Deciding What to Build

Sure, you could make a new Lunar Lander game and give it a different name. Then you could put it on the Android Market, and you have yourself an Android application!

Of course, this isn’t very original, isn’t it? You’re not going to find someone who is willing to spend $0.99 to go to play a game that hasn’t changed much since the 1980s. In fact, a search for “Lunar Lander” on the Android Market reveals two lander games, both of them available for free. If you want to succeed on the Android Market, you are going to have to come up with something a little bit more complex than this.

Of course, there are many Android applications that are based on simplicity that have made a lot of money. For example, I find that one of the most useful apps that I have is a simple flashlight. It seems like every day I find a need for a light, and if I have my Android phone on me, I can do much better than curse the darkness. Color Flashlight (Figure 2-2) does nothing more than cover the screen with one user-defined color of pixels, which creates an illuminating effect. Color Flashlight is not too complex of a program, and it is the simplicity of it that makes it work for Android users (until the battery dies).

Figure 2-2. An example of a simple Android application that is useful in many ways. Applications like this make me wish that I had thought of them first.

If you go into the Android Market and type “flashlight,” you will get many results for applications that will essentially do the same as Color Flashlight (some of them can be seen on the left in Figure 2-2). I am not certain who developed the first flashlight app for Android, but I’m certain that it was quickly imitated. The important thing to note is that these flashlight apps do exactly what they are supposed to do (provide light), and many more of them have some extra features. Color Flashlight allows the user to make some hypnotic flashing patterns, and even spell out some text, so users can carry around their own private neon sign.

Special features like these are not too complex to program, and set Android applications apart from other similar ones. Marketing is all about making certain that Android users will find your application, possibly among several similar ones that may or may not be imitators. It is also about presenting your application to users so that it is the one that they want, as opposed to the competition’s. Whatever Android application you design should probably be quite simple, but with enough features that will set it apart from whatever competition you’ll come across. In short, marketing will put whatever application you have in the proper spotlight so you can sell it to your users.