This new feature is a big deal for many Android developers. Anyone who’s released an app on Google Play knows what it’s like to receive a negative review, complaining about problems which have already been fixed, or are simply the result of a misunderstanding by the user. This kind of thing happens all the time. And up until now, it’s been impossible to follow up with these users.

As of today, it’s super simple to view and reply to comments. Simply log into the Google Play Developer Console and click the “Ratings & Reviews” tab for an app. You’ll see a link under every review which says “Reply to this review”. Clicking this link provides a text box where you can respond to the user’s review in up to 350 characters. Once you’re done, click “Publish reply” and it will appear immediately on the Google Play listing for your app, directly under the original review.

I’m very excited to see this feature finally enabled for all Google Play developers. Two-way conversations are critical for good customer support. Now that we can follow up bug reports and feature suggestions, I believe the quality and effectiveness of user feedback will improve greatly. Google Play is no longer just a place to complain about problems. It’s now a place to get solutions, and communicate with developers directly.

What do you think of the new “Reply to Comments” feature? Is it a positive thing for developers? For users? Leave your feedback in the comments below!

Forum member Gabriele (megasoft78) recently posted a thread about creating an IRC channel for this website. This would provide an avenue for realtime discussion, and another way of exchanging ideas with the people who already frequent the blog and forums.

The feedback so far has been very positive, so we now have a new hashtag on the Freenode IRC network – #makingmoneywithandroid.

I’ve added a new menu entry on the blog – “Join the IRC Discussion” – which points to an embedded web client. So even if you’re not familiar with IRC, or don’t have a desktop client, you’ll be able to join the discussion from inside your web browser.

The web client is quite easy to use:

• Visit the embedded client, or the standalone version
• Provide Nickname (any name you like)
• In Channels, type “#makingmoneywithandroid” (if it is not already set)
• Fill in the reCAPTCHA, and click Connect.

I’d encourage you all to drop by if you get a chance. IRC is a great medium for getting quick feedback on a new idea, or getting to know the other developers you’ve seen around the forums in a more open & spontaneous setting. Many thanks to Gabriele for sharing the idea, and setting up the channel!

Looking forward to seeing you on IRC!

Join #makingmoneywithandroid on Freenode.net.

In my October report, I described how this one simple app turned into an overnight success. Fake iPhone 4S brought in over $700 in October alone, helping to bring my total earnings for that month over the nominal target of $1000.

In November, these already fantastic results improved in every way. Total Active Installs went from ~140,000 at the end of October to over 400,000 by mid-November. By the end of November, I’d reached about 1.2 million total installs. This boost in downloads seemed to be mostly self-propagating. By reaching the top Trending charts for the Android Market, it was noticed by a lot of people, which in turn helped keep it in the top charts.

It still amazes me that an app which I created as a casual idea in my free time would reach this level of popularity. There’s no way I would have predicted this number of people could be interested in downloading a Fake iPhone. But I tried it – and apparently a lot of people do want this kind of app.

Anyway, this torrent of new users brought a proportional increase in revenue. In fact, during November I brought in an average of over $200 per day! This was an incredibly exciting month for me – and busy too, as I released a number of updates.

Advertising Networks

Throughout the month I added a lot of new advertising networks. Since I was getting a heap of ad impressions, I thought it was an ideal time to try out a few other networks I’d heard of, and see how they compare in terms of eCPM and overall revenue.

Here’s a chart showing the overall distribution of revenue between all the networks I used this month:

Income Distribution for November 2011

A few of these networks are worth mentioning in detail, which I’ve done below.

Tapjoy

Impressions: 300K | CTR: 18% | eCPM: $6.33 | Revenue: $1,893.27

Tapjoy Offers in Fake iPhone 4S

My biggest success here was with Tapjoy. I decided to add a little “gamification” to Fake iPhone 4S, and see if this would help improve revenues. I’m very pleased with the results (see The Numbers section below for details).

All I did was add an extra “screen” (to the far right, when users scroll through the app), which shows how many “Karma points” the user has earned. Of course, it starts at zero, and the way to earn points is by completing Tapjoy offers. Most of these offers are free, so there’s very little friction involved.

