Author Archives: Wolfgang

Android Report #4

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I havn’t done any new apps or updates in december. But it was still the month with the most downloads and income till now. The numbers are higher than in november because it’s the first month where all apps are available from the beginning of the month.

The GPS Widget is still my bestseller. The free version of the Battery Live Wallpaper has moderate download numbers and the Keyshaker has very few downloads. But surprisingly it sells better than the Battery Live Wallpaper Pro.

Stats

Apps in the Market: 7
Total installs (cumulative): 32563 (+13769)
Active installs: 13882 (+5220)

Apps with AdMob: 2
AdMob Impressions: 4864 (+3025)
AdMob CTR: 1.03% (+0.28%)

Apps with Tapjoy: 2
Tapjoy Sessions: 15628 (+4293)
Tapjoy Offerwall views: 7341 (+2726)
Clicks: 1189 (+645)
Conversions: 180 (+101)

Downloads distribution:

Income distribution:
I don’t want to disclose my income from android apps in numbers. But I want share the sources and their distribution with you:

Battery Live Wallpaper

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As I mentioned in my last report I have a new app called “Battery Live Wallpaper” in the Android market. It’s a live wallpaper that indicates the battery status of the phone by either changing the saturation of the background image or its color. A custom image from the SD Card or the gallery can be selected as the source background image.

Currently the color gradient is predefined. Green indicates a completely charged battery, yellow means there are about 20% left and red stands for an empty battery. In the future I plan to allow customized color gradients.

When I developed the Battery Live Wallpaper I expected similar download rates as for the GPS Widget. But currently the rates are much lower. I try to optimze this in the next weeks by posting on some forums and blogs about it. I’m curious how this will improve download rates. If you know some good places to promote an app/wallpaper, please let me know by leaving a comment.

In the market I have two versions of the wallpaper. One free and a paid version. In the free version the option to select a custom image is locked but can be unlocked with Tapjoy.

You can download the free version here and the paid version here.

Android Report #3

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Time for the monthly report. This month I developed two new apps. The “Keyshaker” and the “Battery Live Wallpaper”. I wrote about the “Keyshaker” in my last post and will write about the “Battery Live Wallpaper” in my next. I havn’t found the time to write about it till now… sorry. But as you can see in the downloads distribution graph below, both new apps arn’t very successful till now.

My most successful app is the “GPS Widget” at the moment. I added some new features during the last month to make it even more useful. It’s now possible to us different display/unit formats and the user can share his location with anyone else via sms or email. The new features are available in the pro version or by unlocking them via Tapjoy in the free GPS Widget. As a result I got more Tapjoy conversions and more downloads of the pro version. Simply hoping for people to donate by clicking on the Tapjoy offers, because they are nice, did not work. With some kind of reward this strategy seems to work.

Because of the GPS Widget I had more than 10000 downloads this month. For me that’s very cool 🙂

Stats

Apps in the Market: 7
Total installs (cumulative): 18663 (+11795)
Active installs: 8590 (+5535)

Apps with AdMob: 2
AdMob Impressions: 1839 (+334)
AdMob CTR: 0.75% (-0.25%)

Apps with Tapjoy: 2
Tapjoy Sessions: 11335
Tapjoy Offerwall views: 4615
Clicks: 544
Conversions: 79

Downloads distribution:

Another new App: Keyshaker

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Today I developed and published a new app called Keyshaker. Originally Keyshaker was developed by Josef Schuh for the iPhone and I got his kind permission to make a clone for Android. Thanks for that!

What is Keyshaker about? The app simply creates a highly secure random key for you while shaking your phone. It uses the accelerometer data of your device as the seed for the random number generator. As a result it is almost impossible to generate the same key twice.

Keyshaker offers the possibility to define the key length (up to 100 characters) and there is also an option to select which charactersets should be used to generate the key (upper-case letters, lower-case letters, numbers and symbols).

You can download the Keyshaker here.

Android Report #2

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It’s time for my second Android Report. As you may have seen I published a new App, the GPS Widget. Because there is a free version an a paid version, I now have 4 apps in the market.

The number of downloads of the GPS Widget are higher than I expected. More than 4000 downloads in less than 3 weeks. It was just a small weekend-project I made because I missed something similar on my phone and now it seems other people need such a Widget as well.

Instead of ordinary AdMob ads I tried to monetize the GPS Widget using TapJoy. I added a button where the user can indirectly donate by downloading another app from TapJoy for example. The user then gets some Good Karma Points and hopefully a good feeling in return.
As I see from my Tapjoy stats a lot of people click on the donation button (about 30% of the users who open the settings view want to know what’s behind the button). A few of them even click on an item on the offerwall. But then, most of the users (or should I say: ALL except 2 + 2timesMe) abort the process  → my free donation strategy does not work.

