The frustrating thing about Android

[danjayh]

I've gone from Symbian to Maemo to Android over the past few years, and on each I've fiddled with application development (all free, because I'm doing it for the fun of it). Well, on those platforms, free applications usually got quite a bit of exposure because the signal-to-noise ratio was pretty low. Especially on Maemo: STRONG community, and any development effort effort was really appreciated.

Skipping forward to the present, more recently I've been working on a game for Android ... my brother and I spent about three months on it. We figured that given the relative size of the platform, if we made a polished effort, we'd get some kind of a response. Sadly, the response has been very lacking. And this brings me to my point:

The android market is dominated by junk and major studios. People download the SDK (or worse, App Inventor), pop out a cruddy app, and post it to the market. This creates a firehose of stuff that prevents anybody with no advertising budget from standing out (major studios just buy tons of ads). Anyway, I just wanted to vent. Also, shameless plug: our game is called Aqua Balls ... it could just be that it's not very good, but I really don't think that's the case.

Also, just for kicks, I decided to spend $50 bucks on AdMob ads to see what we'd get ... it's the price of a good meal, so not much of a loss. Ended up costing over $0.35/install, which (for a free app) was just really disappointing to me. Anyhow, I just needed to vent. Hope you have a great day!

Oh, one more thing: I'm thinking of adding either ScoreLoop or OpenFeint for their social functions. Which one do you guys like better?

[Caturday]

Word of mouth advertising seems to work! Just downloaded your game

[patrixl]

Seems to me that many good apps/games that get talked about on blogs, or by word of mouth like Caturday said (lol I love that nickname), get much more exposure.

Complaining won't work, doing something about it given the way the world is, is what works.. in any field...

Heck you could have made a post in the apps section here, talk about it on blogs (without spamming of course), etc... It's a little bit of effort, but if the game is good and gains traction, then it's gonna be worth it, right? I sold an ebook online, strictly through word of mouth and targeted blog/forum posts, and of course it had useful content so people wanted it. I didn't go and complain about a crowded market (which it was, and is even worse now), and I'm not blaming a crowded/saturated market for the fact I barely make any sales now, I don't make sales because I'm not putting effort into getting my ebook talked about. I'm too busy on other projects anyway