Can Free Apps Sell Games?

GetJar is trying a new gambit in an effort to generate more app sales. They've implemented the GetJar Gold store, where they've taken 50 top Android apps and offered them for free. It's "free app of the day" on steroids, and represents a serious effort to draw some attention away from Amazon's app store. The 50 titles available at launch include such hits as Fruit Ninja THD, Pocket Legends, and Age of Zombies.

The developers of these games will get paid by GetJar, so it's not a bad deal for them. GetJar plans to generate revenue from GetJar Gold by offering sponsored listings to other app developers. Developers can bid from 1 cent to $1 or more for each install they get by being listed. Sponsored apps are shown with a different color coding alongside the high-quality free apps.

It's a clever method to entice a horde of buyers in by offering high-quality free apps, and while they're busy downloading some of those, customers will be seeing other apps they might never have found. It will be interesting to see how well the model performs.

These days, though, small developers should be happy to have some new way to try out in order to find more customers.

Android App Users Less Adventurous

If you're not in the Top 50 Android apps, you're nowhere.

Smartphone users spend more time in apps than on the web.

The hidden weakness of the Android platform is that developers are having a hard time making money; even harder than on the iOS platform. Which is not what you'd think given that Android has the bigger market share, but it's due to the behavior of the customers. Here's a new study from Nielsen that gives the sad data: 61% of the time spent on Android devices is spent in the top 50 apps; 43% of the time in the top 10. That's an extraordinary concentration of time; it means that if you're not one of the top apps, you're pretty much invisible. Which explains why developers are still targeting iOS first; it's where the money is. At least, iOS users appear to be more adventurous about trying out other apps.

Both the App Store and the Android Market need to have better discovery tools if app developers are going to have a good chance to make some money. Clearly, though, Android has bigger problems. Developers can help by creating better apps, and by encouraging cross-app marketing. Google also should put some effort into encouraging users to try a wide variety of apps, perhaps through some marketing efforts. I see that Apple continues to advertise apps on iOS, where Android partners all seem to focus on their hardware. Google should step in and spend some marketing dollars showcasing various apps.

In the meantime, developers will continue to be pretty much on their own when it comes to getting customers to buy their apps.

Amazon App Store: One Developer's Sad Story

Pocket Caster, now a poster child for how success can be unsuccessful.

Amazon has been pushing its Android app store, and getting a lot of developers to sign up. It sounds like an opportunity to stand out in a crowded market, especially if Amazon offers to make your app one of its Free App of The Day picks. This is what happened to Shifty Jelly with their Pocket Caster app, a utility for handling podcasts. Sure, they knew that they wouldn't make any money from the app that day, but it seemed logical to assume that the extra exposure would result in some added sales. Right?

Here's what their week looked like:

The number of orders looks great, and so do the earnings... but the sales are what counts.

So their sales went from 20 to over 100,000... but they actually made less money. OK, sure, they knew that... but you'd think the sales would jump after all the exposure, wouldn't you? No such luck. They got a little blip in sales, but in a couple of days the sales were back to the level before the promo. No effect, basically, except for the 300 or so emails every day they were getting that they had to answer.

Developers are desperate for their apps to get noticed, but this sort of promo is obviously helping Amazon but not the developer. At least they didn't spend money on this, like so many other app discovery mechanisms that are out there. You can easily drop thousands of dollars to get your app "discovered", and most of the time you'll not see that returned. I saw one ad for a service where they boasted that you could buy a spot on their ad network and get lots of clicks, usually for $1 or less... sometimes as low as 45 cents! News flash: If your app sells for 99 cents, and you only get 70 cents of that, this sort of campaign is not a good idea.

The sneaky part here is that Amazon is introducing its own Android tablet at some point, and it wouldn't be a surprise if Amazon only had the Amazon App Store on that tablet, which means only apps that had signed up for Amazon's terms would be there. So Amazon has a huge reason to want to give away your apps, because it pushes sales of their devices... or will be soon.

This all just points back to the fact that you have to have a realistic projection of the number of app sales you can achieve, and the revenue, before you spend a dime on development. The coding isn't the hard part; making money on the coding is. You really need to figure that part out and factor that into your budget. You don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars developing an app to make a few thousand dollars. And the business is only getting tougher...

GetJar vs. Amazon: Android Markets Battle

Cut The Rope goes exclusive to GetJar... for six whole days.

While developers have had a hard time making much money on Android titles, Android Markets are still competing to see who's going to be the best at distributing Android apps. One way for them to compete is by signing exclusive deals with developers. If you're the only place to get Angry Birds, you're going to get a lot of traffic. GetJar had its traffic spike 10 times normal after it was the first place to get Angry Birds for Android, and they had 1.9 million downloads of the title in a few days. That's what Amazon did with Angry Birds Rio, as well as Plants Vs. Zombies, and it bought them a lot of traffic.

Which is why GetJar got themselves an exclusive to Cut The Rope, the  iOS title that's hit the coveted No. 1 slot in the App Store, which now is coming out for Android... exclusively on GetJar. Well, exclusively for six whole days before it appears in the Android Market. That doesn't sound like much of a window of opportunity, which is no doubt why GetJar plans to promote the game heavily in that time frame.

Of course, we don't know what deal the developer got from GetJar for this exclusive. Nothing succeeds like success; only the #1 games are going to get these kind of promotional deals. Though GetJar is trying to play nice with developers and promises them far more opportunities for promotion and marketing than they'll get with other markets. No doubt true, since most other markets do little or nothing at all. Except Amazon, which is trying to set a new standard for app markets.

I expect we'll see more marketing "opportunities" being offered by markets to developers, such as discounts, advertising, and so on, as ways for developrs to try and gain a little visibility in the seemingly endless sea of apps. (When you want to be found, and you're one of hundreds of thousands of products, you do have to find a way to get noticed.) Some of these "opportunities" may in fact be good ones... some will just be a way to throw money away. I hope to find out which is which before spending anything...