Earnings

A lot of developers won't post their earnings for whatever reason. Maybe they're embarrassed by their success or lack thereof, or they're hiding money from the government, or who knows what. Because of that, it's very hard to figure out what you might be able to earn as an independent app developer. The upper limit is in the millions, while the lower limit is zero, but beyond that, there's no way to tell.

So, in an effort to help people out, I'm going to provide a bit of my Playbook app sales data for this past month.

Here are the sales numbers for five of my apps:

The exact total's a bit of a pain to calculate due to the different currencies involved, but the total looks like it comes to about $65 or an average of $13/app. Since I only get 70% of that, my personal profit on these five apps comes to $45.50 or $9.10/app. Which works out to just about 30 cents per app per day. Meaning that in order to make the equivalent of a $10 per hour job, I'd need to put out somewhere in the neighbourhood of 200 apps.

Now, these are just my numbers, and they may be atypical, but even at 25x my earnings, the numbers aren't good.

Just for fun, here's the download data for five different apps:

Again, it's hard to tell what the totals are, but it looks to be around 5000 or so. If I could earn $1 per download, I'd be a reasonably happy guy.

Android Versions

Google divides its various Android releases based on what they call API Levels. An API Level may contain multiple versions of the OS that implement minor bug fixes, or it may just be a single version. When you design an Android app, you choose an API Level to target, and every device running that level and above should be able to run your app. API Level 16 made its debut recently, so I thought I'd make a relevant post.

At the moment, there are about ten API Levels with a statistically significant share of the overall Android device market. Now, despite the fact that level 11 debuted about 16 months ago, devices running at that level and above currently only comprise a total of 13% of the Android market. Versions in the 2.x range, occupying API Levels 7-10 now hold a whopping 86% of the market. Which means, if you want to target the greatest number of people possible, your best bet is to go for API Level 7 or 8. Which sucks because version 3.0 introduced some really useful features. For instance, being able to use Property Animation would've saved me a load of time today. It's going to get better in the future, but right now, the version lag is really kind of a bummer.

No More Try & Buy

As of a few weeks ago, RIM has deprecated the Try&Buy licence for the Playbook. Which means I can no longer make any updates to any of the apps I've listed in that fashion. I say good riddance. The whole thing never worked properly, and it was a total pain. From now on, it's in-app purchases for me.