtheremore I focused on a specific country when I created the game. I localized the game and created an environment that comes close to the local beings.

Thats all I want to say for now. Unfortunately I still got the problem of dropping impressions and that stuff. I guess I just moved out of the list of Free New Apps.

Greetings

sadly for me, instead, my first app stil remains dead after the big fall started on 30th august…4 days in a row with 30-50 downloads when i had 200-300ish for 90 consecutive days…it is something definitely not related to my app but something weird happened on the store since i can’t believe that all of a sudden my app had a 80% drop in downloads because people magically started to see it as a bad app.

The number of daily visualizations of its youtube video has dropped too from 100-150ish to 10 in the same days, so that means that the app has simply nearly vanished from the store for whatever reason…it is not that people are not liking it anymore, they are not seeing it anymore.

The fact is that, according to appannie, its positions for the different keywords have not changed much (apart for the aforementioned changes on the 1st september when, infact, all my apps were out of all results for all keywords, probably for the supposed changes in the search algorithm), so i really don’t get what has happened :frowning:

How long is your app in the store? I suppose that we both went out of the Free New Apps category…

nope, not my case sadly…the app is out since 3 months…during the free month it reached 600-700 daily downloads in the last week since it entered in the top 500 in 7 nations…then when the first month ended, it went down to 200-300ish for the next 2 months, until 30th of August…then it went downhill with 80-50-50-35-50 daily downloads all of a sudden and 0-10 visit to the youtube video…it simply disappeared from the radars for unknown reasons

Im too sailing in the same boat, i made my first game within 2months and it showed constant increase in downloads day by day, i started earning from the first day, but now iam struggling with my second game, it all depends on luck and mostly on the keywords you use within your discription, dont choose a name that no one could think off, keep posting links and sharing with your frends to rate n downloads, secondly your app rank increases as per downloads due to millions of apps on playstore chances of getting showed are very low, that is why there are advertising agencies that do the work for you… :smiley:

For me all went back to normal. I even got a new high peak but I’m unsure if that is only the effect of the weekend thought.

I’m still not sure what caused the drop some days ago. But the good thing is that I worked very hard and I created another app because I thought the “old” ones are dying now. :smiley:

Always keep on making new apps, hone your skills to make better and better apps. It all adds up.

sadly for me instead, my first app is still struggling with 40-50 daily download, which is like 20% of what it was 10 days ago…and it seems it is not recovering too much.

What i can’t understand is why that happened…apparently, according to appannie, it is more or less in the same chart positions as before but it is gettin a quarter of the old download numbers…

@dariobrun
What marketing/promotion did you do to get 1,000 downloads per day? Maybe your campaign run out?

I was not getting 1000 daily downloads, i was getting 200-300ish (apart for the last week in the first month when i reached 600-700 because i entered in various national charts).

I made no advertising at all, so it isn’t definitely a problem of marketing…i don’t really know why this app went so well from the beginning since my others haven’t (they are actually going way better on the opera store than in google store, figure it out…i have more downloads there with a definitely smaller userbase…it seems that at least on opera i am somehow visible while in google unless you pay no one will ever see you).

I think the problem lies in my last update…i had a problem while uploading the new apk to the developer console since it told me i had 2 different apk in production (instead of changing the one in production it put both of them in production and gave me that error, i don’t know why). In the end i had to firstly remove the old apk from production and then put the new one. I suppose that they considered it like i removed the app from the store and the new apk was a “new” app, thus deleting all its previous ranking stats…infact it is exactly from that day that the downloads dropped from 200 to 50