7M Downloads: Why Angry Birds Is Free on Android

Personally I view this as bad news for the Android ecosystem.<p>The iOS/iTunes ecosystem is incredibly accessible. You don't need a credit card (important for minors; a <i>huge</i> market). You can buy credit everywhere. iOS users seem willing to part with cash.<p>Google Checkout on the other hand is not available everywhere Android is. People seem less willing to use it (eg 50k paid from this post). You can't buy credit in the retail chain. Google gives developers 95%.<p>The last one is actually a <i>huge</i> problem. Google's 5% will never pay for retail distribution (Apple's 30% clearly does).<p>Developers have come to the obvious conclusion: they'd rather have 70% of (potentially) a lot rather than 95% of much less.<p>iOS has the option of paid and ad-supported. Android only having ad-supported (realistically) is a major disadvantage.<p>The only way Abgry Birds could make it to Android is on the back of the success of iOS. I wonder how much money their experiment is really making.

I'd love to know how many active installs there are of those 7M downloads. I must have downloaded it 3 times to my devices and it didn't successfully run on any of them.<p>We have an app with over 1.2M downloads and around 500k active installs. I think the active install rate is low because it is a LITE version. Only - I haven't put ads on the game yet, and have been wondering whether it's worth it or not. If it only makes a little per day, then I'd rather just leave my free users alone and stick with the paid upgrade.<p>I'd also like to know what kind of revenue they are making from ads on Android. I feel like if we made our game completely free, we'd reach over 2-3M downloads pretty quickly and triple our active install rate, and if that meant we were making as much in ads as paid downloads, then I think we'd consider going that direction. It's just too big of a maybe, and we can't seem to get any inside info about ad revenues to make the leap - even when emailing Mobclix and Admob, we get no response to this question.<p>Worst of all - I wonder if we are leaving money on the table by not being an ad supported app.<p>Ho hum.

This seems to say really bad things for the Android marketplace. If a game as good and popular as Angry Birds can't survive if charged for, it doesn't seem like a good place for developers. Ad supported doesn't work unless you can get to millions of downloads.

Something the article doesn't keep in consideration is the fact that Angry Birds is so famous that most likely those people on Android who downloaded it have seen their iPhone friends playing it and praising it for months...

I have the game on my android phone and like it, so I put it on my wife's new ipod touch. I am amazed at how much better the graphics and gameplay seem to be on her ipod. The graphics seem much more detailed, and the controls seem more responsive.

I don't get why there isn't a version I can pay for to get rid of the ads. They're annoying.

This is neither here nor there, but I'm wondering if anyone else has an opinion on this: Does anyone find the physics in Angry Birds INCREDIBLY frustrating? There seems to be very little rhyme or reason to the way momentum is transferred. And the material modeling just makes me want to bite my tongue off.

Rovo could easily release a paid version without ads. It's practically ancient tradition on the iPhone, which everyone is arguing is completely different to the Android market. I just assumed that Rovo must be making more money from ads than they ever could from sales. In what order did Rovo release versions for alternate platforms? I would be interested in knowing whether there was a point where they started preferring ad-support.

From an UI perspective I really hate the ads in angry birds on android: the advertised products are never interesting and the ad is placed in a way that it can be accidentally tapped during gameplay (happened to me multiple times).<p>I would GLADLY pay to get the ads to go away. Maybe they should add a premium, ad-free, version

"Because it makes more money that way" is the short answer. While this explains why they have a free version, it doesn't explain why they don't have a paid version as well. There are plenty of people who would pay $.99 to remove ads. Piracy is the only explanation for this that comes to mind.

I think Rovio is putting all their weight into turning Angry Birds into a global brand.<p>The mobile app market is still pretty limited. Getting beyond $10 million revenue over all is incredible but nobody has any experience on sustaining success in the mobile market in the long run.<p>Investing in the brand, on the other had, gives Rovio a lot more options - licensing deals, a movie deal or whatever. It is a tried and tested model.<p>If Rovio got 7 million extra fans and alot of free media coverage by releasing it for free on Android, that in itself might be a better deal than a half a million in revenue from sales, even if you don't count the advertising revenue.

Developer of Angry Birds: “Really Big and New Project Underway” <a href="http://techie-buzz.com/mobile-news/angry-birds-new-project.html" rel="nofollow">http://techie-buzz.com/mobile-news/angry-birds-new-project.h...</a>

Still stuck on 7/11 :(