Android developers, you too can have break-out success in Google Play—and Google itself wants to show you the way. The creator of the mobile software and its related app store has put together a game plan to help app makers make it big using its resources.
Perhaps anyone can write an app and push it into the store. But the company emphasizes that those are just the first steps. After all, it’s hard to stand out amid more than 1.3 million Google Play apps. According to the company’s blog, the tome is “a detailed playbook on the best practices and tools you can use to maximize the reach, retention, and revenue of your new app.”
See also: OK, Google—Search Inside My Apps!
The main idea is to help developers understand Google’s guidelines and to offer tips for making their apps stand out, analyzing their traffic and turning a profit:
- Publishing on Google Play—using the Google Play Developer Console to distribute your app to over 1 billion Android users worldwide.
- Quality—The fundamentals of building a great app and an insight into the Google Play guidelines and policies.
- Discoverability & reach—Maximizing your app’s discoverability and reaching the widest audience possible.
- Engagement & retention—Converting installations into active users and improving user retention.
- Monetization—Monetization strategies to generate ongoing, growing revenue streams.
- Measurement with Google Analytics—Understanding your users and improving your app experience, conversions, and marketing.
- Going global—Launching your app in local markets around the world.
In truth, the secret formula—available as a PDF file, a Google Play download or even a print edition—isn’t really that much of a secret. In fact, much of the information here can be culled from other places, like its Android developer portal. But at least it’s handy having the information organized in one place.
Google offers a limited run of the print version for free to people in the U.S. and U.K. Other countries, it says, are coming soon.
The move may look like a magnanimous gesture on Google’s part, but it’s also obviously part of its general Android evangelism, as it works to attract even more development in Google’s mobile ecosystem—a platform that’s still trying to shake its reputation as a lackluster moneymaker relative to Apple’s App Store.
As it turns out, Google Play is doing a pretty good job growing up into a genuine profit center. Citigroup analyst Mark May estimated that Google Play revenue could jump from $1.3 billion in 2013 to $5.2 billion in 2017.
Although that’s still well behind the $10-billion-dollar App Store, one thing is clear: There’s money to be made in Android apps, if you know how. And Google aims to teach you.
Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock
