Some tidbits after the first 2 weeks for those of you who are interested:
- Free-version downloads are running about 3x what they did our first few weeks on iPhone. Not sure how much of that is due to the free handwriting promotion and how much due simply to the fact that there are a lot more people using Android Market now than there were using App Store 2 years ago, though - probably a combination.
- Aggregate sales are actually very close to what they were our first few weeks on iPhone, but the day-to-day standard deviation is a lot lower - not nearly the same spike that we saw on iOS after its launch - perhaps because the people who were eagerly anticipating our Android app already bought it months ago during the beta. But iPhone also had spikes after we released flashcards (which came a few months after the initial iPhone launch) and OCR (which came almost a year after it), so it may also be that our sales on iPhone are inherently less steady.
- About 60% of our sales are coming from our own store rather than Android Market; not sure how much of that is attributable to Android Market problems (the dreaded "took too long to deliver" errors - sadly entirely Google's fault and impossible for us to fix) versus people being in countries that don't support paid Market apps versus people reading our website and deciding they'd rather not tithe 30% of their purchase to their cell phone carrier, but it's definitely a good thing we're offering it as an option anyway.
- Sales are only about 50% of our current iPhone sales, however, so while that holding steady would probably be enough to justify the time / expense of an Android port, we're hoping there's still some room to grow there.
- In spite of those two things, we're currently ranked 340 in the Market-wide "top grossing" list, while on iTunes we generally hover around number 500. So in other words, even though Android Market is only registering about 20% as much gross revenue from Pleco as iTunes is, our gross rank is still 160 points higher. Which certainly fits with the general perception that people are making more money on iOS.
- Our free app download ranking in Reference is hovering around 165, which is almost exactly where it is on iTunes. Again, though, we're at that position with considerably fewer downloads than on iOS.
- Nonetheless, it appears that we can already claim to be the top grossing Chinese dictionary on Android - in fact it seems likely that we've been in that position since last summer - and the second most heavily downloaded.
- The special "CN Pleco Chinese Dictionary" version for the Chinese market hasn't exactly set the world on fire - about 10% as many downloads as the regular app - but we've gotten quite a bit of positive feedback / email about it, and now that we've streamlined its build process down to just a few minutes we think launching it was probably a good move. (though it sure would be nice if Google would let non-paid-app countries download free-with-IAP apps...)
- In device usage, Samsungs appear to be utterly dominant - one in every seven Pleco users has a Galaxy S2, and one in every fifteen has a Galaxy Note. (we really need to get one of those here for testing...) The Galaxy Ace / S / Tab / Nexus / Nexus S are also all in our top 10; the remaining three spots are all HTCs, the Desire HD, Sensation 4G, and (making an impressive showing for such an old device) the original Desire.
- Android 3.x/4.x remain a minority at the moment - around 10% - so our initial focus on 2.2/2.3 appears to have been a good choice. That 10% is a lot higher than the Market average, though, and the 14% of our users on 2.2 are about half the Market average, which suggests that our users skew towards newer devices and hence that skipping Android 2.1 was probably a good move - Market-wide, 2.1 is only 7.6%, and it would probably be considerably less than that in our case.
- Regional distribution is very similar to iOS - as it has been pretty much since 2001, Singapore is our second biggest market after the US. Though we're actually getting more downloads from Australia than the UK at the moment, which is a bit unusual.
- The ability to update instantly is a wonderful thing - there are minor bugs that we have / would put off fixing on iOS that we've dealt with immediately on Android because there's no 2-week review delay, and no fear that we might introduce a new and more serious bug and have to wait another 2 weeks for an update that fixes it. In fact I'd say that outside of OCR, this largely cancels out the negative impact of Android platform fragmentation on our software's typical level of bugginess.
- The perception that user reviews are much friendlier on Android than on iOS seems to be holding true in our case - we're currently at 104 5-star reviews and 1 4-star review with an entirely reasonable complaint about flashcard system complexity. One reviewer actually gave us 5 stars in the same review that he was reporting a serious crashing bug (which we've now fixed, but on iOS that would be a 1-star "Latest update crashes! Fix it now!"). We really appreciate all of the kind words, though, especially as we've been bludgeoned with about 60 fake 1-star reviews on iOS this week. (we know they're fake because every other top-ranking free Chinese dictionary got about the same number, and none of them came with any comments attached - a thoroughly mediocre competitor from Hong Kong is trying to spam their way to a high ranking)