For this particular app though, there were no extra features or levels to unlock. Normally Tapjoy points would be used in a game, or to unlock new features in an app. In this case, I integrated this points system purely as a method of supporting the developer (me!), with no other reward for the user per se.

I did add a little “incentive” to earn points though – by giving the user a title. As an individual earns more points, they progress through the roles such as “Red Dwarf”, “White Dwarf”, and “Karma Wizard”. It’s a pretty simple concept, but gives a little bit of a reward for completing offers. Which is always a good thing

LeadBolt

Impressions: 6.3M | CTR: 2.36% | eCPM: $0.13 | Revenue: $835.48

LeadBolt brought in good results – not stellar, but stable & reliable. The eCPM was certainly not impressive. The main aspect which brought made LeadBolt so effective was the high fill rate. Other advertising networks often struggled with inventory, whereas LeadBolt was one of my “safe” networks, which would regularly return decent adverts.

Ironically LeadBolt don’t actually show me the fill rate on their reporting interface. But since my app switches between the different ad networks randomly, I can make a guess of the fill rate based on the number of impressions compared with other networks.

If LeadBolt had the eCPM of Inneractive or Madvertise, it would be fantastic. But it seems that their banner adverts (which I was primarily using here) are more of a guaranteed fill, rather than a high-flying revenue driver.

Inner-Active

Impressions: 1.3M | CTR: 6.95% | eCPM: $1.20 | Revenue: $1,649.88

One thing I must say – Inneractive has great developer support (similar to LeadBolt). I’ve had a personal account manager from the start, and she has been very helpful when I had any queries or difficulties. In fact, I’ve even had reps from Inneractive drop by on this blog, offering help to developers looking to get started. They’re definitely a company that values communication, and you shouldn’t have any trouble getting in touch with a real person here.

Having said that, let’s look at the numbers for this month. Fill rate & eCPM were quite good, bringing Inneractive to 3rd place in terms of overall revenue (behind Madvertise). The CTR was really quite high. Coupled with the reasonable fill rate, I chose Inneractive as another one of my “safe” networks, which I’d revert to automatically if another system was struggling to provide inventory.

Madvertise

Impressions: 135K | CTR: 4.71% | eCPM: $17 | Revenue: $2,360

Madvertise is a bit of an interesting case. On the one hand, they offer absolutely stunning eCPMs – especially considering these are banner adverts. But on the other hand, the fill rate is pretty appalling.

As it turns out, Madvertise only fills inventory for a small set of Western European countries. Outside of this area, you’d be lucky to get any adverts at all. As most of my app downloads come from the USA, it would seem Madvertise isn’t a great fit for me.

What I ended up doing, was including Madvertise in my “random rotation” ad mediation code. But if Madvertise failed to provide an ad, I’d blacklist that network for the rest of the user’s session. So if a US-based user opened my app, it would request an Madvertise ad, fail to load, and switch over to use my other networks for any future requests. But for somebody in Europe, the Madvertise code would fill the space, and whitelist Madvertise for the rest of that session. Any future ad requests for that user, would be exclusively directed to Madvertise.

So as you can see, I made a very specific exception here for Madvertise. Without this kind of intelligent switching, I’m sure the fill rate in my reports would have been much lower. But as it turns out, Madvertise managed to bring in more revenue for this month than any of my other advertising networks – over $2000 US-dollars. That’s right – I earned more money from this single network in November, than from all my income sources combined in October! Crazy stuff.

Other Networks

Most of the other ad networks speak for themselves. It’s probably worth mentioning though, AdMob was not included in the Fake iPhone app. Hence revenues aren’t greatly improved this month.

Also worth noting, Airpush is only included in one of my apps, which is actually a demo of Airpush functionality itself. This app has very few users, so is not bringing in any real revenue. I’m not planning to introduce push notification ads into any of my other apps. I simply created this one to try out the SDK

The Numbers

Here are detailed figures for all the advertising networks I used in November.

