Hi fellow Readers and Followers

I am a bit late, but I promised to make a lookback for the year 2012 and give some insights in what happened and how things was working.

As some of you know, I started developing games for android in december 2011, so 2012 was my first whole year being present as a game developer for android - I also started writing posts to this website during that period.

I published many different games during the last year, the most successful was Robo Miner, followed by Worm Puncher (started in July) and also Tablet Tower Defense (Dec 2011) and Minesweeper: Unlimited! (Jan 2012)

How things did

(stats only from google play)
Things were not starting great, because my first games were hardly downloaded but it was my beginning and somehow I expected it to be so.
Robo Miner was a bit different, people liked to play it and so Robo Miner started like a Rocket.

Started in the end of Jan 2012, Robo Miner did a steep curve upside, ending up with 12.000 daily installation during its best time (which was during february/march 2012)

After that period - mainly because Robo Miner does not deliver enough content for a game being played over months) it drops to a level of 1-2000 daily installs and stays there for the end of the year. There was a small peak with 300 dailies at August, no idea why, maybe there was a review somewhere giving more attention to the game.

Another peak appeared at christmas - pretty sure, that is because many people were giftet an android device :-)

Worm Puncher is by far not that successful as Robo Miner, but is Number 2.
To show you the gap, Worm Puncher has only 60 daily installs (peak 110) - which is still not bad for a just causal game without deep gameplay. It was more made because of fun, to give you some good time :-)

Tablet Tower Defense and Minesweeper: Unlimited! are the only games who were also available ad-free and while there were some pretty good reactions, they never reached a very high level of daily installs. With a maximum of about 30 installs per day (peak 60), I am still satisfied - after all, I play that games by myself very often.

During the last year, I tried out different things. I used many markets. I wouldn't do that in the future. Mainly because the effort of updating an app is enormous and most of the markets needed different images and such stuff. Beside the Amazon App Store (to get your app to Kindle) I would ignore the other markets.
They may have some small impact and there is a good amount of extra downloads to it but everyone should be aware of, that it is really time consuming, to get an update out. That's also true for the Samsung Store which was a mess to do.

In Terms of downloads, there were the following ranking:

Google Play (by far the most downloads)
Amazon App Store (~5% of google play values)
Samsung Store (~3-4% of google play values)

all other stores has either stopped producing downloads, where not confident about their numbers or just weren't woth to mention.

If you are a young dev just starting with making games for android - then go for them! You'll need every bit of attention. If you alredy has a step in the market - stick there, except you have to much spare time :-)

Is it bad to submit to other stores? Hell, no! Just a decision of time being invested in uploading instead of developing.