Android Report #2

It’s time for my second Android Report. As you may have seen I published a new App, the GPS Widget. Because there is a free version an a paid version, I now have 4 apps in the market.

The number of downloads of the GPS Widget are higher than I expected. More than 4000 downloads in less than 3 weeks. It was just a small weekend-project I made because I missed something similar on my phone and now it seems other people need such a Widget as well.

Instead of ordinary AdMob ads I tried to monetize the GPS Widget using TapJoy. I added a button where the user can indirectly donate by downloading another app from TapJoy for example. The user then gets some Good Karma Points and hopefully a good feeling in return.
As I see from my Tapjoy stats a lot of people click on the donation button (about 30% of the users who open the settings view want to know what’s behind the button). A few of them even click on an item on the offerwall. But then, most of the users (or should I say: ALL except 2 + 2timesMe) abort the process  → my free donation strategy does not work.

So here are the stats of the last month:

Stats

Apps in the Market: 4
Total installs (cumulative): 6868 (+4491)
Active installs: 3055 (+2521)

Apps with AdMob: 1
AdMob Impressions: 1505 (+786)
AdMob CTR: 1.00% (-1.23%)

Apps with Tapjoy: 1
Tapjoy Sessions: 3104
Tapjoy Offerwall views: 931
Tapjoy CTR: 5.6%
Tapjoy CVR: 7.7%

Downloads distribution:

GPS Widget

I just released my new app “GPS Widget” on the Android Market.

This widget simply shows your current location in numbers. Latitude and Longitude are received from the GPS location provider or from the network location provider if GPS is not available.

The altitude is queried from open MapQuest API which yields in a more accurate result than receiving the altitude by GPS. So this widget is also interesting for hiking.

I have implemented TapJoy to enable the user to donate indirectly. TapJoy is an ad-network like AdMob or InMobi. The difference to these networks is that with TapJoy it is allowed to directly ask the user to take action while an action is either downloading an other app, watching a video or something similar. After completing this action the user gets points as a reward (e.g. resources like gold in a game). In my case the user gets some “Good Karma Points”.

You can download the free widget here.

The Importance of a nice GUI

The first GUI of the "Wiener Würstel-Kompass"

It’s now more than a year I have published my app “Wiener Würstel-Kompass”. I developed the app under time pressure because I wanted to submit it to the “A1 Challenge for Apps 2010”. As a result the first GUI was very ugly.

After some months I found the time to redesign the GUI. I tried to pimp it a bit. Unfortunately I’m not an artist. All I can do is programmers art ;-). I’m sure there is still a lot of room for improvement but in my opinion it looks much better than the old GUI.

 

 

 

Wiener Würstel-Kompass Screenshot

The redesigned GUI.

And luckily I’m not the only one with that opinion. Look at the diagram below. It shows the number of active installs over time. Guess when I published the app with the new GUI!

Right! (or maybe not… I don’t know what you have guessed). It was published in the end of May.

Before the app was released with the new GUI, the active installs stagnated. After the release the number of active installs increased noticeable.

My conclusion: the GUI design is a very importand part of an app. It should definitely not be undervalued.

 

Active installs over time

Android Report #1

This is the first posting of a series where I will share my Android stats of the previous month with you. I will try to post this stats periodically every month.

Stats

Apps in the Market: 2
Total installs: 2377 (+211)
Active installs: 534 (+46)

AdMob Requests: 1058
AdMob Impressions: 719
AdMob fill rate: 67.96%
AdMob CTR: 2.23%