What we’ve learned from the thousands of Android developers that we’ve helped is that there is always a way to increase a developer’s revenue. Improvements to their mobile monetization strategy might be as complicated as A/B testing ad formats and encouraging advertisers to propose direct deals. But optimization can also be as simple as avoiding these five basic mobile monetization mistakes.

Don’t mistake “eCPM” for earnings

Developers will often mistake eCPMs as a measure of a publisher’s potential earnings, but eCPMs are really just a standard of measurement that assess the quality of how well an advertiser’s ad is performing in their app. While it’s easy to say that developers like yourself should fill your inventory with ads from high eCPM advertisers, the number of impressions that you allocate to advertisers and your app’s fill rate will both affect your earnings. A word of advice: analyzing eCPMs alone can misrepresent how well your app is monetizing. For instance, an advertiser with a $2.00 eCPM can generate less revenue for you than a $1.00 eCPM advertiser if the $1.00 eCPM advertiser is comparably receiving more traffic.

Interstitial ads are better than you give them credit for

The interstitial ad might “pop up” at strategic times and fill up a mobile phone’s screen, but it’s undeniably one of the most effective ad formats on the market. If monetization is your priority, don’t take the interstitial ad format for granted. In fact, when we analyzed the earnings that publishers generated from both CPC and CPI advertisers, interstitials consistently out-earned app lists, panels, custom ads, and banners on AppFlood. However don’t get me wrong. Monetizing your app doesn’t end with downloading the SDK. As with deploying any ad format, you should be mindful of the ways that you can minimize in-app interruptions, whether this means showing the interstitial in between levels of a mobile game or right before the user closes the app.

Make sure you have a monetization game plan

You’d be surprised by the proportion of developers that don’t have a growth strategy for their apps. For instance, in an AppFlood survey of 1022 app developers, 20% of indie developers “took a chance” on an ad network without so much of a substantial reason. If you’ve been a part of the cutthroat world of mobile app publishing, “taking a chance” on an ad network and coming in without a game plan won’t help. You need to identify the monetization strategy that’s best for you and your app. This may include choosing a mobile ad network that works for you, learning how to measure user engagement, or even investing in a burst campaign. A burst campaign is a strategy developers will use to purchase quality users in a short window of time to sprint their way to the top of the app store charts and later monetize the resulting larger userbase.

Don’t give up too early

99.99% of app publishers aren’t going to become millionaires overnight. But after installing an ad network’s SDK, many developers tend to get the wrong impression about mobile app monetization. What they expect is a high return off the bat. On the other hand what they don’t expect is the realization that monetizing an app is a test of patience. Just because the earnings after the first week of testing out the ad network weren’t satisfactory and they didn’t see the improvement they were looking for, doesn’t mean that it’s in the developer’s best interest to jump to another network. What they’ve neglected is the reality that higher earnings won’t appear magically overnight. If developers want to boost revenue, these publishers need to employ strategies for optimizing earnings, whether that means testing different ad formats and its placement, or redistributing traffic.

Don’t be shy – ask your ad network for help

Finally, don’t forget that ad networks are a service-based business and are there to help you maximize your revenue. For many developers, strategizing a monetization plan can get tricky, but fortunately for the mobile ad networks like AppFlood, which have addressed concerns and aided thousands of app developers, advertising networks have plenty of experience troubleshooting or even guiding your mobile optimization strategy. This might mean someone from the ad network will work directly with you to allocate traffic to target demographics, or your mobile advertising network of choice might fulfill your request for a data analysis report of your app’s monetization performance, they may use an android databases system. With so many employees now working remotely it creates some serious challenges for businesses but did you know that you can monitor internet activity of staff working for you and so see what they are doing? This makes it so much easier to manage them and catch any bad behaviour so comes highly recommended.

Don’t be afraid to reach out.

About The Author
Richard O’Connell is the Global Marketing Director for PapayaMobile and AppFlood, a mobile advertising network of 5,500 developers delivering more than 1.3 billion impressions. He has six years of experience successfully marketing global digital and mobile brands in the Europe, Asia and the US. He now leads AppFlood’s global marketing efforts including strategy, branding, mobile marketing, digital, PR and community management with a team spanning the US, Europe, and China.

