Android Update

Golf Solitaire has been out for a couple of days now. It sold 8 copies the first day and 5 the second, which isn't stellar, but works just fine for me if it stays relatively steady for a while. I'm pricing it at $1.99, and have no plans to change the price in the foreseeable future. I think it's a solid, fun game and worth the two bucks. Plus, I put more work into it than any app before it. If sales slack off to fewer than 10/week, my plan is to then release a lite version, probably with the ability to only play the first two holes, and see if that leads to conversions. But I'll worry about that if/when it happens.

It turns out that with the upgrade to Cupcake, the market now requires the insertion of a piece of code in the app's manifest indicating its compatibility with different versions. It also turns out that if you had previously published an app without this code snippet, updating with the snippet bumps you to the top of the newest apps queue, which confers a nice advantage in terms of exposure. People tend to check out what's new, and if your app is out long enough, it soon gets buried under the heap of new content.

So I fixed a couple of small memory issues in my JoyBuzz and DogWhistle apps and rereleased them yesterday, bumping them up to the top of the list. DogWhistle had been selling 2-3 copies a day, but yesterday the bump got me 15 new sales. It's possible I should have waited a couple of months. The market will grow, and new Android phones are coming out, and Android is also opening in new countries. Most likely I'll keep Spades unupdated for a while and see if I can get a boost in the middle of the summer. A new analysis projects that the Android market will increase 900% by the end of this year, which some other analysts are saying is crazy...that 400-500% is more reasonable. Either of those numbers sound pretty good to me.

My ad revenue has leveled out between $5-10/day, but the sales from new/rereleased apps has bumped me back up to daily revenues of $20-30/day, which is nice. It's still not independent salary money, but it's nice supplemental income.

I've got a couple of conferences coming up, but I'm going to try to get at least one more app out the door before then. When I do, I'll report back on how things are going.