anyone here develop apps for multiple mobile device OS's?

[purbeast0]

just curious for those of you that do actually develop mobile applications, what your sales are like on ios vs android. i just finished up my latest app for ios this past thursday and submitted it, and ported it to android on saturday, so it's been on the android market since then. on tuesday evening around 5pm my ios one was approved and on the app store. takes a while to propogate.

the way that apple shows you the app sales is by a daily chart/report. since yesterday was my first full day it was on the market i checked it out this morning. i was surprised that it sold 49 copies in the first day on ios. now my android version has probably sold like 15 total since saturday. while the 49 number was surprising for a day 1 sale since i didn't advertise or anything, it's not surprising in the least that the ios one is selling much more.

historically for me is is about 5-6 times more money made on ios apps than the android version of my apps. i have built all of them on ios first then ported to android. they both share the same exact data and graphics, and use the same exact layouts too, so they are pretty much identical.

i was just curious about other people who do this what their trends are like. i only submit my apps to the google play store for android, and obviously itunes store for ios.

i got some spam today from some woman at the opera store and am thinking about putting it on there as well, but it just seems like such a hassle to set up yet ANOTHER account with my bank account information, etc. i get spam about other markets all the time on android too. i do also have an account on the amazon store, but i only have 1 of my other apps on there and it sells hardly anything on there so i don't really expect much to happen on there with this latest one.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

so how much did you make on sales of 49 copies at itunes. how many per day have you sold since the first day. if you could make even a couple hundred bucks a day that would be pretty good

 

[Daniel Jones]

Yes, we does apps for both iOS and android and now a days we are working out on HTML5.

I will suggest you to put your apps on Amazon too, if your previous app didn't generated revenue doesn't mean that Amazon store is not that good, bulk no of apps are downloaded from amazon too.

 

[purbeast0]

so how much did you make on sales of 49 copies at itunes. how many per day have you sold since the first day. if you could make even a couple hundred bucks a day that would be pretty good

how much i made is moot. but these are pay apps not free.

and since yesterday was the 2nd day since the first day numbers i put in the OP, i checked just now and sold 39 copies on iOS yesterday.

since may 15th, total, on android, i've sold 6.

so in the same time frame on both ios and android, i've sold 88 on ios, and 6 on android.

this is exactly why i develop for ios and android is a ported process. sales on ios have ALWAYS been significantly higher for me than android, which is what i'm wondering about other developers of mobile platforms.

good thing it only takes me an hour or two to port it over to android. but what i need to do is start looking at the development tools that allow you to develop in 1 language and deploy to all the mobile systems, then i won't have to worry about porting.

 

[Red Storm]

Can you tell us what the app is? Would be interesting to know what it is that iOS users are buying but not Android users.

 

[purbeast0]

Can you tell us what the app is? Would be interesting to know what it is that iOS users are buying but not Android users.

they are all guides for fighting games that have a similar look and feel at 99 cents each. some have more data than others though, and some have data that can't be found easily or in game.

i have a new idea that i'm going to be working on starting next week that is totally unrelated to this and it incorporates tapping into social media api's. i will be curious about how that will do as far as ios vs android sales are concerned.

 

[Red Storm]

they are all guides for fighting games that have a similar look and feel at 99 cents each. some have more data than others though, and some have data that can't be found easily or in game.

i have a new idea that i'm going to be working on starting next week that is totally unrelated to this and it incorporates tapping into social media api's. i will be curious about how that will do as far as ios vs android sales are concerned.

Well off the top of my head I would guess that the Android users are taking advantage of the 15 minute return window? Or they're just using their web browsers to find the many free guides available online (gamefaqs comes to mind)?

 

[purbeast0]

Well off the top of my head I would guess that the Android users are taking advantage of the 15 minute return window? Or they're just using their web browsers to find the many free guides available online (gamefaqs comes to mind)?

ios users can also use their browsers to view gamefaqs. also, this requires no network connection so you can use it wherever, and quite a few tournaments i've played at had crappy cell phone coverage.

also as i mentioned, i have data that isn't available online in most of my guides. and if it is, it's in a way that looks formatted very poorly on a phone.

in general though, paperback strategy guides still sell and they are $20 each for the most part, yet contain information you could find for free online for 99.9% of the content.

 

[Red Storm]

I could save a web page for offline viewing if I wanted. If it was just short codes/sentences, I would type a note or take a picture for later use.

Just curious but why won't you say what app it is specifically?

 

[purbeast0]

I could save a web page for offline viewing if I wanted. If it was just short codes/sentences, I would type a note or take a picture for later use.

Just curious but why won't you say what app it is specifically?

cause i just didn't want it to be considered spam on here.

but eh, i guess it does pertain to this thread lol. i just put a basic website together the past few evenings to link as my developer page on my listings, which i haven't gotten around to doing yet.

http://www.andrewstantonapps.com/

 

[ponyo]

Free Pocket app and web browser and you can save pages to read later for free without the need of internet connection.

