Making money in the Android Market

In order to succeed, the old adage goes, you have to be either first or best. But with so many different types of apps in the market, and since the market has been around for a while now, the opportunity to be first has, for the most part, passed.

There’s still room to be the best, but some developers are trying to take shortcuts.

Take this example we saw last month, wherein a developer admitted to spamming the Market with mostly useless apps.

We didn’t want to have to [spam the market]. But the Android Market doesn’t have many people who like to pay for apps. So how is a developer to live? Just off ad revenue?

There are just so many things wrong with that statement. First off, a developer can only survive where there is a market for his services. If that is not in the Android Market, then the developer has to find another outlet. Second, replacing quality of apps with quantity of apps is the easy way out, the shortsighted move that nets you a few dollars today at the expense of potential future earnings. And third, yeah, maybe developers can live off ad revenue.

Via Engadget we see a report that Aaron La, an early Android developer, has made $30,000 from just one app’s ad revenue. Aaron, of course, had the advantage of being among the first, so his results might be out of line with today’s expectations.

But it also illustrates that ads can bring in revenue. If a developer can release four or five high-quality applications, they might be able to make them available for free and earn a decent ad income. After all, Aaron’s revenue comes from that one app, one that is today obsolete because task management is built into the Android OS. Unfortunately, there will probably always be developers like this, who think that it’s their right to make money in the Android Market.

As such, we’ll continue to see a deluge of poor applications from developers who will put out anything to make a buck. Let Aaron La stand out, though, as someone who created an app that people wanted, charged for it, and then created another stream of revenue with an ad-supported version. That’s the kind of ingenuity needed in the Market. Not a bunch of entitled developers.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.