http://gizmodo.com/5813653/whats-good-and-bad-about-the-android-market-for-game-developers
That’s great to see you spread your wings over such big sites, PNA 
Very honest article, as usual.
Very nice article
Very nice article indeed 
Though the reason why the common believe is that free ad supported is the way to go is three fold yet clear:
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Many users don’t want to spend money there, its a fact that isn’t going to change without enough iOS users changing over (and I understand it too, the average quality is that bad that I’m not even willing to download the trash - 1 out of 10000 apps is about worth its disk usage space, the rest is just WWW garbage - Googles claim in market growth bases on the total lack of base quality). Also android running strong in many countries where money is extremely limited by our feel for “much and little” and androids 1 price for all countries model is not supportive on that end with daily changing prices - for such countries ad is just great as it unbinds your users from paying yet you are still payed.
Don’t forget that the Android spread in such countries is much higher than for iOS as there are a plentitude of “trash androids” floating around at prices people can afford, which for iPhones is definitely not the case. -
For a long time many countries could not buy anything even if they wanted, they only had access to the free market. Thats where the strong focus of ad solutions for Android started
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piracy: Android piracy is trivial compared to iOS jailbreaking etc as its just linux, requires 1 setting to use non-market apps and is just a data drive in the right connection mode to drag drop install stuff / usage of a sync tool to do so. Prior the LVL verification it was impossible to do anything and even nowadays, the situation on android is definitely much worse than on iOS in this respect.
I was kinda surprised this morning to find a few blogs reprinting my little rant. I originally just posted it for my twitter followers, I guess word got out though.
I have no doubt that piracy, and a general lack of willingness to buy things is at the heart of why free, ad-supported apps are preferred by many. I was just hoping to point out that real meaningful revenue can be made with paid apps these days, which is widely believed to be a dead-end street. Gone are the days of the top 10 paid apps making less than minimum wage. I wouldn’t be surprised if other models are more profitable still.
And I’m happy you shared the fact that the situation isn’t as crap anymore as it used to be and that you can even make some usable income even without ad based games.
Would be interesting to get some estimate / metrics from a well done android game that started out on android / is android exclusive at the time, to rule out the “I own the iOS version but my Galaxy S2 just does not run iOS” cross selling cases cause I’m sure that your games and a few others definitely benefit from the large followership on iOS
just starting on android myself, this let some hope ^^, nice article.
tho the fact to deal yourself with client for refund and things sound weird XD…
As someone who has part-supported himself on ad revenue alone from the past year I have to put up a warning flag: these past few months have seen a rapid decline in how much revenue is paid out from the leading ad vendor: admob. Google took them over and they are steadily lowering the amount paid out: despite the same CPM and impressions.
I attribute this to the flood of yet more ad sponsored apps - with so many going ad revenue, it is little suprise that at some point something had to break. I think we are going to see a gain from paid apps sector - in fact the title I am working on right now will have no ads and no demo either.
Summary: Release for Android if it makes you enough to hire customer support?