Android™ 3 SDK Programming For Dummies®

Chapter 13

Selling Your Application on the Market

In This Chapter

• Setting up your application for publishing
• Publishing your application to the Android Market
• Selling your app on other marketplaces
• Marketing and support hints to make your application commercially successful

Android is by itself a platform on which mobile phone applications run. Android needs apps in order to be useful, because the platform is only as successful as the apps that are created for it. As a relative latecomer to the mobile phone market, Google realized that in order to compete with Apple and others in this area, it had a lot of catching up to do. Rather than try to become an app developer and app seller, Google, like Apple, decided to let its users become its app developers, and they completed the deal by making it easy for users to sell (or at least give away) apps to other users.

Because Google wants to establish market share as quickly as possible, it has tried to make publishing and selling apps as easy as possible: Though it has set up its own, well-known electronic marketplace, known as the Android Market, it also allows almost anyone else to set up a marketplace for Android apps. A major player, Amazon.com, has recently taken advantage of this policy to set up a portal for selling (and buying) