I'd say it's even lower than 7%, both for paid and ad supported apps, at least on my experience of having several applications for both iOS and Android. There is a small percentage of Android users willing to pay for apps, primarily due to Google not requiring a payment method when setting up your account and lots of Android users who don't use the smartphone features. This, in turn, makes the CPM lower in ad supported apps, since the ads have smaller returns and thus the advertisers pay less for them (compared to iOS).
Just to prove my point, here are yesterday's profits for a couple of apps:
- Paid app:
- iOS: $128
- Android: $6
- Ad supported app:
- iOS: $1285
- Android: $21
And that's without taking into account that Apple does most of the tax collection/invoicing for me while Google does not, despite taking the same sales percentage.
Ok, fair, but that is some really anecdotal evidence. Also, the amounts are low enough that you could even dismiss the evidence as having too low of a sample size.
This may hold true to your own personal experience, but it doesn't really have anything to do with getting a sense whether the income generated from Android devices is 5% or 10%.
You might be doing a terrible job at marketing to Android users, or have the wrong business model etc. (I'm not saying you are, I'm just saying we don't have any evidence from your information.)
I don't think anybody's trying to make the argument that in general Android produces more revenue. Only that it might not be as low as 7%, but possibly around 10% ?
Also, the article is criticizing the data the stats are based off, not trying to make an argument for the numbers being any different in real life.
I'm not saying you are wrong (of course you know your numbers better than anybody), I'm just saying that argument is completely irrelevant to the conversation.
Nice job, though, on the revenues. Your app(s) seem to be doing well :)
I'm not a specialist in that field, but my marketing efforts have been basically the same for both platforms. Of course, I might have targeted the wrong users in Android while targeting the right users on iOS, but I think that's unlikely to be case.
Maybe I didn't make that clear in my previous post, but while the data I posted is only about two apps, the percentage is consistent across all our apps (mine and my brother's) and some of my friends who develop for both platforms. That's still anecdotal data, but I wasn't claiming it was significative, just my experience.
P.S: Not trying to sound rude nor defensive, English is not my first language
Nice catch :-)! Since I closed the project I mentioned in that comment, I wanted to release some parts of the code. The article about Readability reminded me of it, mostly because some of the comments suggested that a lot of people were rewriting Readability using Python and lxml. This part of the code was mostly clean and well tested, so this morning I spent half an hour writing the README and pushed the code to github.
Given the number of articles I guess you're processing each day, I think you should probably rewrite your parser in C. I used to run a service which basically consisted on a feed reader where every article was preprocessed by an algorithm similar to readability. I wrote the parser using lxml and it looked fast enough, but when I started running on the 400K-500K pages per day territory I started having performance problems. Since parsing the pages is easily paralelizable across multiple machines, I could have just rented some more servers. But where's the fun in that? So I sat in front of the computer and 4 hours later I had a C implementation which passed all the testsuite and, according to valgrind, didn't have any memory leaks. As soon as I deployed it into production, CPU and memory usage dropped by something like 10x (don't remember the exact number) and I was able to remove some servers and bring the costs down. Sadly, I had to close that project because I was spending too much time on it compared to the revenue it was generating, but it was so much fun while it lasted.
Another anecdote: I was writing an HTML-to-text converter. The prototype used lxml and some custom DOM-traversal and formatting logic in Python. I got about a 17x speedup from porting the thing to use C and libxml2 (the parser that lxml uses). The port to C took most of an afternoon, and it's currently chewing through a lot of HTML without a problem.
Good idea. The problem is "FaceBook for iPad" is listed in their submissions rather than in their apps, which means it hasn't been approved yet. However, if they end up passing the review (I have my doubts about that), I'll make sure to buy a copy and report back to Facebook.
Sandboxing is only required for apps sold in the Mac App Store and the OS won't require apps to be sandboxed. None of your non-sandboxed apps will stop working on March 1st.