The purpose of the Wiki is to collate the information people are discussing on the forums, and make it easily accessible and useful. Are you looking for a database of indie-friendly multimedia resources? Or clear and concise info about popular ad networks? How about implementation guides, or mediation adapters? Instead of having to dig through pages of old forum discussions, you’ll now be able to find all this information easily accessible on the Wiki.

We’re starting off with these major content areas:

• Advertising & Monetization Detailed information about the various ad networks, ad formats and app stores.
• App Development & Design Resources for app developers, source code stores, coding tutorials and how-to’s.

The new Wiki will complement the existing forums by helping to organise the information which comes out of discussions. Official ad network representatives are already contributing to both sites, and they’ll continue to help answer your questions.

It’s super easy to contribute – just sign in with your username & password from the forums. You’ll be able to edit existing pages and create new ones right away. So I encourage you to drop by, take a look and start wiki-ing! With your help, we can continue to build a great community for Android developers.

Visit the Making Money With Android Wiki | Read the Forums Announcement

What do you think of the new site? Let me know in the comments!

So What Actually Happened?

On Tuesday morning I woke up to find the homepage for the Blog, Forums and Gigs website replaced by a “hacked” message. Immediately I took the website offline, and setup a temporary “under maintenance” page which I pointed all the DNS records to while assessing the damage.

At a first glance, it appeared the hacker had only replaced the “index.php” files with a defaced version, but left everything else intact. This would have been quite easy to fix with minimal downtime.

Unfortunately further examination found several copies of a backdoor had been installed, including remote shell access. Given this information, I felt it necessary to migrate the entire site to new servers, and restore from a known backup.

Was Any Information Stolen?

Potentially everything. The hacker obtained access to vBulletin using a zero-day exploit which allowed them to create an administrator account. With an admin account and remote shell access, they could have accessed email addresses, private messages, hashed passwords, and any other information on the site.

There is no indication this was a targeted attack. Dozens of other sites have been compromised this week with exactly the same symptoms. However, it is still possible that any/all of this information has been stolen, and I’m operating under the assumption that this is the case.

How Does This Affect Me?

There are a few precautions you should take to minimize any potential impact:

• Change your forums password immediately.
• If you use the same password on other sites (such as your email account), be sure to change them as well.
• Assume that any information you sent via PM on the forums has been stolen.
• Let me know via email (makingmoneywithandroid@gmail.com) if you notice anything suspicious on the website, or have any concerns you’d like to discuss.

What’s Happening Now?

• I am continuing to investigate the circumstances which led to the hacking, and ensure that all vulnerabilities have been patched.
• In the near future the blog will be moved to more secure WordPress hosting.
• I’m working with security professionals to ensure this site adheres to best practices for security moving forward.
• Ongoing monitoring will be established, so that any future hacking attempts can be noticed and mitigated more quickly.

Conclusion

I’m very sorry to have to share this news with you. While websites are hacked all the time (and a large number seem to have been affected by this particular zero-day exploit), I feel a personal responsibility to protect the information you’ve trusted me with by joining this community. Please be assured I’m doing my best to resolve the situation, and prevent anything like this from happening again in the future including hiring expert assistance at https://indexsy.com/best-cybersecurity-companies/.

I’ll keep you posted, and update with more information as soon as it becomes available. In the mean time, you can get in touch with me using the email address above, if you have any queries or concerns. Thanks for your continued support and patience!

Update: I’ve posted a further update about this incident on the forums.

Often I have been asked whether or not it’s possible to really make a living from Android apps alone as an individual, and always my answer gets a surprised response when I give it. Not only is it possible to make a full income from Android apps alone, but it’s also actually pretty easy and you don’t even need any marketing. As overly simple and straightforward as it might sound, it’s actually entirely possible to release a paid app onto the Play Store, do nothing to market it or advertise it, and then just watch as the money pours in. I’d even go as far as to say that it’s unnecessary to bother with other more complicated forms of monetization (such as in-app billing, or ‘freemium’ apps) and that in this case the most straightforward approach really is the best, since people is always is trying to make and save some money, also using some other resources as credit card debt consolidation could be really helpful to improve your financial condition.

How do I know this? Simple: because I released an app on the Play Store about 10 months ago and have so far racked up nearly £15K from it (that’s roughly $30K – I’m a Brit y’see). I never did any advertising, I’m not exactly what you’d call a ‘pro’ and I didn’t even own an Android until 6 months before. But I have managed to repeat the process since then, and with this project I have invested and gotten personal loans to manage it, I’ve obviously gotten plenty of advice from professionals like the ones at SoFi.

There are several things to consider when applying for an instant loan approval bad credit and some of these can significantly improve your chances of getting your application accepted without unnecessary delay.

You can therefore get your cash quickly and avoid the stress and worry of being unable to pay your bills and put food on the table.

Of course though to make this work you also need to know what you’re doing and you still need some strategy. Fortunately I’m about to share with you what made my apps a hit and what some of the secrets to success are. Follow these tips and you too can start earning a living from Android apps.

Throw Lots of Paint at the Wall and See What Sticks

A common mistake I’ve seen is for people to spend years working on a single app only to then release it and find it flops. Unfortunately the market just moves too quickly to spend that long on one project, and if you do then you’ll be much more badly hit by a failure. To start with, try releasing lots of Android apps that you can make quickly but which have potential and then focus on developing the ones that work.

Program Properly

That said, I would highly advise against using any ‘app builder’ tools out there which severely limit what’s possible for you to create. Use these tools and you’ll make an RSS feed for your site at best and that’s never going to be a massive hit. Learn to program properly, but to make life easier consider using the amazing Basic4Android tool which is much quicker and easier to get to grips with than going the Eclipse+Java route that most programmers take (just research it and trust me on that one).

Make Apps That People Are Looking For

So you’re making lots of apps quickly – great. Now, how to know what kinds of apps to make? Well one tip is to look at the Play Store and to look for what’s being searched for commonly. Thankfully this is easy currently as the search box provides suggestions based on popular queries. Type in ‘A’, and see what the suggestions are. If you can find a popular search that doesn’t have a lot of results, then that’s a great area to target. Make sure it’s something that interests you too though, as you don’t want to get bored with it.

Make Apps That People Will Get Excited About

Likewise, try to think about which kinds of apps people will be willing to pay for. An app that changes the function of Android (such as a novel new home screen for instance, or a pop-up window) will have a big market in tech fanatics who want to experiment with their devices and show them off to friends – which is why they’ll often be willing to pay. Likewise you can sell apps that promise to make life a little better – such as a fitness app or a money management app. Just make sure that there is no free competition around, you need to offer something unique to warrant the spend.

Make it Self Explanatory

One of the best things I did with my app was to make both the name and the icon highly self-explanatory. The name of my app was the exact search term that people were looking for (which helped it to show up in lots of queries) and the image was a simple screenshot of the app that made it clear what it was for so that people would open it up to take a look. Use an obscure brand name and logo and no one is going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Find the Right Price

Your chosen price point is also very important and will have a big impact on the number of purchases you get, as well as the profit of course. You’d be surprised, but 10 cents can make all the difference so do take the time to experiment with different prices to see what makes you the most money.

Update Regularly

Now your app is out there you need to update as regularly as you can when an app shows promise. This will not only get you lots of good reviews, but it will also increase your visibility by putting your app in the ‘recently updated’ lists.

Oh and meanwhile? Begin work on your next app! This is a market where volume can really pay off, and the sky really is the limit…

About The Author
Jason Haddad works as a tester for wellresearchedreviews.com. He enjoys writing pieces based on his own experiences of selling apps on Android. Making use of social media in his free time is one of his hobbies.

Rarely stated but universally accepted, mobile apps have played a pivotal role in creating the market duopoly that iOS and Android now enjoy.