Advertising Networks – Breakdown

AdMob

AdSense

Tapjoy

LeadBolt

Inneractive

Madvertise

InMobi

Millennial Media

Airpush

Totals

Total App Downloads: 1,374,362 (+1,055,158)

Total Ad Impressions: 8,422,607 (+5,758,191)
Total Ad Revenue: $6,855.13 (+5,555.72)
Revenue Per 1,000 Impressions: $0.81 (+0.31)

Android Market Sales: $4.04 (2 sales) (+2.03)

Total AdSense Revenue: $168.68 (+95.17)
Other Website Advertising: $90.85 (+12.85)

Total Income for November: $7,118.70 (+5,637.78)

Conclusion

As you can see, November was a very exciting time with a huge increase in pretty much every metric I’ve been counting. It was my best month yet, by a factor of more than 400%. This demonstrates more than ever, that it is possible to make money with Android.

The only real downside of these results, is that all my revenue is pretty much dependent on one app. The ongoing challenge will be to diversify – which is easier said than done. It’s going to be hard to replicate the viral popularity of a popular keyword with some of my other more obscure apps. But I’ve already seen a rise in daily installs for most of my listings.

Monthly Revenue - April 2011 to November 2011

Speaking of ongoing challenges – yes, this report is very late. Like, 6 months late. I apologise to everyone who’s been watching & waiting for new reports. I’m something of a perfectionist, so I always struggle to publish an article without spending a lot of time refining it. And in recent months, I just haven’t had that time.

Although this report is far from perfect (by my standards anyway), at least it’s published now. Which is a lot better than no report at all I hope these details I’ve written up can help other developers interested in pursuing a similar path. As always, feel free to share your questions / comments in the Disqus thread below. Or, drop by the forums for a more detailed discussion with fellow devs.

Until next time!
-David

• Added check for Android API calls that require a version of Android higher than the minimum supported version. This will save you from having to test your app on Android 1.6 for example, only to have it fail due to an API call that was introduced in Android 2.1
• Added a feature that allows you to run some code only in debug mode. Builds now generate a class called BuildConfig containing a DEBUG constant that is automatically set according to your build type. You can check the (BuildConfig.DEBUG) constant in your code to run debug-only functions such as outputting debug logs.
• Added feature to automatically setup JAR dependencies. Any .jar files in the /libs folder are added to the build configuration (similar to how the Ant build system works). Also, .jar files needed by library projects are also automatically added to projects that depend on those library projects.
• Updated the resource chooser to show the resolved value for resources. For example, when selecting @string/hello the chooser displays a resolved value such as “Hello World”). The resource chooser also now allows you to edit the chosen value directly.

There are plenty more changes to be found in the SDK Release Notes and ADT Release Notes. The Android Emulator can now run x86 system images at native speed, thanks to contributions from Intel. Lint has also received a major upgrade, with 40 new rules checking for performance and code issues.

Version 17 is a must-download release, as it fixes a number of problems with the build framework, including the dreaded “Conversion to Dalvik format failed with error 1″ message when using external JAR files.

Many developers will also be pleased with the new Network Usage feature in DDMS. This provides a very powerful monitoring framework which allows you to analyse your app’s network usage in real time.

So what are you waiting for? Head over to the Android Developers website and download the latest release now! Feel free to share your thoughts about the new SDK in the comments, or on the forum thread. Has it improved your coding efficiency?

During the past month or so, I’ve been testing a number of different apps on my Asus Transformer Prime tablet. The landscape form factor, coupled with a built-in keyboard make the Transformer a very different beast to most other Android devices.

While I’ve found the device great for gaming, basic productivity and email applications, I still needed my desktop for one important task – developing Android apps. Eclipse doesn’t run on Android, and for a long time there was no suitable Java IDE which could compile Android apps natively on the ARM architecture.

Along comes AIDE. The app’s description on the Android Market / Google Play states:

AIDE is an integrated development environment (IDE) for developing real Android Apps directly on Android devices. AIDE supports the full edit-compile-run cycle: write code with the feature rich editor offering advanced features like code completion, real-time error checking, refactoring and smart code navigation, and run your App with a single click.

Yep, that’s right. AIDE is not only a great Java editor. It can actually compile your Android apps, and then run them directly on the device itself.

This app provides a complete development environment on your Android phone or tablet. A pretty powerful code editor is provided, with basic real-time code completion and syntax checking. And it’s compatible with Eclipse projects too.

