How to promote Android apps

Recently my friend asked me to answer a few questions to promote applications for Android. We dogovorlis that I would write a post. Over the last year I got the definite impression on the market Android Market. I am pleased to share my opinion. I hope my experience will be useful to developers. I would be happy if the post will generate a constructive discussion. 

On Android Market:

1. How often do updates for whether these updates in some real bug fixes, or users' trust and silently update "?

As a user I am a "trust and silently update the" application or not at all if I update the application is not interested. Everyone is different and there are users who are always watching the ongoing changes in apdeyte, my IMHO - is dominated by people who install updates, rarely going into the details. There is also a category of applications, in which each update brings new features. As a rule, the loyal users of such applications are always waiting for the upgrade of new functionality or content.

How to make $250 a day (and get banned from the Android Market)

A few months ago I did something which, in retrospect, was probably rather stupid. But it was surprisingly successful while it lasted. As I wrote earlier, I’ve been using Google+ since the day after it was launched. I myself received an invite from a stranger who was offering invites publicly. For this reason, I’ve been keen to share invites with anyone else who’s looking for one. I put up a post on this blog offering free invites, and got a huge response from the Android community. In fact, there were so many responses that it overwhelmed my email after a few days. There’s no way I could have kept up with the demand.

Rather than stop accepting requests altogether, I wanted to make it easier to handle the load.(NB: At this stage there was no limit to the number of Google+ invites you could send.) My first thought, trying to work out a faster way to do things, was “hey, is there an Android app for this?” A quick search turned up a negative. No Android apps offering Google+ invites. So, why not make one? It seemed a pretty good idea, so I spent that afternoon writing a simple app that accepted an email address, and a description of the request. The data was sent to a PHP script on my server, so I could go through and invite the email addresses stored in a database.

Actually, it’s not that simple to write an Android app that POSTs data asynchronously to a server, checks the response, and handles errors gracefully. I re-used some classes from another unreleased project, but it was still a bigger job than I expected. But the actual coding is an issue for another day. The most interesting part came when I released the app on the Android Market.

Protect Android Apps with the License Server via Android Market

I am not a big fan of copy protection, DRM or anything that prevents the freedom me and how I handle products I bought in future. Is it an app I bought with the G1 and copying it onto my Nexus One, or an old LP that I want to use on my new LP player. Therefore, I am always kind of skeptical when it comes to copy-protection mechanisms. Of course, as a mobile application developer for about 6 years (that’s longer than people know the word iPhone) I have to admit that I thought about those kind of thing a bit in the past. However, IMHO my time is better invested in adding new features to apps, create new apps and hook up with all the users to figure out what the heck they actually want – rather than trying to punish them with copy-protection mechanisms that are just annoying.
With Google recent announcement of the License Server for Android I have to say, they put out a good piece for developers and for users. I haven’t used the License Server yet, but from what I read in the blog article and Android docs (see links below) it looks like a solid mechanism that allows developers some basic protection via verifying whether an app has been bought or not. And to be honest, that’s all you need!
Here is what it does:
Developers can now easily verify whether the current user (more specifically the current GMail account) purchased an app. Developers can implement such verification methods in a jiffy into their apps and after getting verification (or not) they can decide what to do after that. IMHO, this is a very open, very free approach to this delicate topic and I love it! Here is the official chart of how the procedure works:

License Server via Android Market

How to get more than 100% active installs on Android Market

Well, having a percentage of more than 100% of active installs on the Android Market seems a bit unrealistic to me. However, this is what it shows in my Android Market app listing. The one shown on the right is a paid application that had just been launched, so I guess the Android Market didn’t update its internal statistics properly yet.
The mix of ingredients to get a high percentage of active installs is fairly easy:

1. Have a good app with as less bugs as possible.