How to earn money by creating an app?

How do you make money with a free app? How do I launch an application on the Play Store? Is it profitable to create a mobile application? Android or iOS? How to promote its application?

Launching popular, fast-earning mobile apps isn't easy.

On the other hand, more and more developers are making a living from apps that earn them additional passive income. 

How to create a mobile application in 2021?

Mobile has been the big winner of the decade 2010. Today, mobile is ahead of the computer and mobile-first web development has become standard.

Even though web mobile performance is improving day by day, native mobile development remains a very attractive choice. On the one hand, you have native performance that remains unmatched by PWAs and Web Views and on the other, you have access to the Play Store and App Store to distribute your app to the world with just a few clicks.

So let's see together the alternatives to develop your mobile app.

Which programming language for a mobile application?

Mobile development had bad press because 5 years ago you had two choices: Learn either Java and the Android SDK and be limited to the Android world Learn Objective-C and become an iOS developer Accept the poor performance of Web Views to be able to develop on Android and iOS with cross platform

Fortunately, 2021 is a long way from the Web Views period with Cordova and Ionic, and Kotlin and Swift have taken a toll on native Android and iOS development respectively. But above all, we saw native AND cross platform Frameworks with Flutter and React Native.

React-native is especially great if you are from Web Development and are familiar with React. With React-native and the Expo framework, you will be able to develop your Hello World that runs on your Smartphone in just a few minutes, completely abstracting from iOS and Android tooling.

So you have the choice:

Want to be 100% Android? Learn about Kotlin.

Are you in the Apple clan? Swift is for you.

Are you from the web? React-native will be your second home.

New to React and the web? Try Flutter.

The differences between Google Play Store and Apple App Store

Once your app is complete, you can publish it to one of the two main stores, the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. These work differently and you won't get the same results depending on which one you choose.

You may have heard that the App Store is more selective than the Play Store. It is understood that Apple would take up to 2 weeks to accept your application and reject it for any reason. On the other hand, Google would accept applications during the day and be much more flexible on releases ... This is no longer true in 2021.

Indeed, Apple's lead times have been reduced considerably by being closer to 48 hours and conversely, Google's policies have hardened.

The real differences are ideological.

Apple is a world in which everything is paid, you will pay 99 euros per year to be able to publish applications on their store where Google only charges 25 euros once for registration.

Also, a free and less successful app could be downloaded in large numbers, certainly because the Android public would be more indulgent and prefer free when the Apple tribe associates price and visual with the quality of a product.

How to create an Android and iOS application?

As we saw above, you don't have to sacrifice performance to have a native application on Android and iOS today.

Once you have chosen the technology you want to use to develop your application, you should familiarize yourself with X-Code or Android tooling. This might be the only real difficulty you'll run into if you already know how to code.

Compiling an app for blinds for the first time is still a relatively long and tedious process.

How to create an application on Google Play?

For me, React-Native and Google Play have emerged as logical choices.

Indeed, the application that I made in a day is a basic project that I wanted to put on GitHub to build my portfolio.

During the summer of 2017, I had found a Pokémon image bank and I thought to myself that making a Pokédex composed of two types of screens: a list and details would be interesting as many applications work with this system ( sometimes with an additional Map view).

During my research on Pokémon to create my application, I saw that at the same time, the game Pokémon GO (which had already been released for 1 year at the time) had just released a new collaborative Feature: the Bosses of Raid, a list of Pokémon on steroids that attack locations in the game.

A list.

So a light bulb appeared above my head: rather than making a Pokédex with all the Pokémons, I'm going to make a Pokédex only with this list of Raid Bosses that change every 2-3 months.

So users will be able to see which Pokémon are Raid Bosses right now, what their stats are and how many players it takes to be able to beat them.

In a few minutes, I reduce the complete list of Pokémon to the 20 Raid Bosses, I install an Admob library to add a banner ad at the bottom of the page (no invasive pop-up) and naming it “Raid Boss” I ship it to the play store with an account I already have.

Being the only app that listed these Pokémon for Pokémon GO, the number 1 game on the stores at the time, the success was immediate and, after fighting with Google and its intellectual property policies, I quickly came to several dozen of 'euros in earnings per day.

