C H A P T E R  6

Marketing the Free Application

Now that you have determined your culture, created a marketing plan for release, and figured out ways of selling applications within your own application, it is time to discuss a very important aspect of marketing. Chances are, it will be the first thing that Android Market shoppers will look at when they discover your application: the price.

It doesn’t take long before you realize that the most common price for a paid application is $0.99. This is not to say that your application has to be that price, but it definitely has to be worth the price to a user. These days, app users are expecting more from their applications for less of a price. Think of all the games that are free or $0.99, when games of lesser quality used to be purchased for the Atari 2600 or Nintendo Entertainment System for $40.00 in the 1980s.

As someone who usually doesn’t pay for applications, I can tell you that I am most drawn to applications that are free. If you are a first-time developer, it might be in your best interest to get your first application out into the market for free. Note the emphasis on the word might. If you have created an application that you can get to work well, then why shouldn’t you be paid for it?

A lot of paid applications have brand-name recognition going for them, as many years and lots of money have been spent developing their culture, as discussed in Chapter 3. New applications to the market, as good as they might be, can be easily ignored by Android users. It can take weeks, months, or even years before you have a dedicated culture who will be willing to pay for the products that you put out.

Your application is something that you can update over time after it is published to the Android Market. (You will quickly discover how buggy applications can be after their launch, and how they need to be updated periodically.)

Think of your first application as a resume for future clients. If you are in a situation where someone needs a developer, you can show them your first application. The quality of that application could lead to you getting hired to create another application for someone else. If people see that your first endeavor was impressive, they’ll tend to believe that you can only get better. Once you get several successful applications on the Android Market, companies will feel more confident about hiring you to create their next winning application.

You might be wondering how in the world anyone can afford to give an Android application away for free, especially with all the hard work that goes into creating an application. However, there are several ways that developers make money apart from the initial price that the user pays for the application:

• Developing a lite version: This is when you develop an application separate from your paid version. The lite, or free, version has limited features, but the paid version is the complete package. The idea is that users download the free application just to see what it is like. They then enjoy it so much that they purchase the paid version of your application, which can be released sometime after the free version.
• Apps that are temporarily free: You can give your app away and then create a paid version later.
• Ad revenue: As with web sites, there is some profit to be made from putting ads within your application. This profit can be great or small, as it depends on the amount of views. If you have some free space on your application’s screen, you might as well sell it to those who are willing to advertise on it.
• Affiliate programs: This is when a participating company offers a commission every time a sale is generated within the application itself. So far, this is not really used as much as it is on iOS, but that may change.
• In-app sales: I will inform you how to do this in the next chapter, but it is a way of allowing your users to buy items within your application to make yet even more profits.