Maybe it's because of the wide availability of iTunes gift cards? I would guess something like fighting game move/guide app would be more popular with younger kids who play these games. I know my daughter has iTunes gift cards she uses to purchase apps/games. To do the same on Android, she would need to buy hard to find Play Store gift cards since she doesn't have credit card.

 

[slippysoup]

As an android user I can't stand iPhone ports. If it's not holo I'm not paying for it.

 

[vshah]

As an android user I can't stand iPhone ports. If it's not holo I'm not paying for it.

this. iOS ported apps stick out like a sore thumb. although it doesn't seem like OPs are specifically iOS styled.

out of curiousity purbeast, have you looked for competing apps on the play store? do any exist & how are they doing compared to yours? specifically free alternatives on itunes & play store?

 

[purbeast0]

this. iOS ported apps stick out like a sore thumb. although it doesn't seem like OPs are specifically iOS styled.

out of curiousity purbeast, have you looked for competing apps on the play store? do any exist & how are they doing compared to yours? specifically free alternatives on itunes & play store?

well i had one of my apps for free, marvel vs capcom 3 app, for a while and i took it off after i created the ultimate version for the latest game. the free app got over 50k downloads and it wasn't even out there for very long. so obviously people will grab free stuff so that isn't really saying much to me.

on android there are a couple free alternatives, but they look like crap and don't have all of the data i have. also on android people seem to use copywritten graphics and icons and can get away with it. i actually received a c&d from capcom when i did that on my very first app, which is why i don't use real icons/graphics. but many people do, free and paid apps, but i'm not taking that risk again.

there are no alternatives out on the ios store right now. so yup that is probably part of why i'm seeing these results. i also just think that android users for the most part are cheaper when it comes to buying apps, and it's been really obvious since i've been making apps like these for the past 3 years. at least in my niche market that is true.

my past 4 apps i've had out there basically at launch of the game and was the first one out there, and still had the same results. this one i made i just decided to do after i fixed my laptop after it being dead for 8 months, so i can actually do ios development once again. but the injustice game has been out for like 1-2 months before my app was done.

 

[Deeko]

I don't have any apps on ios because objective c makes me want to vomit and html5 isn't far behind however, I have apps on Windows phone, Android, and BlackBerry 10. With no advertising for any of them, the order of downloads is wp, bb, Android. I don't know if app discovery comparatively sucks or if I'm just benefiting from smaller pools of apps, but yea, so far Android is in last place despite having by far the most users.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

I don't have any apps on ios because objective c makes me want to vomit and html5 isn't far behind however, I have apps on Windows phone, Android, and BlackBerry 10. With no advertising for any of them, the order of downloads is wp, bb, Android. I don't know if app discovery comparatively sucks or if I'm just benefiting from smaller pools of apps, but yea, so far Android is in last place despite having by far the most users.

Doing a quick search of the Play Store I only see one of your apps on Android and it seems to be a simple one while you have both more numerous and feature rich apps for windows phone.

I would also hazard a guess that you have less competition on WP and BB, Android has a couple of very major fitness apps I have seen around.

 

[Deeko]

You are correct in that I only have two apps on Android; however, the fact remains that the apps that are on multiple platforms do worse on Android than on other platforms. That's not necessarily a fault to android, but its something to consider of you're a small scale developer.

 

[purbeast0]

You are correct in that I only have two apps on Android; however, the fact remains that the apps that are on multiple platforms do worse on Android than on other platforms. That's not necessarily a fault to android, but its something to consider of you're a small scale developer.

so it isn't just me then heh. i have never messed with windows mobile maybe i should check into that as well. are the dev tools any good?

and i agree objective c is whack i don't like it at all, but i know enough to do what i've done so far and will learn more at my next go for my next app idea.

 

[Deeko]

I for one love the WP development tools - but to be fair, my day job involves writing C# in Visual Studio, so I'm very accustomed to it. Everything is very use to use and powerful, though, and the emulator works really well.

One thing I will say, is that while you can make a beautiful app on any platform, the WP SDK makes it the easiest to make an attractive, well-performing app of any platform I've used. Like with anything, it still takes effort to really tweak it, but you can get something decent with less effort.

For iOS I'm considering using Mono. I played with the framework before and liked it, but the licensing costs were outrageous for a single developer like me. They have a new licensing system now that's much more reasonable, I might try it out. Objective C is just so....stupid. It's like Steve Jobs said "lets change the conventions every programmer uses in every language, because, well, we're Apple and we 'think different'.

 

[Deeko]

And in case you were wondering, the difference in numbers is striking. For example, for my Tabata Stopwatch app, on Windows Phone it averages 70-80 downloads per day, BB10 about 15 / day, Android about 2. The apps have the same features and look/feel.

If you have an app that makes its way to the "big leagues", of course Android is the place to be with its enormous user base - but without a marketing budget, it's difficult to get in that position.