5 Big Reasons Why Android Developers Don’t Make Money
July 25, 2010 | Editorials
Developers have asked for a long time for better monetization of their Android apps. Even to this day Android developers make on average 50x less money than they could make with the same app in the iphone’s Appstore, considering everything else is equal.
Why is this happening? Why are Android developers making 50 times less, when there are only about 3x less Android units sold globally, compared to iphones and ipod touches. There are a number of reasons why Android developers are not making nearly enough money as iphone developers, and most are related to the monetization options for their apps, which are very limited.
Google is planning to add different payment options for Android developers that are well integrated with the Android market and their apps. Here’s what I think Google should add to Android Market:
1. Integrating in-app purchases
Apple added this payment option last year for iphone OS 3.0 and it’s been a huge benefit for the iphone developers. This option lead to much increase revenues for all the apps that implemented it, because it was so easy to buy something in a game with just one click.
In fact most of these developers made a lot more money from this option than they made from selling their apps directly. This is why a lot of these developers decided they shouldn’t even charge for their apps anymore, and they should give them for free. Distributing the apps for free meant a lot more people could try them and buy stuff from inside the app.
Android absolutely needs this in order to lure more developers to their platform and reward them in a better way. After all why spend the amount of time building an Android app when you can make 50x more on the iphone platform. For almost all developers, the choice is easy, and they build Android apps as an afterthought. This is why the same app on Android is usually of lower quality than the one on iphone.
Paypal has announced libraries for in-app purchases for Android. However, I’m sure developers would prefer a more integrated way of getting users pay with one click, perhaps with a Google Checkout account. This would also mean a higher sign-up rate for its Google Checkout business, which they’ve been ignoring lately.
2. Enabling paid apps in all countries
For some reason, Google is not enabling paid apps in too many countries, and they are moving extremely so to do it. I’m not sure if this is because they want most developers to use their ads instead of charging for apps, or because of some technical reason.
Either way, they have to put an end to this, and fast. Developers want options to monetize their apps, and they also want to be able to reach as many people as people. But what good is knowing that Android sells 160,000 Android devices per day, if you can only sell your app in 13 countries.
3. Promoting the OS to the mainstream
Apparently, Android users buy less apps than iphone users. This could be because of the reason stated above, simply because many Android users can’t buy apps, but also because the main Android market is consisted mostly of techies. This means they are a lot more likely to do their research first about some type of app, and get the best free one, while a mainstream user is more likely to buy an app instead of wasting time with all that research and comparing all the features until they take a decision.
However, to get mainstream users to buy Android phones, Android need to be a lot easier to use and easier to understand by the mainstream. It needs to look better and feel more intuitive to use. This is likely to come in the next version of Android.
It also needs higher quality and more polished apps. Most games on Android still look like they’ve been made for the old Symbian S60 smartphones from a few years ago, and games are the #1 app category in iphone’s Appstore. So, the mainstream wants high quality games. Of course this depends on Google to lure great developers and give them the tools to make games and other apps, that are just as good or better than what’s on iphone.
Another way they can get more mainstream users is by making commercials that appeal to mainstream users, and not to techies. The techie market is just the beginning for any tech product, but to become ubiquitous, it needs to be in the hands of all the mainstream users as well.
Google doesn’t make these commercials, but perhaps it should (the Droid is a brand more well known than the Android brand in USA). At the very least they should have a talk with the big manufacturers to start focusing together on the mainstream market.
4. Creating skinning tools for manufacturers
Android doesn’t really have a “face” of its own – like Windows does. But this is how they created Android from the beginning and perhaps this was the only way to convince so many manufacturers to adopt it in the first place. Personally, I wish Android had just one face and could be easily recognizable by everyone. But they might not be able to put the cat back in the bag.
The real problem with all these different skins from manufacturers is that they delay the update process by months, and a lot of people get frustrated over this, especially when they know that a phone is capable of an update to a new Android version, yet the manufacturer chooses not to, because it would cost them development time and money, and why bother when they can just sell the new phone with the new version on it.
This is why I think Google should make some skinning tools, that would allow manufacturers for fast and powerful customization, but without integrating it with the core code, and without breaking the update process. If Google could make tools that make skins totally separated from the OS, they could update all the Android phones by themselves.
The skinning problem is a hassle for developers because they have to make apps with the lowest common denominator. Lower versions of Android don’t support some features that later ones use, so their apps are crippled on those phones.
5. Improving the Android Market
One of the biggest issues developers complain about, is that the Android Market is making it hard for users to discover their apps. The search is bad and shows results in an almost random way. They don’t even have search for their apps on the market’s browser on a desktop. This is ironic coming from the biggest search company around. There are also not enough good filters, to show you the category of apps you are looking for. They don’t even have a popular apps section. The AppBrain market, which is a 3rd party market, has all of the features Google’s Android Market should have, and more (pic above)
How can developers expect to make a lot of money from Android when so many things around its ecosystem are lacking. If Google doesn’t improve all the above to be as good or better than the iphone’s, then even if there will be 10 times more Android phones than iphones, the Android developers won’t be able to make as much money as on iPhone.
Google should remember that the number of units sold is not the only factor in Android’s success and growth as a platform.
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