Good afternoon, dear readers of the blog on the app2top website!
My name is Mikhail Skrichevsky. I am a very ordinary senior student at the Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (at KPI). I have been interested in programming since the 11th grade of the lyceum and have always dreamed of combining pleasant with useful in the form of a small business of my own, on which I will not spend very much time, and at the same time enjoy creating something useful.The very idea of developing for Android appeared to me after the new year.
I was impressed by the ease of setting up and working with the emulator, as well as the simplicity of implementing the principles of object-oriented programming in Java. The main problem was the idea, or rather its absence. What exactly should I write? There are already a lot of applications and at first glance it seems that everything has been implemented a long time ago before me.
It took me more than four months to realize that you don’t need to come up with something complicated and fancy, and success lies in the simple. All ideas on a cosmic scale have remained unfinished code. However, in July of this year, I decided to brainstorm myself and decide what I myself was interested in seeing on the Market. I started to climb the forums in search of ideas and write down even the most ridiculous of them. I searched for most of them on the Market and found several dozen already implemented analogues.Among these ideas was also an idea about a quote book from TV series.
It would seem an obvious thing and must have existed on the market for a long time, but as it turned out, the quotes on the Market were either too general (i.e. dedicated to quotes on very different topics), or specifically dedicated to a particular series. Thus, it turned out that fans of different series had to download a separate application for each series, which is extremely inconvenient. That’s where my hands itched :)Got down to business.
Realizing that the target audience will most likely be young people who are obsessed with TV shows, to one degree or another, and will potentially be interested in reading these quotes, I started with an attractive interface. I immediately found and studied the guidelines on the website for developers and began to design in accordance with their standards. I also found friends who were able not only to evaluate the appearance and structure of the application, but also to offer their ideas and backgrounds, for which I thank them very much. Then the process of filling in the content and testing the application on different devices began.Probably the most extreme part was putting this creation on the Market.
After attaching the VISA card to your Google account, the payment for the dedication to the developers took place from the third time, because it was necessary to call the bank and remove the protection from the card. Each time it takes an additional 8-15 hryvnia for an unsuccessful payment, I did not understand what kind of money it was and where they were. Then access to the Developer Console was opened (immediately after confirmation of payment crediting).The console allows you to add your own applications and view statistics about them, user comments and the current rating.
In general, I spent about an hour filling in all the fields and adding all the pictures of the necessary formats. I highly recommend taking screenshots directly from the emulator in Eclipse. Applications get to the console instantly, but to the market after 2-5 hours.After the application has accumulated more than 100 downloads, I decided to add advertising and see what results it can give.
To begin with, I chose the tapfortap cross-promotion project, but I still don’t feel much return from it. It pleases only that it is free and the banner takes up little space. Then I installed Admob. Simple SDK integration and beautiful banners, as well as a convenient control panel. Naturally, there was almost no income at the beginning, but after the publication of the article in the developer support section on the 4pda website, download ratings jumped several times! After 2 weeks, I already had about 2500 users. Advertising revenue has also increased and has started to average $1/day. By the way, Admob statistics are updated every hour or two. It is very useful for income to regularly update the application, since the user often re-enters the application after it is updated.The trick worked very well that users can specify in the reviews which TV shows they would like to see in the application.
After all, immediately after the next update, when they see that their request is satisfied, they put 5 stars rating. The “Rate the app” function also works very well, which periodically appears in the TV series selection menu.
Of course, in order to increase the level of income, it is necessary to attract new users. To do this, you can pay Admob for advertising your applications (I haven’t tried it yet, but I think I’ll check with time). Advertising on social networks is also very important, but it is better that users do it themselves. To do this, when a user posts a quote to some social network, it is necessary to attach a link to the application in Google Play. This can be very effective if the user has a lot of subscribers/friends, etc.In general, non-commercial development for Android turned out to be a very interesting activity from which, as it turned out, it was really possible to make a profit.
It’s just a pity that Admob pays only after accumulating an amount of $ 300-400 on your account. I update the application on average once a week and have already received more than 100 reviews, as well as a rating of 4.7. In the future I plan to create a widget for this application.Link to the Top Quotes application:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=top.quotes.pkg
