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发帖数: 8397 | 1 http://androidandme.com/2010/10/news/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-
edward-kim-and-car-locator/
Edward Kim and his app, Car Locator, were big news back in March for
netting nearly $13,000 in a month on the Android Market. At the time
Edward wrote on his blog that he would “post again in a month or so with
hopefully even better numbers!”
The update on his earnings never came as Edward’s income from Car
Locator decreased rapidly after March when he was no longer listed as a
Featured app in the Android Market (See the graph at the top of the
post). Just a month after falling from the list Edward was back to
earning $4,000 a month from his app. $4,000 a month for a single person
working on an app isn’t exactly a slap in the face, but such a dramatic
downturn in revenue after months of exposure on the Featured list
definitely points to how quickly an app can get lost in the Market.
Naturally Edward was disappointed in the sudden decrease in profits and
he decided that he was going to take action to correct the two main
factors that he felt were holding back his earnings.
The first of those issues was piracy. Edward used Flurry analytics to
track his total new users against the purchases made through the Android
Market and found that roughly 4 times as many users were pirating his
app rather than purchasing it. This issue has been echoed by many
Android developers and is devastating to potential profits.
The second issue was tangentially related to the first and that was that
the paid Android Market was only available in 14 countries which greatly
limited the audience for his app. The solution for many of these users,
unable to legitimately access the paid Market, is to turn to pirated
copies of apps that they are interested in.
With these two main issues in mind Edward started looking into potential
solutions and in July he first implemented the fruits of his labors,
something which he refers to as “Android Licenser,” on Car Locator and
lo and behold he saw his sales rise again for the first time since
February.
Android Licenser adds an activation layer to Car Locator which provides
a code upon purchase that must be input by the buyer within 24-hours and
then permanently unlocks the app on that handset. This rendered the
piracy issue obsolete and also substantially resolved the international
availability problem as Edward was now able to sell the “locked” .apk
directly to people via Google Checkout which is available in over 150
countries. With these direct Google Checkout purchases Edward takes 100%
on the sale of the app rather than the 70% that is offered in the
Market, but the vast majority of Edward’s sales are still coming through
the Market.
In August Edward’s earnings were back up to $10,500 and while he didn’t
have his final figures for September in time for this post they were on
pace to finish higher still. Edward has his sights set on continuing the
upward trajectory of his sales this time around with a goal of reaching
$15,000 a month by the end of the year.
Ideally Edward should not have found it necessary to take it upon
himself to secure his app from piracy and expand his sales beyond the
Market, but that was the state of things and its hard to argue with his
results.
It should be noted that Google is aware of and trending in the right
direction on both of these issues as in late August they made a
licensing service available which allows developers to determine the
license status of users and just last week Google announced that the
paid Market will be available in a total of 34 countries in the next two
weeks.
While it hasn’t been the smoothest of journeys for Edward he is still
excited about the promise of Android and his story is proof positive
that there is money to be made here and with some refinements to the
Market and new users and new countries coming quickly the opportunities
are still expanding.
If you are interested in checking out Edward’s Android Licenser, we’ll
be taking a closer look at it in an upcoming post, or you can find
details on it at www.androidlicenser.com. |
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