Android App Maker: $13,000 in Sales Per Month
By Anna Johnson on March 7th, 2010iPhone app makers aren’t the only developers making money from mobile applications. Case in point: Edward Kim, whose ‘Car Locator’ application for the Android smartphone platform is making around $13,000 in sales per month.
Edward Kim released Car Locator 5 months ago and, according to a recent blog post, reports that the free version of his application has been downloaded 70,000 times, while the paid version has been downloaded 6,590 times. The paid version briefly took the #4 spot in the Travel category for Android paid apps.
According to Kim, Car Locator was making him around $80-$100 per day until it became a featured app in the Android Marketplace. Being a featured app took Car Locator sales up to around $435 per day.
Check out Kim’s blog post for an analysis of his sales to date. An interesting point he makes is that when he doubled the price of Car Locator – from $1.99 to $3.99 – sales declined by less than 50 percent. Just another reminder to experiment with price and not to be afraid to increase the price of your products and services – you may just end up making more money overall.
As an individual developer, Edward Kim is elated with his sales results. He also reckons the Android platform is only a fraction of what it will become. I agree. In fact, it’s not too farfetched to imagine that with an open platform, enthusiastic developers, and a bunch of smartphone manufacturers all investing millions of dollars into Android, it could end up making a big dent in the iPhone’s market share. After all, that’s exactly what happened in the early 1980s when Apple lost ground to the PC makers…
Source: Edward Kim, “An Android Success Story: $13,000/month App”, March 1, 2010, Edward Kim Blog
