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by gregholland
5790 days ago
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First off, congratulations on your success on both the iPhone store and the Android market. As an aspiring app developer for Android, i'm wondering if you are willing to share some specific marketing/sales strategies that lead to your success. I noticed that for your android app, there is a trial as well as paid version, does the trial drive a lot of traffic to the paid? How are the return rates like on your android app? I heard that a lot of people does the "buy-app, backup with astro file manager, return app , restore app" trick to get freebies. I also noticed that you have a website for your app, does this help sales at all? Thanks for your insights |
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On Android it is fairly easy to some word out, only because it is a much smaller ecosystem. So hitting up all the standard blogs once your app is well reviewed and polished up will generally get you a mention.
From there it is pretty much organic, we did a bit of tweaking of our application name based on what we think common searches are 'news', 'rss'.
People like trials, though it is probably mostly relevant for an app like NewsRoom, where the real utility comes from using it for days. For smaller games I'm not sure it makes much of a difference, though that it is surely true that the Android market is especially harsh to the amusing for 10 minutes kind of games that sell quite a bit in the App store for 99c. Those apps make nothing on Android, as people return them within the 24 hour window.
The trial was also useful for international customers, as we allow people to get an unlock key from our website. Paid apps aren't available in a lot of countries that the Android marketplace lives, so this lets those users who want the full version have a way to buy it. We don't get a ton of sales that way, but a few a day.
I don't think the website helps much at all, though the video might help give people an idea of how it works. We consider those to just be checkboxes for getting blog coverage, most purchasing decisions are made on the phone I think, where people aren't googling the app first.