Without their enthusiastic and prolific developer communities, it’s unlikely that iOS and Android would collectively account for a staggering 93% of worldwide smartphones today.

Curiously, the exceedingly important factor of developer platform preference is almost never taken into consideration when the future of mobile advertising is discussed. Instead, the headlines continue to reflect the present edge iOS retains over Android on mobile advertising revenue. You can also how to use the spy app spybubble iphone spy app review and learn how to use it for your advantage.

Alas, we are simply expected to believe that what is true today will somehow still be true tomorrow. But if you look closely at what developers have communicated to us with their actions, particularly during the last twelve months, a cogent argument can be made for why Android may soon emerge as the dominant platform for mobile advertising.

New Innovative Ad Formats

Android is, without question, where mobile advertising is presently evolving fastest. This is an undeniable benefit for both developers and consumers.

Overwhelmingly, consumers want free apps and will embrace mobile ads as a means to procure them. Auspiciously for Android yet again, ad networks are doing some of their most creative and engaging work today on Android – not iOS.

As a result, leading ad networks have helped to incentivize Android to the developer community through their creation of highly innovative ad formats. From proprietary units like Airpush’s SmartWall, to the bounty of new resources introduced during AdMob’s Spring 2013 overhaul, a large segment of developers now view Android as home to the industry’s most effective and least disruptive mobile ads.

And they have the payouts to prove it.

More Money For Developers

As good detective work routinely illustrates, whenever you “follow the money” you can almost always find what you’re searching for. In mobile advertising, money is flowing like never before into the pockets of Android developers and the ad networks making it possible.

From the recent start of Millennial Media’s rebound following a brutal Wall Street debut last year, to Airpush’s march toward an astonishing $150 million in revenue this year, it isn’t difficult to understand why a high-profile developer survey just this summer showed that the monthly earnings gap between iOS and Android developers is narrowing fast and could reach parity by 2014. Anyone who fails to consider this when assessing the future of mobile advertising is surely missing one of the most telling clues about how the industry is evolving.

No matter how you slice it, driving this growth for ad networks, app stores, and all companies that have hitched their wagon to Android’s star is the expanding pool of developers who have done the same.

Platform Of Choice

Since the start of 2013, Android’s global market share has continued to lead the mobile ecosystem. Mobile ad impressions on Android are now at an all-time high. Google Play even reached 50 billion app downloads just weeks after Apple’s App Store boasted of the same milestone. But none of these factors will, in the long run, do as much to bolster mobile advertising on Android as where developers choose to concentrate their efforts.

It goes without saying that app developers are among the most creative individuals toiling in any facet of technology. And they are most inclined to thrive – and profit – when the resources available in their preferred mobile ecosystem are equally as creative. This is precisely why Android is becoming more desirable to developers. It supports an environment of inspired and profitable productivity.

During the April 2010 unveiling of iAd, Steve Jobs asserted his belief that Apple’s mobile advertising platform was poised to revolutionize mobile advertising and accelerate the growth of this promising young industry, chiefly to the benefit of iOS.

Now more than three years removed from that prophetic prediction, it is unmistakably clear that the late Apple visionary’s high hopes for mobile advertising have finally started to manifest… but mostly for Android.

Jobs challenged the nascent mobile advertising industry and its players to aim higher, innovate faster, and expect more. Unfortunately for iOS, many developers have found it easier to do those things on Android.

In the last seven months alone, the pace at which mobile app developers have shifted their allegiance from iOS to Android has accelerated markedly, as evidenced by app stores and ad networks paying out record sums to Android developers. As a result, today’s crop of Android developers is more motivated and productive than they have been at any other time in the five years that iOS has been at war with Android.

Conclusion

Although industry reports covering everything from hardware shipments and app downloads, to mobile ad revenue and consumer satisfaction continue to paint conflicting portraits of which mobile operating system is really the dominant platform, nothing may ultimately do more to declare a winner in this war than the leading platform preference among developers.

If the current trend persists, Android will prove over time to be the supreme and dominant platform for mobile advertising.

