Hi Folks!

It is time for the next developer report about android developing.
In this post, I will tell you something about the last month.

Right in the beginning of this post I have to say, that there were nothing really special. The numbers were ranging the whole month without any big peeks.

Beside that, I had some time to care for the next updates and that was most of what happened that month (and still happens). I will split up the number talking in a little bit gossip and for every of my games, so it hopefully comes a bit more natural to read and also I have to practice my english xD

Also for the first time I will also talk about revenue, so other developers can get an insight without calculating for themselves. Players on the other side may get a little insight in what work is involved to make and maintain a game and that someone will not get rich with it xD

After the ending hype of the month before, I decided to give Robo Miner some new updates, some of you may have recognized, that there were new blocks introduced. I was hoping to give Robo Miner a little bit more depth.
After the release there was some players who didn't like the new blocks but was forced to play with them. They were right, so later I released another update where players can now chooseif they want or want not to play with the new blocks.

So most of the work of the last months was building up this new update and also doing some improvements on memory usage and overall performance.

All those updates didn't change very much on the actual numbers, so Robo Miner was generating 1000 downloads per day very steadily and around 100-120.000 impressions per day. That left Robo Miner with a revenue of 80-100$ per day, depending on the quality of ads. All other numbers stayed nearly the same, so still a CTR of ~2.5% and a nervous eCPM of admob.

Just to remember you, when Robo Miner peaked out, it gathered a max of 12.000 installs per day!

So I also invested time in doing some more things for the popularity of Robo Miner and also searching for more possibilites to communicate with actual players to get more insight in what they like and what not.

So I set up a Fan Page and a Fan Group on Facebook, where already some people joined, I hope for much more! :-)

At the end of the month I come up with another idea in advertisement inside Robo Miner and the update for that is already released. I will stop auto-refresh and make it manually for 10 min refresh time. Also players can now choose to close the ad! So if they are annoyed or it is not interesting for them, they can close it. There comes another ad after 10 mintues and so on - I will write another article on that subject in the next days hopefully :-)

I also started to upgrade Minesweeper: Unlimited! this time. Beside implementing Online Highscores I also put up a Fan Page for it and decided to try another ad network for evaluating. I decided for MoPub and do some mediation with them. So I signed up for many ad networks, installed them with MoPub and integrated that in Minesweeper: Unlimited!
It is now running since some days and I am no unsatisfied with it. Works well. Also Support seems to be very good, they react very fast and in a very friendly manner trying to help you with any problem (I just wrote them about new networks).
Implementation is very easy, but I got my problems understanding how their mediation works - but in the end I got everything right.

The Online Highscores is my own system on my oen server. I do not wnt to add any more permissions in my games or annoy users with logins or other things, the different ready-to-go-systems may produce. I wanted a simple system, so I wrote my own and will integrate it in my other games also.

Minesweeper: Unlimited! has a very steady Impression rate of ~1000 Impressions per day with a low CTR and therefore not very much revenue.
To make it clear, since the start of the year, Minesweeper: Unlimited! produced under 40$ overall revenue, which I believe is a regular revenue for a non-popular app.

I redesigned my ad implentation also for that game and have to watch it over the next month to see if anything had changed. Also I need to spread it out a little bit more and try to make it more popular. I play this game very often by myself in situations where I have to wait for something, so I think it is a good game and people would like it :-)

I now come to a problem with my paid apps, like the ad-free version of Minesweeper: Unlimited!
Problem is, that I would need to integrate all the different Licensing Systems for the different markets or spare them at all. Which is bad - really heavy work without any real benefit for me.
I am thinking of droping these paid versions at all or at least stop upgrading them.
Unfortunately, some of the stores (like AndroidPit) does not allow to remove an app - that is one more reason to NOT recommend AndroidPit because the dev can do nearly nothing after publishing. That is better solved with other markets where the dev has more control over his apps.

I didn't have changed anything with my other games so far, so there is nothing to tell, revenue is still less than Minesweeper: Unlimited.

I also signed up with distimo, which is a sort of analytics system, which can track all your apps over different stores and gives you an overview. That is kinda helpful but I am not sure if it works really well - it seems, that it misses data from getjar sometimes and also does not always get the reviews of some stores (like amazon) .. but it is still helpful the keep the overview of your apps.

So yes, I think that's it for the last month, feel free to post a comment if you have any further question. I would be glad to answer it