Hi all, I'm just about to finish my first app for Android. I'll do it for IOS next. What are the various strategies to market it ? : _ all for free, no ads _ free, with ads. How does that work ? How do I implement and test ? What is the financial gain ? Does it require a minimum number of downloads ? _ no ads, but a fee to download. How to set a price ? I prefer being cheaper and have more downloads, but what does cheap mean ? Does a table or analysis exist to compare the success of each possibility? Success being measured separately in number of downloads, and in financial gain. Since my app is fairly specific (motorcycle racing engineering), I don't expect so many downloads out of the racing world. But it's the opportunity to get knowledgeable about it, and still make the right choice for my current work. Any experience is welcome ! Cheers Nico

Hi Nico, I have been creating android apps for last 2 years and have switched from all free to paid and then also to apps with ads. In this journey of app making business for android platform, i have learnt that the android users are very reluctant to pay for your app. There are very few apps which get massive downloads despite it being paid one. Android users prefer to free apps over paid apps. They do not mind if you include any ads in it. But the bottom line is it should be free... At one point i had 102 android apps in my dev account but today there are about 56 odd android apps in my profile. All of those apps are free with ads in it. Only one app is free without any ads coz its a religious app. If i invest time in creating app then obviously i would want to have some financial gain from the app so i generally put ads in it instead of making it a total free download without ads. The idea of selling app for a price in android market is not a good idea for the reasons stated above. In addition if your app is really that good, someone will either copy the contents of your app and will sell it for free. The other big threat to all paid android apps is the Grey market where users can download your apps binary file for free. If you decide to use ads in your app, you can have a look at Admob, Applovin, Airpush and Tapcontext. I use all the above ad networks except admob in all my android apps. I used to use Admob but recently quit using it coz the new admob is not available in my country yet and the old one pays less than applovin. There are tutorials i have made which you can find in the how to's section of this website of including ads in android apps. All the best in your app making venture.

In my experience, I've had more success with paid apps. Unless you get hundreds of thousands of app downloads, you don't really make much from app ads. maybe a dollar a day if you get a few thousand. But as sandeep said, a good paid app will attract people that copy your app and put it in the market for free. What I found works best, is have a free version with ads, and then have a paid "pro" version that maybe has more features and is ad-free

Hmmm, thank you both for your comments. I will look into those Applovin and co and will see what seems best. Your experience is valuable to me, I appreciate it.

Hmmm, thank you both for your comments. I will look into those Applovin and co and will see what seems best. Your experience is valuable to me, I appreciate it.

With the ads in the app, do revenues come from the app being installed, or from the user clicking on the ads ? Basically if a user install the app, uses it, but never clicks on the advertisement, does it bring any revenue ?

Revenue from ads is generated only if the user clicks the ad and completes the further action. This is general practice used widely in ad industry and they call it cpm (click per milli). Another popular model is cpi (click per install). Admob, airpush, applovin, etc use this model. Startapp too uses above model but they have another model where they used to pay devs when users installed the app. I dont know whether they have that model now after googles new ad policy but you can chect it on their website.