About The Author
Michael Essany is a bestselling author and senior editor of Mobile Marketing Watch who has also been featured on CNN, Oprah, NBC’s Today, and inside the pages of Time, Newsweek, and People. To contact Michael, visit www.MichaelEssany.com.

I’m now opening up the blog to accept contributions from the wider community. Not just my own story, but all of yours as well. Do you have a passion for Android development? Have you learned something from publishing an app yourself? Do you have tips for new developers looking to monetize their apps? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, chances are you’d make a great guest author.

My hope is to make this site an even better resource for developers, by publishing tutorials, monetization tips, step-by-step guides and personal testimonies from successful developers.

Would you like to contribute to this blog? Shoot me a line at makingmoneywithandroid@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you!

This new feature is a big deal for many Android developers. Anyone who’s released an app on Google Play knows what it’s like to receive a negative review, complaining about problems which have already been fixed, or are simply the result of a misunderstanding by the user. This kind of thing happens all the time. And up until now, it’s been impossible to follow up with these users.

As of today, it’s super simple to view and reply to comments. Simply log into the Google Play Developer Console and click the “Ratings & Reviews” tab for an app. You’ll see a link under every review which says “Reply to this review”. Clicking this link provides a text box where you can respond to the user’s review in up to 350 characters. Once you’re done, click “Publish reply” and it will appear immediately on the Google Play listing for your app, directly under the original review.

I’m very excited to see this feature finally enabled for all Google Play developers. Two-way conversations are critical for good customer support. Now that we can follow up bug reports and feature suggestions, I believe the quality and effectiveness of user feedback will improve greatly. Google Play is no longer just a place to complain about problems. It’s now a place to get solutions, and communicate with developers directly.

What do you think of the new “Reply to Comments” feature? Is it a positive thing for developers? For users? Leave your feedback in the comments below!

Forum member Gabriele (megasoft78) recently posted a thread about creating an IRC channel for this website. This would provide an avenue for realtime discussion, and another way of exchanging ideas with the people who already frequent the blog and forums.

The feedback so far has been very positive, so we now have a new hashtag on the Freenode IRC network – #makingmoneywithandroid.

I’ve added a new menu entry on the blog – “Join the IRC Discussion” – which points to an embedded web client. So even if you’re not familiar with IRC, or don’t have a desktop client, you’ll be able to join the discussion from inside your web browser.

The web client is quite easy to use:

• Visit the embedded client, or the standalone version
• Provide Nickname (any name you like)
• In Channels, type “#makingmoneywithandroid” (if it is not already set)
• Fill in the reCAPTCHA, and click Connect.

I’d encourage you all to drop by if you get a chance. IRC is a great medium for getting quick feedback on a new idea, or getting to know the other developers you’ve seen around the forums in a more open & spontaneous setting. Many thanks to Gabriele for sharing the idea, and setting up the channel!

Looking forward to seeing you on IRC!

Join #makingmoneywithandroid on Freenode.net.

In my October report, I described how this one simple app turned into an overnight success. Fake iPhone 4S brought in over $700 in October alone, helping to bring my total earnings for that month over the nominal target of $1000.

In November, these already fantastic results improved in every way. Total Active Installs went from ~140,000 at the end of October to over 400,000 by mid-November. By the end of November, I’d reached about 1.2 million total installs. This boost in downloads seemed to be mostly self-propagating. By reaching the top Trending charts for the Android Market, it was noticed by a lot of people, which in turn helped keep it in the top charts.

It still amazes me that an app which I created as a casual idea in my free time would reach this level of popularity. There’s no way I would have predicted this number of people could be interested in downloading a Fake iPhone. But I tried it – and apparently a lot of people do want this kind of app.

Anyway, this torrent of new users brought a proportional increase in revenue. In fact, during November I brought in an average of over $200 per day! This was an incredibly exciting month for me – and busy too, as I released a number of updates.

