An Android Success Story: $13,000 Monthly App Sales

He got featured on the android market. This isn't something you can plan for, so the $13k/mo figure is not representative. Just because there is always someone winning a lottery doesn't mean playing lottery is a god business plan.<p>Of course knowing that increases confidence in the platform somewhat.

Reading this gives me hope, but leaves me dumbfounded.<p>I've seen about $30 in two weeks from a simple game I have in the Android market. It's not a terrible game, but it's not great either. The free-version reviews are not very good (technical reasons), but some people who bought the paid version left raving reviews.<p>Like everything else, it's about quality and marketing. Once you leave the "just in" page in the Android market, you vanish. If you want to make this kind of money, I "guess" you better be good enough to be featured, have a 4-5 star rating, and find ways to get noticed (blogging, etc). That being said, I haven't done any of these - so it's all assumption.<p>As for price, I can attest that for my second game I put out, lowering my price killed sales. The numbers weren't high enough to say what price works or not, but statistically, lowering didn't work. The price was raised from $0.99 to $1.99 again today and I'm waiting for new results.

Congrats on the success.<p>Btw you mention that your app averaged 20$/day when it was first released. It looks like winning a spot Google's ADC contest, getting featured on the Android market etc. has increased app revenue by a huge factor<p>At this stage, do you see this as a one-off or do you see it as a sustainable business for yourself. IOW would you quit your day-job to work fulltime on Android apps ?

I'm surprised more people aren't using the trialware model for mobile apps. If someone downloads this app and uses it 15 times they probably won't be too worried about 1.99 vs. 3.99 for the paid version. The people who don't use it more than 15 times would have never bought a "full edition" if you had gone the lite model. Seems like a good way of doing it.

I just launched on android after having great success with a golf instructional iphone app. While my professionl golf partner got hot and that helped sales, it exploded when iphone made the app new and noteworthy. It came out of nowhere. i guess i'll have to get lucky with android although i do lots of one on one marketing and contacting bloggers

Would have been nice to briefly describe the App and what did he did to make it successful. The latter one in more detail.