My Humble Android Sales Figures
Posts on the Apple app store sales are pretty easy to find, but I haven't seen many Android developers sharing their sales figures. Though I wish I had some more exciting numbers to share, I thought people might be interested in hearing my sales numbers anyways.
BackgroundBefore diving into the numbers, lets put things into context.
- Car Locator is a pretty straightforward app: Save your location when you park your car, and the app will navigate you back to your car later. I've also heard of it being used to locate hiking trail heads and for Geocaching. The app goes for $1.99 on the Android market.
- There is also a free version of the app.
- I've done no marketing on the app.
- This app was the 2nd Android app I've written. The first app was "Print Photos", which lets you print and mail photos directly from your phone using your Picwing account
- The app was recently voted into the Android Developer Challenge 2 contest. Voting in the final round started November 6. (Please vote!)
- The Motorola Droid phone was also released on November 6.
Numbers
- About 23,000 downloads of the free version.
- 220 downloads of the paid version.
- At last check, the app was ranked #21 in the Travel category for paid apps.
- In the first 2 months, the app saw sales of about $5-6/day. Nothing too fancy. But starting November 7th, there's been a significant uptick in sales, peaking on November 9, where the app saw $44 in sales.
- Sales have since settled to about $20/day, but it's probably too early to tell if this will hold.
- I'm attributing the recent uptick in sales to 2 factors: (1) The release of the Droid phone and (2) Car Locator being in the final judging round of the ADC2 contest. It's impossible for me to tell how much of factor each of these play, since both events happened on the same exact day, but I would be interested to get some more data points from other developers.
- Ironically, it seems to me that it's easier to get exposure as a paid app rather than a free app. Here's why: When you open the app store on your phone and select a category, the app store first shows you a list of paid apps in that category. Car Locator is the 21st app on the list in the Travel category -- It's pretty easy for someone browsing the store to see the app. However, if you select the "Free" tab, I can't even count how far down the list the free version of Car Locator is -- No one would really find the free version of the app without explicitly searching for it.
- Though sales of the app is nothing I can live on, it is kinda cool thinking that the app has been covering the cost of my meals recently. It's nothing compared to the stories you'll hear on the Apple app store, but I personally beleive that with the release of many new Andoird-based phones, Android has more long-term potential than the iPhone.