When coupled with a decent physical keyboard, AIDE can be a very powerful tool for developing and testing Android apps. Especially if you’re on the go and want to make a quick change to your Dropbox-synced Android project. AIDE would be the perfect tool for this situation – quick & easy mobile access to your code, and the ability to compile & debug the app without ever touching a computer.

For now, I’ll still be using Eclipse on my workstation to develop apps. I need the advanced SVN integration available on the desktop, as well as fast file-switching and copy/paste. This stuff is simply too slow or difficult on Android for me to use it as my primary development device.

That said, AIDE represents a huge step forward for the Android platform, and with a few tweaks could become an essential tool in the Android developer’s arsenal. I’d definitely recommend you check it out. At the very least, just to impress your iPhone-dev friends (“Hey Joe, look what my Android phone can do! Yep, just like Inception… an app within an app!”)

Android developers – if you haven’t checked your developer console in a while, I recommend you log in and try out these new features right now. They’re a vast improvement on what was previously available. There’s even an “Export to CSV” option available, so you can export the data to Excel (or Google Docs) and analyse it yourself.

Very cool.

The new marketplace (sorry, “play store”) includes content from four main areas – Movies, Music, Apps & Games, and Books. Of course, not all of these are available outside of the US yet, so folks in Australia will only get access to Apps & Games and Books for now.

Google seems to be investing a lot into consolidating their services, which I think is a good thing. I’m a little disappointed though with the name they chose (“Play” doesn’t sound quite serious enough, is difficult to use as a noun – not a verb, and reminds me of the Playbook too…)

All things considered however, this is a step in the right direction for Android developers, and in fact all content creators. Google now has one spot to sell your content, and it’s very obviously Google branded (and more or less separate from the core Android product).

That’s a key point in itself. Previously Google’s Movies and Ebook offerings were confusingly branded under the Android banner. With the introducing of Google Play, the focus is on selling entertainment content – not just for Android, but for any web-enabled platform. This positions Google as much more of a competitor to iTunes, with its unified content purchasing platform.

Android developers need not be concerned about the new changes impacting sales. Google’s set up a seamless transition to the new store, so you shouldn’t notice any major impact on your download figures. For example, Micro CPU Monitor on the Android Market automatically redirects to Micro CPU Monitor on Google Play. “Plus Ones” from Google+ and the Market on Android devices seem to automatically transfer as well, which is significant.

The Google Play Store looks very similar to the Android Market

What do you think about Google Play? Was the rebranding necessary? Will it benefit you as a developer? What about consumers? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Here’s my first payment notification from December last year.  Yes, LeadBolt does pay developers

You can sign up for LeadBolt here.

This morning Google announced a brand new Google+ page for Android Developers.

The goal is to create “a place for Android developers everywhere to meet, share, and connect with the people behind the Android developer experience”.

The Android Developer Relations team will be hosting Google+ Hangouts from this page, and even calling in some external developers to talk about how their apps are made. If you’re keen to sit down for a chat, check out the weekly Android Office Hours on Google+.

The page was only created a few hours ago, but already holds some great info. It’s great to see Google reaching out to developers in this way, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes in the future.

Check out the Android Developers page on Google+

Even more surprising – and exciting – is the news that this month, I passed the $1000 mark. Yes, after 7 months of Android development I’ve actually reached the goal set back in March. This was mainly due to the phenomenal success of my latest app – “Fake iPhone 4S“.

Read on for more details, including the full story of how one weekend’s work turned into my most successful app yet.

Stirrings In The Apple Camp…

Apple fans & aficionados across the world will remember October very well. Early in the month, Apple announced the new iPhone 4S with iOS 5 (I wrote my thoughts about the announcement here). But sadly, this wasn’t the only news from the computer company. Less than 24 hours after the iPhone 4S announcement, Apple informed the world that its founder Steve Jobs had passed away.

Steve has impacted so many people across the world with his products, and the company he built. He will always be remembered as a great visionary in the technology arena. You don’t need to be an Apple fan to appreciate what he’s contributed to modern computing, especially in the mobile world.

I mention these two events because they are both relevant in many ways to Android developers, and especially my activities during the month of October.

