8 ms·

Don't make your Android app free for 1 day

287 points by dminor 16y ago

jrockway 16y ago
Just make it one cent instead?
- mahmud 16y ago
  It's never about the price, rather the difficulty of acquisition. When it's free, user's don't have to do anything to get it; just click and download. If it's fraction of a cent, they need to have credit cards or google checkout. If you want people to try your software, good luck.
- arron61 16y ago
  The lowest you can make an app in Android is 99c
annon 16y ago
Wow. Delete the app and create a new package? I'm assuming that will also kill updates for people that had the original package unless you deploy to both, which may be impossible if you want the free version gone.
aresant 16y ago
In iTunes it's a regular strategy to give an app away for free for a week or two to promote a special, a launch, or otherwise, and then see residual sales come in when you flip back to paid - particuarlly on social games etc. Don't understand this policy in android.
- arron61 16y ago
  IMO, Android is taking the right approach. 1) Developers will game the system. They give apps away for free to get good reviews and higher ratings. I am more generous on a free app than a paid app. 2) You are baiting users to get your app for free initially and then making them pay for the upgrades.
  - megablast 16y ago
    In the Apple app store, ratings given when an app is free do not carry over to a paid for app, so any extra ratings you get are ignored. Reviews are carried over. There are a number of websites/apps with lots of users who look for free apps to try out, and rely on this method to try out some really good stuff. I see nothing wrong with this, you are giving users something for free that is normally not, and a great way to get new people to try your app. A very valid and welcome marketing technique.
    - aphexairlines 16y ago
      You can try out any paid Android Market app for 24 hours.
  - annon 16y ago
    Not true. When you get the app for free on iTunes, you own it, even if they charge later. There's no distinction between if you got it for free or not.
  - modeless 16y ago
    Free apps generally get worse reviews. Also, once you've obtained the app by any means then all updates are free.
  - eekfuh 16y ago
    I wouldn't call that gaming the system. If I recall, there was a pretty unknown game by PikPok that was released as a paid app, they made it free for a day, then raised the app price back up after that day and it worked very well for them, they even made it to the top 25 paid apps and was number one free app the day it was free. If this wasn't a good idea, or was considered gaming the system, I'm pretty sure the FAAD (http://freeappaday.com/ http://freeappaday.com/) for iPhone wouldn't be as popular as it is right now. People love FAAD.
  - DLWormwood 16y ago
    Baiting? Isn’t that a bit harsh? Is “try before you buy” morally repugnant now? (And don’t say free/paid dual releases are the “right way.” Having two separate apps has data migration issues, and inflates app availability total, benefitting the platform operator more than developers.)
- credo 16y ago
  Apples and Oranges Apple/itunes doesn't show the download count for apps. So switching an app from free to paid wouldn't cause any confusion. App-store rankings are based on downloads from the past three days. However, these rankings (and the last-3-days-counters) are reset when the app is changed from free to paid. The total number of downloads (since day 1 for the app) doesn't really matter. My understanding is that Google wants to indicate the total download-count for apps. In this case, an app that changed from free to paid will have a misleading count. That is probably why Google doesn't let anyone change their free app to paid. Now Google could obviously make things a bit more complex and use two separate counters (one for free and one for paid), but for now, it looks like they don't want to do that. So I think I understand why developers can't change a free Android app to paid (and I also understand why some developers can find this annoying :). ---- Btw I didn't design the system and I'm not defending it. I just tried to explain why free Android apps can't be changed to paid.
  - Eliezer 16y ago
    That is a completely ridiculous reason to not let people give away apps. Just change the frickin' counter system.
    - aneth 16y ago
      Meant to up vote but downvoted. Boy does hn suck on apple devices. Hostile to developer reasoning like this is why most devs I know stick to iPhone. Yeah, apple ain't perfect, but at least their reasons make some sense.
  - bruceboughton 16y ago
    That sounds like a technical justification for a business problem.
    - napierzaza 16y ago
      Well they're all engineers right? Except for that guy that walks around spouting how he knows everything about everyone and you shouldn't do anything bad if you don't want it to get out. You know ... the CEO.
doki_pen 16y ago
I think the correct approach is to release an update that adds a link to buy the paid version, and disables the app after a trial period. It should have been done this way to begin with, usually there are two version in market (free and pro or something). Now that he screwed up, users can just refuse to update and keep it forever. Of course, they won't get updates.
- jcl 16y ago
  Of course, the problem with that approach is that it punishes everyone who paid for the app before it was free.
dpcan 16y ago
Yup, once it's free, it's free. Otherwise I think people would use this technique to skew their ratings and stats. Make it free till it's got 100k downloads, then put a price on it and people will think 100k people bought it. I would LOVE just a few things in the Android Market: 1) To be able to give away a free license of a paid app to someone somehow. As a gift. 2) More than 325 characters to describe an app. 3) More than 2 screenshots.
- latch 16y ago
  Sure people will game it, but doesn't seem like a particularly difficult problem to solve. Introduce the concept of promotions, and don't count downloads during the promotion period.
- masklinn 16y ago
  > 1) To be able to give away a free license of a paid app to someone somehow. As a gift. You... can't do that? Ever? Don't you get like 50 free licenses for each AppStore update? Can you at least gift applications on the Market?
  - dpcan 16y ago
    I know of no way at all to give away a free license to someone. Even partial refunds are said to uninstall the app from the users device - tho I have not tried this so I don't know if it's true.
    - alextgordon 16y ago
      Even partial refunds are said to uninstall the app from the users device - tho I have not tried this so I don't know if it's true. I can't believe this. Customers would essentially be paying some percentage of the app cost and getting nothing in return if they obtained a partial refund. That's just wrong.
ryanjmo 16y ago
I had this exact problem. This is one of the reason I have found the Android app market horrible when compare with the iPhone market. This rule is so arbitrary and non-intuitive. I actually made my app free for testing purposes and had to create an entirely different app once I made it free. In my experience with the Android app store, Google has no idea what they are doing. Edit: Independent of this weird issue, I say this mostly because we sold literally 20x less of the exact same app on the Android market vs. the iPhone market (the apps were marketed the exact same way). This is in spite of the fact that the Android phone sales are apparently equal the number of iPhones phone sales... Another one of my biggest gripes, while people are listening, is that you can not get a URL for your app for the Android store (or at least I don't know how). How are you suppose to sell anything on the web without a web address. We have a link to our iPhone app and for then Android app we need to give people a search term to enter into the Android app store! This is crazy to me! Finally, and this is the last thing I promise, when you submit and app to the Android store you use a keystone to sign it. Well, I ended up losing my keystone (cause I'm an idiot), so I could never push an update of my app. So, I ended up needing to go through and literally refund 100 people's purchases (by hand) and create an entirely different app. This was actually the same app that I made free, so I literally have 3 versions of this app submitted to the Android App Store (but two are no longer public).
- there 16y ago
  This is one of the reason I have found the Android app market horrible when compare with the iPhone market. and This rule is so arbitrary and non-intuitive. right, because apple's never been known for arbitrary and non-intuitive rules when it comes to their appstore...
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    I don't know that they have. Rejected apps are a very small minority and so far my reaction to every rejection I've heard about was "why did they think this would get approved?".
    - sprout 16y ago
jsz0 16y ago
Imagine the Internet riot that would break out if this was an App Store policy? I don't think gaming the Market ranks is a good excuse here. Google is a search company. They know how to make a good search/rank. They should be able to figure this one out.
jacquesm 16y ago
I just got an android yesterday, first negative experience within 20 minutes of opening the box, to play around with the turn-by-turn navigation you have to download an app which is free, but which requires you to set up a gmail account, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the task at hand. Other than that amazing tech. The app download process was pretty painless after the google account was created. I can see why the 'free to paid' switch would require a new application ID, after all people would feel tricked if they sent the name of the app to their friends on recommendation only to find that the one your friend downloaded for free is now suddenly a paid app.
- vetinari 16y ago
  Actually, Gmail (Google Apps accounts work too) account has quite a lot to do with the task at hand. You will find out, when you will have a new phone and log in with the same account - the market will know which apps you bought or downloaded in the past and will set up them on your new phone.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Yes, but that does not hold true for a free app that just enables some functionality that was supposedly present in the phone when I bought it. You don't need a google email account for turn-by-turn navigation with voice instruction.
    - nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
      So go get a 3rd party gps app if you don't like it; You're not forced to download the voice app. I've been using the Navigation app on my Nexus One for a year now without downloading it. It just beeps instead of talking, and I actually like it better that way, compared to my wife's phone where she did download the voices, and it's just some crappy synthesized lady who's hard to understand and talks waaayyy too much.
      - vetinari 16y ago
rfolstad 16y ago
Good to know but about the free thing but the rest of your issues aren't issues at all. The guides explain all this stuff. How did you ever get your app uploaded and approved for the apple app store if you can't follow simple instructions like the ones that explain how to publish your app to the android market?
kingsley_20 16y ago
Another serious annoyance is that users can return your app in 24 hrs and get a full refund. Wipes out an entire ecosystem of cheap games that go for under $5. I understand that this is good for the consumer in a short-sighted way, but really, return a 99c app?
- dpcan 16y ago
  Today I looked, and if they buy the app a second time, they can't cancel a second time. My biggest frustration is definitely the huge amount of "Payment Declined" orders that come through. Then I get emails a day or two later from someone ticked that their app never downloaded AND they think they were charged. Google emails them that the app didn't download and they need to update their payment info in Google Checkout, but I think that most people just have Gmail accounts setup so their phone will work but they never actually check those gmail accounts where these non-payment notifications are sent. Then they're left wondering why their purchased apps don't download. A simple email to both the gmail account AND the user's primary email address would at least help solve this problem. EDIT: I'd like to add that in the few short hours I've been working this evening and following this thread here and there, I've received 4 payment declined orders for our apps. It's like watching money blow out the window.
ww520 16y ago
I'm screwed. I've just done exactly that. There seriously should be a warning in the Dev Console when marking an app free. I'm moving to IPhone development. Edit: Here's how I got screwed. I put my app up as paid app for beta testing at first because testing the Google License Server required the app to be published as a paid app (that's another insensible thing). Within a hour someone made a purchase. I felt uncomfortable charging an app still under testing so I emailed the guy to ask him to revert the transaction within 24 hours. He said it's ok since he liked the app anyway. Then another guy emailed me asking why charging a beta app, which was a reasonable question since people can't download paid app without credit card info. I made my app free for beta testing, thinking that would make it easier for people to test. Now, it looks like the app has to be withdrawn and republished as a new paid app. I feel bad for the guy who has paid for the app already. This really screws the developers and the customers.
- eli 16y ago
  So eventually you publish the final app as a new package and update the beta with a nag screen that points to the new package. Or am I missing something?
  - ww520 16y ago
    Customers who have paid for the beta app will get a crippled app, whether the beta becomes a nag-ware or a lite version.
jlgosse 16y ago
The problem with doing this, which I have seen before on other app stores, is that making something free and then charging for it makes your app look much more valuable than it actually is. For example, if you release a free iPhone application, and it gets downloaded a million times, with 50000 reviews, and then you make it cost $0.99, won't people think the app is some amazing app that millions of people have bought, so then you're more likely to buy it? There's no true indication that the app was free initially, so you don't really know.
- ryandvm 16y ago
  True enough, but it's not rocket science to use separate counter/review tables for each mode. If the app is free, show the free download counter and reviews; and so on. While we're requesting Android enhancements - how about we let the developer select the return policy. 24 hour return works great for utilities and day-to-day apps, but is really hurting the cheap game market.
  - jlgosse 16y ago
    I agree with this. Actually, I will agree with it once Google allows Canadians to actually submit paid apps. What a joke!
Jun8 16y ago
Just another tidbit that bolsters the (to me) obvious fact: Android Market totally sucks and there's a huge opportunity for startups here. The 2-3 independent appstore websites also have ghastly designs.
- callahad 16y ago
  Doubletwist's web interface to the Android Market seems well designed: http://www.doubletwist.com/apps/ http://www.doubletwist.com/apps/

