Android Market

We as android fans can hate Apple but on second thought we have to thank Steve Jobs and the Apple family. The App Store is a phenomenon in a one-person software company that has gone to make over “$250, 000 in a few month”. Many software developers have been able to quit their day job after developing a hit app that got millions of download. Well, the android market is still small and the number of android phones is still considerable smaller than iPhones but the app gold rush is starting to enter the android market.

Techcrunch reports that Edward Kim the marker of “Car Locator” is now making around $13,000 on the app.

Kim writes that the free version of the application has been downloaded around 70,000 times, while the paid application has been downloaded 6,590 times. The price was initially $1.99, but he moved it up to $3.99 (he notes that despite doubling the price, the number of downloads didn’t decrease too much).

So what was Kim’s secret to success? Well, a big part of it seems to have come from the fact that Car Locator is now a featured app on Android Market, which means Google more prominently displays it to users than ‘normal’ applications. Getting featured increased the app’s revenue by over four fold. This probably comes as bittersweet news to developers (you can’t exactly count on being featured by Google), but Kim says that he’s ranked between 100 and 200th place in the Market’s ‘Paid’ category, which means that there are probably at least 100 other applications seeing similar success.  Android Market is still far behind the App Store in many respects (except for openness), but it looks like it’s finally starting to mature.

Kim is very optimistic about the future of the platform, telling me “Android appears to have grown enough that developers can make some money off of it, but there’s not SO many developers that you’ll never get noticed.”

Car locator

Android is spreading like wild fire, so success stories like this will only get better.