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

When I first saw the details of iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, I was struck by an idea. Since these phones weren’t actually available in Australia yet, what if I could make my Android phone look like an iPhone, and trick people into thinking I had the new 4S? It was an intriguing thought, so of course I went to the Market and had a look – simply searching for “iPhone”.

There were a couple of existing apps that claimed to imitate the iOS home screen (Springboard). They did the job adequately, but I wasn’t really satisfied. All the apps I tried had pretty glaring flaws, and wouldn’t convince anyone for very long. Besides, I wanted an iPhone launcher that actually worked - where you could click the buttons, and flip between screens realistically. Surely that wouldn’t be too hard to make?

Testing The Market

Before investing a lot of time in this idea, I decided to “test the waters”, by releasing a very basic version. This way I could see if there was actually demand for the app – how many people would download a free imitation iPhone app?

I threw together a quick app in Eclipse – basically just a single ImageView with a screenshot of the iPhone 4 home screen. Nothing fancy, just a quick demo I could use to gauge demand for this kind of app.

It turns out the demand was more than I expected. In just two days – with no marketing – I got over 2,000 downloads on the Android Market. And amazingly, nearly all of those were active installs. Less than 200 people uninstalled the app in those first two days. That’s an amazing response, far better than I had ever received for my previous apps.

Ramping Things Up A Bit

It looked like I might have a winner on my hands. My proof of concept got a great response. Could I extend that success further by adding more functionality?

During the next couple of weeks I ended up rewriting the app from scratch, with a bunch of new features. Instead of just showing a static image on the screen, I used the wallpaper as a background for the activity. The icons were now rendered as separate Views in a ViewGroup. I used a ViewPager to accomplish iOS-like flipping between screens.

I really enjoyed the exercise of taking an existing design (in this case, the most popular phone on the planet), and basically porting it to a new platform. Of course, my app isn’t anywhere near serious enough to be considered a “port” in the proper sense of that word. It’s more like a parody app – designed to fool your friends for a short time, but not completely replace all the functions of an iPhone. Nonetheless, it was an interesting experience to build an app conforming to someone else’s design, and not my own.

Adding Ads

An example of a LeadBolt interstitial

My first release – the proof of concept – was given away for free, with no advertising. This isn’t a very sustainable business model, so I had to figure out a way to get some return on investment once the app started taking more of my time. I didn’t want to clutter the home screen appearance by flashy banners or promotional text. And I definitely didn’t want to use Airpush or other “push notification” ad networks. Interstitials were the only way to go.

Since not all the apps on the iOS home screen have an exact equivalent on every Android phone, I chose a simple advertising method. When the user clicked an icon that couldn’t launch a relevant Android app, it would display an ad instead.

About half of the icons worked in the first iteration. So clicking the Camera icon would launch the Android camera. Clicking Photos would display the Android photo gallery (built-in). But since “Notes” doesn’t come pre-installed on many Android phones, I set up that icon to launch an interstitial ad.

The Explosion

As a result of these upgrades, my app continued to grow in popularity. By mid October, I had nearly 30,000 total downloads – far more than all of my other apps combined. And it just kept going up.

Fake iPhone - Total & Active Installs for October

The chart above shows total and active installs for the month of October. As you can see, there was a sharp increase in popularity during the later half of the month. In total, during October this app was downloaded nearly 300,000 times. But even more amazing: 225,000 of those downloads occurred in the last 7 days of the month.

That’s a quarter of a million downloads in just one week.

So what made this app so popular? Well firstly, it was created at a very opportune time. Every man and his dog were talking about the iPhone 4S in October, and no doubt this contributed greatly to the popularity of this app.

Secondly, the initial boost of downloads was enough to propel this app into AppBrain’s “Top 10 Hottest Apps” list. While AppBrain doesn’t have as wide a user base as the official Android Market, it’s still a valuable place to be featured.

Thirdly, with the combined effects of organic downloads & the AppBrain exposure, this app made it into the Android Market’s “Top New Free” category. This brought in heaps of increased exposure, and this exposure in turn kept the app popular enough to continue to rise through the rankings. At one stage Fake iPhone 4S was #3 in the “Top Free Entertainment” apps list for many places in the world. Near the end of October it also appeared in the “Trending” list.

