Making Money With Android Apps

Over a month on Android Market

2011-06-21T18:30:00.001-04:00

Well it's time for an update. With my day career and night time Android App work I haven't found the time for composing a post untill now. So here are the highlights:

Its been 6 weeks and one day since I uploaded my first app to the market. Originally I was building them with App Inventor myself but have since found another method: Elance.

I have now hired programmers (mostly based in India) to upgrade my two of existing Apps into something far more professional looking. They are still not perfect by any means but they function well and offer a unique tool to the user. The programmers on Elance do a fantastic job at a very reasonable price point that anyone can afford.

I have also hired an entire team to develop my next application (due out in July) which has many feaatures and will require extensive programming. The final price was agreed on and funds put into escrow a few weeks back. Now I just wait, manage the project, and reap the results in July.

Here is a shot of my current installs.

Not too bad. As usual many people have uninstalled the Apps, therefore the purchase price was refunded. Below are my earnings to date.

The amount paid for May was $84.80- And yes this was indeed deposited in my bank account. The current outstanding since payment is already $83.32 as of today.

So as of right now I have earned $168.12 in just six weeks with very little input. I am quite pleased to say the least. I cover my office internet etc with passive income.

I'm looking forward to the possibility of turning this into serious cash flow.

7 Days on Android App Market

2011-05-16T11:32:00.002-04:00

Well it has officially been 7 days since I posted my first app on App Market. I have to say I have been very pleasantly surprised with the results thus far. I had no experience building an app before last week. I quickly learned the basics off App Inventor and decided to post the first one on the market to test the results. Some lessons learned:

If you post an app for free you cannot charge for it later. I avoided this by putting a price on mine from the beginning (this is to make money after all)
Even a very simple app can generate income within minutes
Niche markets are the best performers (no competition)
App Inventor Apps will have difficulty competing with full featured apps created by professional programmers
Weekends seem to generate the most installs

A very large portion of my installs are cancelled before money is collected. The user has this option for 24 hours. I have not been able to determine the cause for this with my apps but I suspect that they are not what the user expected. I have not received comments from any users as of yet on my paid apps to answer this question for me.

Here are the results for payments so far:

Here are the installs currently:

No too bad :)

Learning to build an Android App

2011-05-14T12:34:00.000-04:00

So once I got started with App Inventor installed and running I found I needed to see some examples of how to build an app. There are not a tremendous amount of sources for tutorials- but there are some very good ones available. First off:

App Inventor Resources- This is a tremendous source of information. There are several tutorials and various links to other developers. It helped me tremendously.

App Inventor Forum- This is the official forum for App Inventor. Chances are, your questions have been already answered in the posts.

theAIRepository.info- More handy tutorials from various sources.

YouTube- Some good tutorials from various sources. Here are a few:

Check out the different videos for each of the channels above. There are some fantastic tutorials and motivational information.

Cheers

Getting Started with App Inventor

2011-05-14T09:57:00.000-04:00

Six days ago I began my journey into Android applications. Upon getting my first Android based phone I quickly decided that I need some applications that were not currently available or well suited to my needs.

A short search online and I found what I thought could be my solution- Google App Inventor. For those not aware of it, App Inventor is a graphical programming interface capable of assembling basic Android Apps. All anyone needs is a Gmail account and they can begin using the App Inventor interface here:

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/

Within an hour I found some great tutorials and was able to make my first app which is a simple cat that can meow to the user. Admittedly this is fairly useless, but allows anyone to understand the interface quite well.

From the App Inventor dashboard the user downloads a Flash file to their computer which opens up the "Blocks Editor". This is where the logic programming actually occurs. Once the user has some basic functions they can test it on a built in phone emulator. This works out fairly well, but it seems to be flaky and takes a long time to respond- remember it's free after all.

Within my first day the end result was I had several apps in process, and one already uploaded to App Market!

Lessons learned:

- Anyone can use App Inventor
- Anyone can upload an app to the market (more on this in future)
- You do not need programming language knowledge (but basic understanding helps)
- An App can make money the first day! (more on this later)

More on this to come.

Cheers