Advertising Networks

Throughout the month I added a lot of new advertising networks. Since I was getting a heap of ad impressions, I thought it was an ideal time to try out a few other networks I’d heard of, and see how they compare in terms of eCPM and overall revenue.

Here’s a chart showing the overall distribution of revenue between all the networks I used this month:

A few of these networks are worth mentioning in detail, which I’ve done below.

Tapjoy

Impressions: 300K | CTR: 18% | eCPM: $6.33 | Revenue: $1,893.27

My biggest success here was with Tapjoy. I decided to add a little “gamification” to Fake iPhone 4S, and see if this would help improve revenues. I’m very pleased with the results (see The Numbers section below for details).

All I did was add an extra “screen” (to the far right, when users scroll through the app), which shows how many “Karma points” the user has earned. Of course, it starts at zero, and the way to earn points is by completing Tapjoy offers. Most of these offers are free, so there’s very little friction involved.

For this particular app though, there were no extra features or levels to unlock. Normally Tapjoy points would be used in a game, or to unlock new features in an app. In this case, I integrated this points system purely as a method of supporting the developer (me!), with no other reward for the user per se.

I did add a little “incentive” to earn points though – by giving the user a title. As an individual earns more points, they progress through the roles such as “Red Dwarf”, “White Dwarf”, and “Karma Wizard”. It’s a pretty simple concept, but gives a little bit of a reward for completing offers. Which is always a good thing

LeadBolt

Impressions: 6.3M | CTR: 2.36% | eCPM: $0.13 | Revenue: $835.48

LeadBolt brought in good results – not stellar, but stable & reliable. The eCPM was certainly not impressive. The main aspect which brought made LeadBolt so effective was the high fill rate. Other advertising networks often struggled with inventory, whereas LeadBolt was one of my “safe” networks, which would regularly return decent adverts.

Ironically LeadBolt don’t actually show me the fill rate on their reporting interface. But since my app switches between the different ad networks randomly, I can make a guess of the fill rate based on the number of impressions compared with other networks.

If LeadBolt had the eCPM of Inneractive or Madvertise, it would be fantastic. But it seems that their banner adverts (which I was primarily using here) are more of a guaranteed fill, rather than a high-flying revenue driver.

Inner-Active

Impressions: 1.3M | CTR: 6.95% | eCPM: $1.20 | Revenue: $1,649.88

One thing I must say – Inneractive has great developer support (similar to LeadBolt). I’ve had a personal account manager from the start, and she has been very helpful when I had any queries or difficulties. In fact, I’ve even had reps from Inneractive drop by on this blog, offering help to developers looking to get started. They’re definitely a company that values communication, and you shouldn’t have any trouble getting in touch with a real person here.

Having said that, let’s look at the numbers for this month. Fill rate & eCPM were quite good, bringing Inneractive to 3rd place in terms of overall revenue (behind Madvertise). The CTR was really quite high. Coupled with the reasonable fill rate, I chose Inneractive as another one of my “safe” networks, which I’d revert to automatically if another system was struggling to provide inventory.

Madvertise

Impressions: 135K | CTR: 4.71% | eCPM: $17 | Revenue: $2,360

Madvertise is a bit of an interesting case. On the one hand, they offer absolutely stunning eCPMs – especially considering these are banner adverts. But on the other hand, the fill rate is pretty appalling.

As it turns out, Madvertise only fills inventory for a small set of Western European countries. Outside of this area, you’d be lucky to get any adverts at all. As most of my app downloads come from the USA, it would seem Madvertise isn’t a great fit for me.

What I ended up doing, was including Madvertise in my “random rotation” ad mediation code. But if Madvertise failed to provide an ad, I’d blacklist that network for the rest of the user’s session. So if a US-based user opened my app, it would request an Madvertise ad, fail to load, and switch over to use my other networks for any future requests. But for somebody in Europe, the Madvertise code would fill the space, and whitelist Madvertise for the rest of that session. Any future ad requests for that user, would be exclusively directed to Madvertise.