So here are the stats of the last month:

Stats

Apps in the Market: 4
Total installs (cumulative): 6868 (+4491)
Active installs: 3055 (+2521)

Apps with AdMob: 1
AdMob Impressions: 1505 (+786)
AdMob CTR: 1.00% (-1.23%)

Apps with Tapjoy: 1
Tapjoy Sessions: 3104
Tapjoy Offerwall views: 931
Tapjoy CTR: 5.6%
Tapjoy CVR: 7.7%

Downloads distribution:

GPS Widget

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I just released my new app “GPS Widget” on the Android Market.

This widget simply shows your current location in numbers. Latitude and Longitude are received from the GPS location provider or from the network location provider if GPS is not available.

The altitude is queried from open MapQuest API which yields in a more accurate result than receiving the altitude by GPS. So this widget is also interesting for hiking.

I have implemented TapJoy to enable the user to donate indirectly. TapJoy is an ad-network like AdMob or InMobi. The difference to these networks is that with TapJoy it is allowed to directly ask the user to take action while an action is either downloading an other app, watching a video or something similar. After completing this action the user gets points as a reward (e.g. resources like gold in a game). In my case the user gets some “Good Karma Points”.

You can download the free widget here.

The Importance of a nice GUI

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The first GUI of the "Wiener Würstel-Kompass"

It’s now more than a year I have published my app “Wiener Würstel-Kompass”. I developed the app under time pressure because I wanted to submit it to the “A1 Challenge for Apps 2010”. As a result the first GUI was very ugly.

After some months I found the time to redesign the GUI. I tried to pimp it a bit. Unfortunately I’m not an artist. All I can do is programmers art ;-). I’m sure there is still a lot of room for improvement but in my opinion it looks much better than the old GUI.

 

 

 

Wiener Würstel-Kompass Screenshot

The redesigned GUI.

And luckily I’m not the only one with that opinion. Look at the diagram below. It shows the number of active installs over time. Guess when I published the app with the new GUI!

Right! (or maybe not… I don’t know what you have guessed). It was published in the end of May.

Before the app was released with the new GUI, the active installs stagnated. After the release the number of active installs increased noticeable.

My conclusion: the GUI design is a very importand part of an app. It should definitely not be undervalued.

 

Active installs over time

Android Report #1

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This is the first posting of a series where I will share my Android stats of the previous month with you. I will try to post this stats periodically every month.

Stats

Apps in the Market: 2
Total installs: 2377 (+211)
Active installs: 534 (+46)

AdMob Requests: 1058
AdMob Impressions: 719
AdMob fill rate: 67.96%
AdMob CTR: 2.23%

First posting… what happend so far?

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Ok, this is my first posting on my new blog. Let’s start:

In my first posting I want to give you an overview what happend with my first published app on the Android Market so far. The app is called “Wiener Würstel-Kompass” and currently it is available in German only. I live in Vienna and wurst stands are very popular here. So my idea was to create an app which directs the user to the wurst stand next to him/her. Its simple: a compass points in the direction of the nearby cheese kransky.

Wiener Würstel-Kompass Screenshot

After walking through Vienna for days to record the locations of food stands, I published the app in the end of July 2010 in two different versions. One paid and one free version. At first the free version was limited in functionality without ads. The paid version included about 130 wurst and kebab stands while in the free version there were about 20 stands located in the first district of Vienna. In July 2011 I decided to provide full functionality in the free version and include AdMob ads in return.

The app already had some successful moments. It made the 10th place at the “A1 Challenge for Apps” and was mentioned on some websites (e.g. www.stadtbekannt.at, www.news.at, www.androidlounge.at).

Stats

As other bloggers I want to share the Market stats of my Android apps. So here they are:

Apps in the Market: 2
Total installs: 2367
Active installs: 529

Conclusion  

Keeping in mind that this numbers are generated within the time from August 2010 till now, they are very low (about 170 downloads/38 active installs per month). I think there are two main reason for the very low numbers: The app is a local app and therefore there is just a limited market. It’s not interesting for people outside of Vienna. Probably the second reason is that I have not invested a lot of time advertising the app.

Currently I’m working on an app that is not limited to a single city in the world. So hopefully my future reports show better numbers ;-).

Feel free to post your experience, suggestions or whatever you want in the comments below.