287 points by dminor 16y ago

jrockway 16y ago

Just make it one cent instead?

mahmud 16y ago
It's never about the price, rather the difficulty of acquisition. When it's free, user's don't have to do anything to get it; just click and download. If it's fraction of a cent, they need to have credit cards or google checkout. If you want people to try your software, good luck.
arron61 16y ago
The lowest you can make an app in Android is 99c

annon 16y ago

Wow. Delete the app and create a new package? I'm assuming that will also kill updates for people that had the original package unless you deploy to both, which may be impossible if you want the free version gone.

aresant 16y ago

In iTunes it's a regular strategy to give an app away for free for a week or two to promote a special, a launch, or otherwise, and then see residual sales come in when you flip back to paid - particuarlly on social games etc. Don't understand this policy in android.

arron61 16y ago
IMO, Android is taking the right approach. 1) Developers will game the system. They give apps away for free to get good reviews and higher ratings. I am more generous on a free app than a paid app. 2) You are baiting users to get your app for free initially and then making them pay for the upgrades.
- megablast 16y ago
  In the Apple app store, ratings given when an app is free do not carry over to a paid for app, so any extra ratings you get are ignored. Reviews are carried over. There are a number of websites/apps with lots of users who look for free apps to try out, and rely on this method to try out some really good stuff. I see nothing wrong with this, you are giving users something for free that is normally not, and a great way to get new people to try your app. A very valid and welcome marketing technique.
  - aphexairlines 16y ago
    You can try out any paid Android Market app for 24 hours.
- annon 16y ago
  Not true. When you get the app for free on iTunes, you own it, even if they charge later. There's no distinction between if you got it for free or not.
- modeless 16y ago
  Free apps generally get worse reviews. Also, once you've obtained the app by any means then all updates are free.
- eekfuh 16y ago
  I wouldn't call that gaming the system. If I recall, there was a pretty unknown game by PikPok that was released as a paid app, they made it free for a day, then raised the app price back up after that day and it worked very well for them, they even made it to the top 25 paid apps and was number one free app the day it was free. If this wasn't a good idea, or was considered gaming the system, I'm pretty sure the FAAD (http://freeappaday.com/ http://freeappaday.com/) for iPhone wouldn't be as popular as it is right now. People love FAAD.
- DLWormwood 16y ago
  Baiting? Isn’t that a bit harsh? Is “try before you buy” morally repugnant now? (And don’t say free/paid dual releases are the “right way.” Having two separate apps has data migration issues, and inflates app availability total, benefitting the platform operator more than developers.)
credo 16y ago
Apples and Oranges Apple/itunes doesn't show the download count for apps. So switching an app from free to paid wouldn't cause any confusion. App-store rankings are based on downloads from the past three days. However, these rankings (and the last-3-days-counters) are reset when the app is changed from free to paid. The total number of downloads (since day 1 for the app) doesn't really matter. My understanding is that Google wants to indicate the total download-count for apps. In this case, an app that changed from free to paid will have a misleading count. That is probably why Google doesn't let anyone change their free app to paid. Now Google could obviously make things a bit more complex and use two separate counters (one for free and one for paid), but for now, it looks like they don't want to do that. So I think I understand why developers can't change a free Android app to paid (and I also understand why some developers can find this annoying :). ---- Btw I didn't design the system and I'm not defending it. I just tried to explain why free Android apps can't be changed to paid.
- Eliezer 16y ago
  That is a completely ridiculous reason to not let people give away apps. Just change the frickin' counter system.
  - aneth 16y ago
    Meant to up vote but downvoted. Boy does hn suck on apple devices. Hostile to developer reasoning like this is why most devs I know stick to iPhone. Yeah, apple ain't perfect, but at least their reasons make some sense.
- bruceboughton 16y ago
  That sounds like a technical justification for a business problem.
  - napierzaza 16y ago
    Well they're all engineers right? Except for that guy that walks around spouting how he knows everything about everyone and you shouldn't do anything bad if you don't want it to get out. You know ... the CEO.

