5 ms·

sounds good, do you have any numbers?

by Concours 16y ago

orangecat 16y ago
Not very impressive in absolute terms, but it's gone from an average of around 15 $0.99 sales per day to 30.
- exit 16y ago
  $0.99*30 day is enviable. can you share the name of your app?
  - orangecat 16y ago
    Sorry, I like my psuedo-anonymity here. Yeah, sales are better than I expected; I never intended it to be anything more than a hobby, but if I could come up with 10 more apps that do as well...
    - exit 16y ago
      fair enough, but can you say anything about what kind of app it is? is it a game / a productivity utility / etc.?
      - orangecat 16y ago
        It's a fun app, not quite a game. It uses your phone's hardware in an amusing way.
  - apu 16y ago
    This is actually considered a good sales number? Making $30 a day? Or actually less, I guess, since I assume the Android market takes a cut?
    - darshan 16y ago
      It depends on how what your goals are and how much time you put into it. In November, I was feeling annoyed that there was no easy way to see exactly what charge my phone's battery was at (at least none that were acceptable to me). I'd been curious about Android development, so I decided to "scratch my own itch". I spent 4 or 5 hours building a little app that would display my exact percentage in the tray at the top. Most of the time was spent tweaking the icon -- I'm not a graphic designer, but I eventually came up with something that looked good enough. I decided it would be worth the $25 fee to get a developer account and share it with the world. Programming is just a little hobby of mine, so while I've been using and loving open-source software for over a decade, I've contributed very little back to the community. So I figured if one or two people a day downloaded this little utility, I could feel good about myself. I put it online and went to bed. Eight hours later, over 700 people had downloaded it. Over the next couple of weeks, I got a lot of feature requests that I personally had no use for, and I'm a busy student, so I didn't think I had much time or energy to add a bunch of features I didn't need myself. But then my friend suggested I make a paid version of the app with the extra features. I thought that was a neat idea -- I figured that if I averaged one purchase a day, I could make $20 a month (Google takes 30%), which to me is a lot of money at this point in my life. It didn't take long before I was averaging 15 downloads a day. It stayed there for a while, until about month and a half ago, with no explanation I'm aware of, it jumped to averaging 50/day. I carefully and courteously respond to an average of 2-3 emails a day, and I release updates when I can find the time. But that's still not very much time put into this, and I'm making almost as much money as when I used to work full time. (I don't have a college degree and worked in retail.) The free version averages 1000 downloads a day.
    - InclinedPlane 16y ago
      $30 a day is $11k per year in effectively passive income. That's nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, it may shock you to know that many of your favorite authors probably earn less from some of your favorite books.
- dpcan 16y ago
  I've had a very similar experience. I sell 1 game for $1.99 and two others for $0.99 each and I was at a steady 7 for a couple weeks right after launch, but now I'm at around 15-17 per day on the $1.99 app, and the others trickle in every day too. My apps have only been in the market for about 60-70 days. The free versions of 2 of my apps have been downloaded about 10k times each, the puzzle game is only at 4k, and not many purchases, but I think it's picking up steam as well. It's been fun, and keep in mind that my games are not graphically awesome, my skills are not in that arena, but my games are fun, and it seems like they are picking up steam. Odd side-note: My most downloaded game gets a lot of hate from comments and ratings, but still plenty of buyers - so even though I think I need to change it, the people who buy it love it as it is, so there's not much I can do :)
briancooley 16y ago
I have a free app, the first one I built last November, that was stalling out around 6K downloads in early April. It's closing in on 10K today.

sounds good, do you have any numbers?

orangecat 16y ago

Not very impressive in absolute terms, but it's gone from an average of around 15 $0.99 sales per day to 30.

exit 16y ago
$0.99*30 day is enviable. can you share the name of your app?
- orangecat 16y ago
  Sorry, I like my psuedo-anonymity here. Yeah, sales are better than I expected; I never intended it to be anything more than a hobby, but if I could come up with 10 more apps that do as well...
  - exit 16y ago
    fair enough, but can you say anything about what kind of app it is? is it a game / a productivity utility / etc.?
    - orangecat 16y ago
      It's a fun app, not quite a game. It uses your phone's hardware in an amusing way.
- apu 16y ago
  This is actually considered a good sales number? Making $30 a day? Or actually less, I guess, since I assume the Android market takes a cut?
  - darshan 16y ago
    It depends on how what your goals are and how much time you put into it. In November, I was feeling annoyed that there was no easy way to see exactly what charge my phone's battery was at (at least none that were acceptable to me). I'd been curious about Android development, so I decided to "scratch my own itch". I spent 4 or 5 hours building a little app that would display my exact percentage in the tray at the top. Most of the time was spent tweaking the icon -- I'm not a graphic designer, but I eventually came up with something that looked good enough. I decided it would be worth the $25 fee to get a developer account and share it with the world. Programming is just a little hobby of mine, so while I've been using and loving open-source software for over a decade, I've contributed very little back to the community. So I figured if one or two people a day downloaded this little utility, I could feel good about myself. I put it online and went to bed. Eight hours later, over 700 people had downloaded it. Over the next couple of weeks, I got a lot of feature requests that I personally had no use for, and I'm a busy student, so I didn't think I had much time or energy to add a bunch of features I didn't need myself. But then my friend suggested I make a paid version of the app with the extra features. I thought that was a neat idea -- I figured that if I averaged one purchase a day, I could make $20 a month (Google takes 30%), which to me is a lot of money at this point in my life. It didn't take long before I was averaging 15 downloads a day. It stayed there for a while, until about month and a half ago, with no explanation I'm aware of, it jumped to averaging 50/day. I carefully and courteously respond to an average of 2-3 emails a day, and I release updates when I can find the time. But that's still not very much time put into this, and I'm making almost as much money as when I used to work full time. (I don't have a college degree and worked in retail.) The free version averages 1000 downloads a day.
  - InclinedPlane 16y ago
    $30 a day is $11k per year in effectively passive income. That's nothing to sneeze at. Indeed, it may shock you to know that many of your favorite authors probably earn less from some of your favorite books.
dpcan 16y ago
I've had a very similar experience. I sell 1 game for $1.99 and two others for $0.99 each and I was at a steady 7 for a couple weeks right after launch, but now I'm at around 15-17 per day on the $1.99 app, and the others trickle in every day too. My apps have only been in the market for about 60-70 days. The free versions of 2 of my apps have been downloaded about 10k times each, the puzzle game is only at 4k, and not many purchases, but I think it's picking up steam as well. It's been fun, and keep in mind that my games are not graphically awesome, my skills are not in that arena, but my games are fun, and it seems like they are picking up steam. Odd side-note: My most downloaded game gets a lot of hate from comments and ratings, but still plenty of buyers - so even though I think I need to change it, the people who buy it love it as it is, so there's not much I can do :)

briancooley 16y ago

I have a free app, the first one I built last November, that was stalling out around 6K downloads in early April. It's closing in on 10K today.