For those that have been reading this over the last few weeks I thought I would share my experience’s with finally publishing an app to the Android Market.

Here it is – Please give it a try

The app as you will have gathered from previous posts is a simple game the concept being it would be a good learning exercise. Once I completed the app I thought I would place it on the market and use it to see how the publishing side works, So here’s what i’v found out after a week.

1. Its really hard to get noticed!

This is one thing I have found quite frustrating, albeit the app I made is no Cut the Rope or Angry Birds but I wanted people to download and play and critique, leaving your app on the market with no promotion will get you nowhere. I posted on reddit the community is great and 99.9% of the time give you great feedback the other 0.01% someone mentions the app would be made better with the addition of a penis or boobs but the rest of the comments more than make up for this, from reddit I recieved great feedback and support and made few changes to my game but after reddit I found myself with no other form of promotion. I could have spammed forums and so on but I wasnt keen on this so for now I have gave up to concentrate on another project I am excited about, though I am still enhancing Killerballs. So if you want your app to be popular you have to push it out there.

Of course their is the Amazon Market and GetJar to explore this is an option I may look into in future I will post if I do!

2. Ad’s – Worth it ?

Now if you are like me you will have already seen the vast majority of blogs that post sensational earnings from the android market in a short period of time with no promotion and all that, now I am not saying they are lying and no so long ago I believe it was a lot easier to make money from ad’s but now it is much harder.

I signed up with admob, you get around $0.03 cents per click of an ad, for an app like mine which currently has low traffic and is likely to stay that way it is unlikely I will ever make any decent return on ad’s. The biggest lesson i made with the ad’s the first few days is I forgot all about the users network connection as I was on wifi while testing so ad’s loaded with super speed even the larger ad’s so I had them inbetween rounds on a time delay dialog. For the first few day my requests were in the 100’s but impressions very low, I quickly realised this was because I was trying to show large ads in a small space of time and they simply never had time to load. I fixed this in an update and seen a great difference as shown below.

So seeing the poor return from Admob I decided to look at better alternatives and found Leadbolt, If you havent tried I strongly encourage people to take a look they Ads even come in HTML form so you dont need to integrate any SDK like with most providers. The provide a feature called an AppWall which gives the user a list of top apps that they can download and of course you get compensated for this. Check it out here – LeadBolt – It is free and easy to sign up and you get a great service ! I will update as I use them more

3. Scoreloop –

If you are making a game and need leaderboards,awards or anything else of that nature check scoreloop out I have just used them to integrate a highscore board but will be looking into them a lot more.

Conclusion

I have made a grand total of $0.17 cents which is around 10 pence UK money so a long way before Im retiring

So far a slow week (5 days) for my app hopefully it can start to pick up as i update it and improve it after all it was a learning exercise and wasnt meant for public consumption so is far from perfect. I will also keep you updated on the latest Ad providers and how they treat me and Id love to hear your feedback.

Thanks