Show Me The Money

With all those downloads, how much money was I making?

For Fake iPhone 4S, I wrote my own custom code to switch between ad networks dynamically. So every time a full-screen interstitial ad was requested, my code would randomly choose which ad to display. I started off using 3 networks – Inner-Active, LeadBolt and Madvertise.

Here’s a chart showing how the income was distributed between ad networks over the course of the month. (Note: This chart includes revenue from all of my apps & the website.)

Looking at this chart, it’s clear that Madvertise and Inner-Active were my most productive networks, followed by LeadBolt. These are the three networks that I integrated into Fake iPhone 4S. They all performed very well, and made up about 88% of my revenue for the month.

During October, Fake iPhone 4S generated a total of $1,307.40.

The income from all my other Android apps (using AdMob and Tapjoy) was pretty insignificant by comparison. I didn’t release any major changes this month, so this is entirely passive income.

During October, all my other Android apps combined generated a total of $22.01.

My website earnings (including AdSense) were still strong, but made up less than 10% of the total for this month.

During October, my website brought in $151.51.

So in total, that’s $1,480.92 for the month. Well over my target of $1,000 – and more than I’d earned in the previous 6 months combined!

All The Juicy Details

Here are the full details from all of my advertising networks, including the bits developers really want to hear – eCPM, Fill Rate and CTR.

AdMob

Tapjoy

AdSense

LeadBolt

Madvertise

Inneractive

Summary

Without further ado, here is my traditional monthly summary for October:

Total App Downloads: 319,204 (+312,846)

Total Ad Impressions: 2,664,416 (+2,631,933)
Total Ad Revenue: $1,329.41 (+1,264.90)
Revenue Per 1,000 Impressions:  $0.4989 (~$0.50)

Android Market Sales: $2.01 (1 sale) (+0.59)

Total AdSense Revenue: $73.51 (-0.31)
Other Website Advertising: $78.00 (+60.5)
Total Website Revenue: $151.51 (+60.19)

Total Income for October: $1,480.92 (+1,323.17)

Wow – what a month! I was featured in the top trending charts on AppBrain and the Android Market. I passed my income goal less than a year after I first downloaded the Android SDK. And in the process, I discovered two new advertising networks (Inner-Active and Madvertise) which returned a significantly higher eCPM than anything else I’ve used.

My success this month can be entirely attributed to one app. But I’m beginning to think this “hit” based business model is quite common amongst Android developers. That is – most apps won’t be successful. But once you create enough apps, one of them will take off in a way you never expected, and that can fund your development for years to come.

Of course, if you’re a development studio with plenty of money to spend on advertising, it would be possible to produce an app and market it to create a guaranteed success. But for an independent developer, the best strategy seems to be “test the waters, and pursue any app that seems popular”. Especially now that the “Just In” section is gone from the Android Market, it’s much harder to get your app noticed if you don’t pick a well-searched title right from the beginning.

It’s interesting to note that since the success of Fake iPhone 4S, all of my other apps have seen an uptick in both new downloads and active installs. By placing a simple link to my Android Market developer page, I was able to cross-promote my other apps to interested users. This seems a very effective way to leverage a single successful app to drive traffic to your other releases.

Where To From Here?

Several people have asked me what my long-term goals are, now that I’ve passed the initial milestone of $1000/month. Here’s what I’ll be aiming for:

• Sustain the $1000/month target for several consecutive months
  In the past, I haven’t been able to maintain a prolonged boost in revenues. During the next few months I’ll try to improve on my October earnings, but primarily focus on stabilising revenue, so that this isn’t a one-off event
• Test several new advertising networks
  Now that I’m handling several million ad requests in a single month, I can start looking at other ad networks. Hopefully by comparing several different networks in the same app, I’ll be able to determine which services offer the best RPM globally.
• Focus on feedback
  I’ve placed a prominent request for feedback – along with an email address – on several of my Android app listings. In the coming few months I’ll try to actively respond to users’ emails, and follow up by adding features that have been requested.

So, that’s all folks! Apologies for the very delayed report, but there was a lot of data to sift through & write up. The coming few months also promise to be a very exciting time, so stay tuned for the follow-up blog posts.