Hi @superherogeek!
I’m going through this process now and it has been a learning experience.
I’ve been an iOS app producer since last May/June (Sad I don’t remember my first app launch). But I’m now a pro subscriber so I’m testing the waters with the other platforms. Here’s a short description of my journey so far.
I decided to take my app Turkeys Revenge (http://turkeysrevenge.omnigeekmedia.com) and have it be my first Android app. It’s been up in iTunes since November as a Free + Ads game. It’s a pretty simple game and while I get a hand full of sales each day on it, its no where near the volume to make any revenue from it. SIDE NOTE: I submitted an update last night that kills the ads and makes it a $0.99 game.
My other game, Omniblaster, which was my first, is not in any shape to try and Androidize, though it would be the better seller since its a richer game. But my screens are not setup to bleed right on the different screen sizes with it, elements are not positioned correctly. Code is near impossible to manage.
So Turkey’s Revenge it is.
Android Marketplace / Google Play
Built for Android, did all the key stuff which wasn’t painful. Creating your Android Marketplace account was easy, though it was $25 to do so. If you want paid apps, in-app purchasing, you also have to setup a Google Checkout account, put in all your banking information and they do a small deposit that you have to verify with them to make sure their deposits and chargebacks can go through.
Uploading an app is pretty straight forward. There is no review process. Fill out the info, provide the artwork collateral (screen shots, icons, etc.) and you’re up and going.
Android users DO NOT pay for games in general. That whole market is “give it to me free and I’ll endure the ads”. Now that we can do in-app purchases, there is some hope to actually make non-ad revenue from this market.
You can of course also just upload the .apk file to your own webserver and provide a link to it and most Android users (Not talking Nook/Kindle yet) can download and install. If you’re an ad-supported app, this is another way to distribute it. Please note, some Android setups block these types of installs default and you jump through some hoops to enable it. This is to help protect people from getting malware randomly installed on their devices.
So far Google Play/Android Market place has been a total bust for me. 12 total installs and 4 active (I’m not sure if this means that 12 people have downloaded it and 8 people deleted it… Not good for my ego!) I should know that I’ve done ZERO marketing, okay, well I’ve tweeted the link once and FB’ed the link once.
Amazon/Kindle
Amazon was pretty easy to get setup and get all your business info in. No fee the first year, but it will be $99 a year afterwards. Your account was pretty much active right after you created it.
Had to resize some artwork for screenshots/icons and such, but getting the app up was pretty easy. They however DO review the apps and mine was rejected the first time because Inneractive ads are sending the device ID in the clear. So I made an executive decision to make the Amazon version a paid app. I changed my price from free to 99 cents, re-uploaded the app without ads and it was approved. However, Amazon won’t sell apps that are more expensive than they are in other market places. So my 99 cent app was on sale for $0. I put in a support ticket and in about 24 hours, the price was set to 99 cents.
Again with only one tweet/facebook post, sales relative to Google Play have been quite good. 41 in a week I think?
Amazon has two stores, their android app store and the Kindle Fire store. You upload one APK, they review it for Android, and then later they will review it again for the Fire… I have no idea if my app as made it there or not nor do I have a way to tell since I don’t have a Fire.
Nook
This has been an adventure in bureaucracy. If you think Apple is bad…
- Create a Developer account (I’m happy its no-charge to do so) and fill out all this stuff about why you should be a Nook developer.
- Done! Approved. Now you have to create an “App Developer” account if you want to do device apps (as opposed to whatever else you would be making), answering many of the same questions.
- Wait to be approved as an App Developer.
- Fill out all your business stuff, banking bits, etc. Submit.
- Wait until all that account information is approved (2 business days I think, they DO NOT work on weekends!)
- Go to create your app, upload your artwork (different sized icon and screen shots have to be 600x1024 and vertical). Submit all that.
- Wait on your app’s metadata to be approved (1 biz day)
- Finally you can upload your APK (which I hopefully will do tonight. I just got my metadata approved today)
I hear that Nook outperforms Amazon, which is clearly out-performing Google Play.
As for hardware, that has been it’s on level of frustration since I don’t have any android hardware to test on.
I don’t believe that you need a Fire to build apps for it. If you know what the limits are and you build your app accordingly, you should be okay. I’m not sure if you can do wireless non-app-store installs (direct from a URL) with the Fire so I’m not sure how good of a test platform it is.
The Nook on the other hand has to be enabled as a developer device and then has to be tethered to your computer and you have to use the command line tools from the Android SDK to install your apk files to a nook for testing. This would seem to limit its functionality as a test device for Android in general, though I suspect if your app works on the Nook (most restrictive) device, it should be an easy pass to the other devices.
I’m struggling with the whole test thing right now. I’m supposed to get a Sprint EVO in June/July when the person who has it’s 2 year contract is up at the same time my 2 years are up on my iPhone 4 and we are going to swap retired phones since we both just need them for test.
I don’t want an Android tablet of any form because well I guess you could call me a Fanboy and I want an iPad. But it does seem having one of these e-Readers or picking up one of the under $100 e-cheapo 7" tablets might be the best way into android for testing.
Regardless of how you go (and you may end up needing all of them), you have to face the fact that there are major differences between 2.2, 2.3, 3.x and 4.x of Android and that your customers are going to be on a wide range of hardware/os combinations that it makes Microsoft Windows based PC’s look like a controlled environment.
I’ve been looking on Craig’s list to try and find a phone for cheap and I see all of the LG something or anothers or Samsung whatnot’s and you have no clue what the device is. I’m so happy in iOS land!
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