4 Feet Software
Android Development & Technology
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Android Market Observations — 4 Weeks Iconic Memory
Posted on April 1st, 2009 1 commentSoftware distribution channels like iStore and Android Market are revolutionary in terms of direct access to virtually millions of possible users and have changed the game in favor of independent developers. A lot has been written by iPhone developers, both success stories and about kicks-in-the-nuts after months of work. Google's Android platform is quite new, with paid applications being visible since today (1. April) in all of Europe. A fellow android developer reports about low sales numbers on paid games, although some games seem to make quite some profit. iPhone has a lot of advantages such as the billing being integrated in the phone bill and quite a different, more mainstream target group. Iconic Memory is a free Android game a friend and I have built in a couple of days. It is on the market since 4 weeks, and I wanted to share our experience and observations.
Iconic Memory is a simple and addictive memory game where players need to remember and redraw given patterns at an increasing pace and action level. A typical game takes one to 5 minutes, after which you will see how many points you reached and how you are ranked in a global highscore (both today and all-time). In my personal opinion, the global ranking makes the game interesting in first place, because you can try to beat other players and get on top of todays and all-time's highscore.
We have added two kind of ads to the game:
- AdMob Ads on the after-game page where you see your ranking
- Google Ads inside the highscore (in the middle and at the end of a page)
It was an experiment with ads because we wanted to keep them absolutely unobtrusive and did not put them on the popular spots but rather down in the middle of the highscore. In march we have earned $ 30 with admob and $ 50 with google (adsense had 55.949 total impressions with 239 clicks, admob 53.728 impressions and 680 clicks).
It is hard to know and interesting to follow how things are going from here. Iconic Memory is currently #19 of the top brain&puzzle games (in Europe) and we din't see a decrease in downloads after four weeks. Perhaps things will change with more paid apps coming on top of the list.
Tea Time is another free app, we released over two months ago:
Downloads are really stalling here. I guess being in like the top 30 in a category helps a big deal for attracting new users, as well as being a game.
An advantage for developers i see in Apple's iStore is the integration with iTunes and the internet. I simply can't write about an app and link to it so users will directly find it. That may change with the 2D barcode identifiers for apps though. With them, users can capture the barcode the phone's cam and open the market with it.
Google should finally setup a proper Market homepage with at least some infos about the apps and games. Like cyrket.com.
All in all, i'm excited to see developers working on interesting concepts, releasing good free and paid software and especially communicating their experiences! I just wish I had more time at the moment to start a new project...
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