So as you can see, I made a very specific exception here for Madvertise. Without this kind of intelligent switching, I’m sure the fill rate in my reports would have been much lower. But as it turns out, Madvertise managed to bring in more revenue for this month than any of my other advertising networks – over $2000 US-dollars. That’s right – I earned more money from this single network in November, than from all my income sources combined in October! Crazy stuff.

Other Networks

Most of the other ad networks speak for themselves. It’s probably worth mentioning though, AdMob was not included in the Fake iPhone app. Hence revenues aren’t greatly improved this month.

Also worth noting, Airpush is only included in one of my apps, which is actually a demo of Airpush functionality itself. This app has very few users, so is not bringing in any real revenue. I’m not planning to introduce push notification ads into any of my other apps. I simply created this one to try out the SDK

The Numbers

Here are detailed figures for all the advertising networks I used in November.

Advertising Networks – Breakdown

AdMob

AdSense

Tapjoy

LeadBolt

Inneractive

Madvertise

InMobi

Millennial Media

Airpush

Totals

Total App Downloads: 1,374,362 (+1,055,158)

Total Ad Impressions: 8,422,607 (+5,758,191)
Total Ad Revenue: $6,855.13 (+5,555.72)
Revenue Per 1,000 Impressions: $0.81 (+0.31)

Android Market Sales: $4.04 (2 sales) (+2.03)

Total AdSense Revenue: $168.68 (+95.17)
Other Website Advertising: $90.85 (+12.85)

Total Income for November: $7,118.70 (+5,637.78)

Conclusion

As you can see, November was a very exciting time with a huge increase in pretty much every metric I’ve been counting. It was my best month yet, by a factor of more than 400%. This demonstrates more than ever, that it is possible to make money with Android.

The only real downside of these results, is that all my revenue is pretty much dependent on one app. The ongoing challenge will be to diversify – which is easier said than done. It’s going to be hard to replicate the viral popularity of a popular keyword with some of my other more obscure apps. But I’ve already seen a rise in daily installs for most of my listings.

Speaking of ongoing challenges – yes, this report is very late. Like, 6 months late. I apologise to everyone who’s been watching & waiting for new reports. I’m something of a perfectionist, so I always struggle to publish an article without spending a lot of time refining it. And in recent months, I just haven’t had that time.

Although this report is far from perfect (by my standards anyway), at least it’s published now. Which is a lot better than no report at all I hope these details I’ve written up can help other developers interested in pursuing a similar path. As always, feel free to share your questions / comments in the Disqus thread below. Or, drop by the forums for a more detailed discussion with fellow devs.

Until next time!
-David

• Added check for Android API calls that require a version of Android higher than the minimum supported version. This will save you from having to test your app on Android 1.6 for example, only to have it fail due to an API call that was introduced in Android 2.1
• Added a feature that allows you to run some code only in debug mode. Builds now generate a class called BuildConfig containing a DEBUG constant that is automatically set according to your build type. You can check the (BuildConfig.DEBUG) constant in your code to run debug-only functions such as outputting debug logs.
• Added feature to automatically setup JAR dependencies. Any .jar files in the /libs folder are added to the build configuration (similar to how the Ant build system works). Also, .jar files needed by library projects are also automatically added to projects that depend on those library projects.
• Updated the resource chooser to show the resolved value for resources. For example, when selecting @string/hello the chooser displays a resolved value such as “Hello World”). The resource chooser also now allows you to edit the chosen value directly.

There are plenty more changes to be found in the SDK Release Notes and ADT Release Notes. The Android Emulator can now run x86 system images at native speed, thanks to contributions from Intel. Lint has also received a major upgrade, with 40 new rules checking for performance and code issues.

Version 17 is a must-download release, as it fixes a number of problems with the build framework, including the dreaded “Conversion to Dalvik format failed with error 1″ message when using external JAR files.

Many developers will also be pleased with the new Network Usage feature in DDMS. This provides a very powerful monitoring framework which allows you to analyse your app’s network usage in real time.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to the Android Developers website and download the latest release now! Feel free to share your thoughts about the new SDK in the comments, or on the forum thread. Has it improved your coding efficiency?