How to monetize a free application?

I chose Advertising because I wanted to worry about the app as little as possible, but there are much more profitable ways to monetize your app.

The different Business Models to monetize your application

There are 3 different types of business models for making money with your app: Charging when installing Charging while using Advertising

CREATE A PAID VERSION OF YOUR APPLICATION

If your free app is already working well, you can make a copy of it with something extra. You can, for example, make a “pro” version without ads, with additional content, preview content or even more regular updates.

Very popular at the start of the 2010 decade with the “Lite” and “Pro” versions, this model has become less common with the democratization of the Freemium model.

THE FREEMIUM MODEL: IN-APP PURCHASES AND SUBSCRIPTIONS

The word Freemium is the compression of the word Free and Premium. You have access to the app but you will have to pay a subscription or purchase items and features in the app.

Unlike the model above, we only have one app rather than two versions. Payments are also made throughout the use of the app rather than just once, upon installation, for pro versions.

ADD ADSENSE WITH ADSENSE

One last way to make money with your app is to advertise it. With advertising you can just add a direct banner ad to places that don't interfere with the use of your app or go to the other extreme and add full screen ad videos that your users are forced to watch.

Obviously, the more invasive ads will get more view and earn you more clicks per user, but you risk annoying your users and losing them if they are too present.

In my case, I didn't see myself being interrupted by my users, so I chose a simple banner ad at the bottom of the screen on List view and Details view.

You can also affiliate with another business that may be of interest to your users to have better margins.

How much does an application bring?

It depends entirely on your application. To get a minimum wage, you can solve a big problem and ask 12 people for € 100 per month or solve a very small problem that affects a lot of people (around 150,000 with AdSense for a minimum wage) and just post publicity.

How to promote a mobile application?

Promoting an application is a discipline in its own right combining technical optimization of the application, artistic design and salespeople, but also a mastery of search engines and marketing text.

Let's see it all together point by point.

Position yourself with the App Store Optimization (ASO)

If you are familiar with the web and SEO then you will understand the term App Store Optimization, it is SEO for Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

The rules are more or less the same as for SEO with a few nuances.

You will have 3 main fields to make your app the best answer to search intentions. Use them well by targeting the keywords you want to target and their semantic field to adapt in the title, short description and long description (up to 4000 letters, numbers and symbols).

In addition to these fields, there are screenshots and other promotional visuals to provide. Again, visually appeal to people who browse their search results on the respective Store, put your app in a situation and make quality designs.

How to reduce the size of an Android application?

In addition to these elements external to the app, Google and Apple will analyze your app metadata to rank you in the app ranking.

So the most important criterion will certainly be the size of the application. Here, it's the size that matters and the smaller the better. On Android, don't forget to use ProGuard and create an App Bundle or at least generate an APK file per architecture to limit the size of your apps.

You ideally aim for less than 10MB.

Respond to reviews to keep a good rating

With your first downloads will come your first comments and ratings. Pay particular attention to what your users tell you.

Some will encourage you and ask you for new features to implement, others will insult you and say that there are viruses in your application (especially in the Google Play Store). Either way, remember to thank the former warmly and respond kindly to the latter. I've had tons of bad reviews turned into 5 stars after showing empathy and responding positively to trolls.

A score above 4.5 is proof of excellence and will propel you to the top.

Go develop your application, but watch out for its survival!

As you may have noticed in the images in this article, the average rating and number of installs is declining as of 2018.

The reasons for this slow death are twofold:

On the one hand, the Pokémon GO game became less and less popular after the hype of summer 2016 passed.

On the other hand, Google has tightened its policies and my app being a guide to the Pokémon license, I had more and more difficulty making updates, until they were blocked entirely. And finally Google removed my app from the store after 3 years of service.

What was fully accepted by Google's terms and conditions 3 years ago is no longer possible today.

And this is where the biggest problem with building native mobile apps lies for me: you only depend on the two marketplaces, Google and Apple.

You can literally have your sources of income cut overnight, and the Google Play Store team will give you very little information on the exact reasons for rejecting updates or removing your app from their store.