doki_pen 16y ago

I think the correct approach is to release an update that adds a link to buy the paid version, and disables the app after a trial period. It should have been done this way to begin with, usually there are two version in market (free and pro or something). Now that he screwed up, users can just refuse to update and keep it forever. Of course, they won't get updates.

jcl 16y ago
Of course, the problem with that approach is that it punishes everyone who paid for the app before it was free.

dpcan 16y ago

Yup, once it's free, it's free. Otherwise I think people would use this technique to skew their ratings and stats. Make it free till it's got 100k downloads, then put a price on it and people will think 100k people bought it. I would LOVE just a few things in the Android Market: 1) To be able to give away a free license of a paid app to someone somehow. As a gift. 2) More than 325 characters to describe an app. 3) More than 2 screenshots.

latch 16y ago
Sure people will game it, but doesn't seem like a particularly difficult problem to solve. Introduce the concept of promotions, and don't count downloads during the promotion period.
masklinn 16y ago
> 1) To be able to give away a free license of a paid app to someone somehow. As a gift. You... can't do that? Ever? Don't you get like 50 free licenses for each AppStore update? Can you at least gift applications on the Market?
- dpcan 16y ago
  I know of no way at all to give away a free license to someone. Even partial refunds are said to uninstall the app from the users device - tho I have not tried this so I don't know if it's true.
  - alextgordon 16y ago
    Even partial refunds are said to uninstall the app from the users device - tho I have not tried this so I don't know if it's true. I can't believe this. Customers would essentially be paying some percentage of the app cost and getting nothing in return if they obtained a partial refund. That's just wrong.

ryanjmo 16y ago

I had this exact problem. This is one of the reason I have found the Android app market horrible when compare with the iPhone market. This rule is so arbitrary and non-intuitive. I actually made my app free for testing purposes and had to create an entirely different app once I made it free. In my experience with the Android app store, Google has no idea what they are doing. Edit: Independent of this weird issue, I say this mostly because we sold literally 20x less of the exact same app on the Android market vs. the iPhone market (the apps were marketed the exact same way). This is in spite of the fact that the Android phone sales are apparently equal the number of iPhones phone sales... Another one of my biggest gripes, while people are listening, is that you can not get a URL for your app for the Android store (or at least I don't know how). How are you suppose to sell anything on the web without a web address. We have a link to our iPhone app and for then Android app we need to give people a search term to enter into the Android app store! This is crazy to me! Finally, and this is the last thing I promise, when you submit and app to the Android store you use a keystone to sign it. Well, I ended up losing my keystone (cause I'm an idiot), so I could never push an update of my app. So, I ended up needing to go through and literally refund 100 people's purchases (by hand) and create an entirely different app. This was actually the same app that I made free, so I literally have 3 versions of this app submitted to the Android App Store (but two are no longer public).

there 16y ago
This is one of the reason I have found the Android app market horrible when compare with the iPhone market. and This rule is so arbitrary and non-intuitive. right, because apple's never been known for arbitrary and non-intuitive rules when it comes to their appstore...
- loewenskind 16y ago
  I don't know that they have. Rejected apps are a very small minority and so far my reaction to every rejection I've heard about was "why did they think this would get approved?".
  - sprout 16y ago

jsz0 16y ago

Imagine the Internet riot that would break out if this was an App Store policy? I don't think gaming the Market ranks is a good excuse here. Google is a search company. They know how to make a good search/rank. They should be able to figure this one out.

jacquesm 16y ago

I just got an android yesterday, first negative experience within 20 minutes of opening the box, to play around with the turn-by-turn navigation you have to download an app which is free, but which requires you to set up a gmail account, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the task at hand. Other than that amazing tech. The app download process was pretty painless after the google account was created. I can see why the 'free to paid' switch would require a new application ID, after all people would feel tricked if they sent the name of the app to their friends on recommendation only to find that the one your friend downloaded for free is now suddenly a paid app.

vetinari 16y ago
Actually, Gmail (Google Apps accounts work too) account has quite a lot to do with the task at hand. You will find out, when you will have a new phone and log in with the same account - the market will know which apps you bought or downloaded in the past and will set up them on your new phone.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Yes, but that does not hold true for a free app that just enables some functionality that was supposedly present in the phone when I bought it. You don't need a google email account for turn-by-turn navigation with voice instruction.
  - nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
    So go get a 3rd party gps app if you don't like it; You're not forced to download the voice app. I've been using the Navigation app on my Nexus One for a year now without downloading it. It just beeps instead of talking, and I actually like it better that way, compared to my wife's phone where she did download the voices, and it's just some crappy synthesized lady who's hard to understand and talks waaayyy too much.
    - vetinari 16y ago

rfolstad 16y ago

Good to know but about the free thing but the rest of your issues aren't issues at all. The guides explain all this stuff. How did you ever get your app uploaded and approved for the apple app store if you can't follow simple instructions like the ones that explain how to publish your app to the android market?

kingsley_20 16y ago

Another serious annoyance is that users can return your app in 24 hrs and get a full refund. Wipes out an entire ecosystem of cheap games that go for under $5. I understand that this is good for the consumer in a short-sighted way, but really, return a 99c app?

dpcan 16y ago
Today I looked, and if they buy the app a second time, they can't cancel a second time. My biggest frustration is definitely the huge amount of "Payment Declined" orders that come through. Then I get emails a day or two later from someone ticked that their app never downloaded AND they think they were charged. Google emails them that the app didn't download and they need to update their payment info in Google Checkout, but I think that most people just have Gmail accounts setup so their phone will work but they never actually check those gmail accounts where these non-payment notifications are sent. Then they're left wondering why their purchased apps don't download. A simple email to both the gmail account AND the user's primary email address would at least help solve this problem. EDIT: I'd like to add that in the few short hours I've been working this evening and following this thread here and there, I've received 4 payment declined orders for our apps. It's like watching money blow out the window.

ww520 16y ago

I'm screwed. I've just done exactly that. There seriously should be a warning in the Dev Console when marking an app free. I'm moving to IPhone development. Edit: Here's how I got screwed. I put my app up as paid app for beta testing at first because testing the Google License Server required the app to be published as a paid app (that's another insensible thing). Within a hour someone made a purchase. I felt uncomfortable charging an app still under testing so I emailed the guy to ask him to revert the transaction within 24 hours. He said it's ok since he liked the app anyway. Then another guy emailed me asking why charging a beta app, which was a reasonable question since people can't download paid app without credit card info. I made my app free for beta testing, thinking that would make it easier for people to test. Now, it looks like the app has to be withdrawn and republished as a new paid app. I feel bad for the guy who has paid for the app already. This really screws the developers and the customers.

eli 16y ago
So eventually you publish the final app as a new package and update the beta with a nag screen that points to the new package. Or am I missing something?
- ww520 16y ago
  Customers who have paid for the beta app will get a crippled app, whether the beta becomes a nag-ware or a lite version.

jlgosse 16y ago

The problem with doing this, which I have seen before on other app stores, is that making something free and then charging for it makes your app look much more valuable than it actually is. For example, if you release a free iPhone application, and it gets downloaded a million times, with 50000 reviews, and then you make it cost $0.99, won't people think the app is some amazing app that millions of people have bought, so then you're more likely to buy it? There's no true indication that the app was free initially, so you don't really know.

ryandvm 16y ago
True enough, but it's not rocket science to use separate counter/review tables for each mode. If the app is free, show the free download counter and reviews; and so on. While we're requesting Android enhancements - how about we let the developer select the return policy. 24 hour return works great for utilities and day-to-day apps, but is really hurting the cheap game market.
- jlgosse 16y ago
  I agree with this. Actually, I will agree with it once Google allows Canadians to actually submit paid apps. What a joke!

Jun8 16y ago

Just another tidbit that bolsters the (to me) obvious fact: Android Market totally sucks and there's a huge opportunity for startups here. The 2-3 independent appstore websites also have ghastly designs.

callahad 16y ago
Doubletwist's web interface to the Android Market seems well designed: http://www.doubletwist.com/apps/ http://www.doubletwist.com/apps/