Lost opportunities in the Android Market
Posted on November 10th, 2009 by Fredrik Olofsson. Filed under Uncategorized and tagged with Android, Developers, Market. – 24 Comments »I have read numerous articles complaining that the Android Market does not give developers the best possible conditions to make a living out of being an Android developer. While they are doing a good job pushing for the Android platform to become more widely spread and are making incremental updates to the Android Market, there are still some major obstacles to overcome to make it a more competitive market for developers. The first one is actually letting all developers to charge for their apps.
There are many ways to improve downloads through the market and get your potential users’ attention. One of the best ways to be successful in the market must be scoring high in Android Developer Challenge. This will give your app great exposure and surely the download frequency will go up. When the ADC 2 now is on the way and the top 200 apps have been presented, the attention to these apps will naturally go up. In normal cases this will be a very good thing but not for the developers around the world located in a country not able to register for a “Google Merchant Checkout account”. Of course this is good in some ways for these developers, but they miss out on a very important part of the benefits of the “free” exposure. They are not able to earn money from it.
Every potential customer that goes to the market to download one of the apps that they know a lot of other people think is good, including the judges at Google, will be unable to find the app, and a customer will be lost. This is in my mind catastrophic for the fairly newly born community of Android developers. Especially for those companies with salaries to pay that try to focus on Android. Why Google doesn’t put more effort in this is still a mystery to me but they must have their reasons. Hopefuly they will not take to long to fix this problem because developers are bleeding around the world!
So what can a developer do while waiting for Google to act? Well there are a few things you could to. When we entered the ADC 2 with our app MobisleNotes and the first round of judging began we got a few e-mails asking for the app. We then decided to make an “ADC 2 version” of the app to satisfy our fans. This is a great way to keep the buzz up and not loose potential costumers. We have all the basic features in this but are saving some killer-app features for the paid version. We decided to keep this app on the market as a free version since the Merchant account is still absent in Sweden despite promises of an October release. We will probably keep it as a free version to promote upcoming apps and a way to test MobisleNotes before buying the paid version.
Another, and much more complicated solution, is to start a company in one of the countries that lets you create merchant accounts. We have been looking in to this possibility, but even if its quite easy to set up a company in, lets say, England, you will still have significantly bigger problems setting up a bank account and are required to have an accountant that will set you back at least $2000 (probably more). You need to sell a few apps for that.
Hopefully with enough pressure from the community we can make Google realize the importance of this possibility for developers to actually get paid for their job. At least if they wan’t to be able to compete with the iPhone in the app-field, which really is the core of the platform. At the moment developers are loosing opportunities in the Android market!
This really sucks. It’s strange that no one cares what happens outside the US. This seems to happen for all new cool technology releases (except Spotify, where it’s the other way around). I wonder how many of the iPhone developers that are from outside the US and how many potential developers that are left outside the market.
It just adds to the things that need fixing about the Android.
This just adds up to many of the problems for Android developers (splintering, Market needs an overhaul, etc). I wonder how many potential developers there are out there that choose the iPhone as a platform instead due to this. Does anyone have any nationality data on the developers for the iPhone?
I’m an iPhone developer in Finland and after meeting several developers on the internet I would say that at least half of iPhone developers are outside US.
The iPhone is the most important product for Apple and a priority for the company.
The Android platform seems to be just a hobby for Google. This incident just reinforces that idea. I would be very careful about putting all of my eggs in the Androud basket.
I had contemplated about writing also for Android, but I had no idea that developers outside US are not welcome.
“In normal cases this will be a very good thing but not for the developers around the world located in a country not able to register for a …”
Care to mention the countries that are allowed to develope?
@Argonaut:
“Austria, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, U.S. and U.K.” for Android Market and just US and UK for regular Google Checkout, according to the Google Checkout support pages.
Nice article, make sure you don’t actuall mention what countries are allowed… that would have been presenting us with something actually useful.
@cak: You have your answer above, but you’re missing the point of the post. The point is developers who want to work with Android are left out in the cold. How are they supposed to get the developer community they’re after?
It’s not just about the developers – it’s also about the customers. It’s very frustrating not being able to buy apps in the market. Now I have yours and I really love it, but if you start selling it one day I won’t be able to buy it, just because I happen to live in Denmark.
That is really beyond me – the same OS but different rights set up by Google.
Thanks for MobisleNotes – it’s great!
I have lots of notes stored on a Palm TX that need to be copied over to MobisleNotes. I can bluetooth them across, but they’re in .txt format. How do I get them into MobisleNotes?
Thanks for providing a nice simple notes app!
[...] I just joined the forum to spread this importent message. Even people in the US are missing out on cool apps that devs. doesn't release since they can't sell them. Updated all my details. Here is a more detailview of one of the problems this caused us: MobisleBlog Blog Archive Lost opportunities in the Android Market [...]
[...] you’ve been following us for a while you know that we are frustrated, to say the least, about not being able to survive as a company on just making great apps and [...]
Lets get more people to sign the petition! Digg this http://digg.com/gadgets/Enable_World_Wide_paid_apps_for_the_Android_Market
[...] veel scholieren hebben nog geen eigen creditcard.Meer info over de petitie is hier te vinden: Lost opportunities in the Android Market. OA_show('AP – Single – 468×60 – Post [...]
Well, there are other incentives for developing than making money, you know – My personal is that I have an itch to scratch. I’d never consider making money of scratching my own itch.
Nevertheless, I fully understand there are individuals and companies who want to make money from Android development, so I signed the petition.
We have contributed from Brazil: http://www.zeletron.com.br/2010/06/abaixo-assinado-para-o-google-liberar-a-compra-de-aplicativos-na-android-market-em-outros-paises.html
It has been more two years since Android was launched. All along they have been saying ” We are working on bringing international support for paid apps”. How long does it take? For god sake hire somebody from PayPal, WesternUnion or even one of those guys from Nigeria! They can help out with international money transfers.
IMHO this should be fixed immediately! There’s a great deal of companies and individual developers with huge potential left out because of this.
It’s indeed Sad, still no payed apps in Belgium, it,s à small country, but every sale is money in THE pocket for THE developer (i gotta turn of this autocorrect thing on my iPad)
Sadder still is that the number of countries from which Paid apps are available seems to drop. There are now only nine countries on Googles own list of paid app enabled countries compared to about 15 early summer. Australia, Canada, New Zeeland and Schwitzerland are among the ones that disappeared.
I am now actually considering to go reclaim my Desire money and buy an IPhone instead.
Hi all, can any one tald me about http://www.mp3sale.ru/ is this legal music site?
Nice article, make sure you don’t actuall mention what countries are allowed… that would have been presenting us with something actually useful.
Enter comment here.
I found a video of this lady who sounds really nice and talks about some methods that she used to turn her life around and start a new life with a specific income system. Anyway, the video is free so I thought I would provide a link to it here. Also, she does promote an advanced system to use and I noticed that if you close out the page with the video on it, it will ask you to stay on the page for a bonus and if you do, you can get the advanced package for $39 instead of $49. I got enough out of the free video, personally, so I can’t really tell you what the advanced methods are but I think it involves some free traffic secrets and methods that anyone can use. Here’s the link to her video: http://goo.gl/LjqbM
That’s a posting full of isginht!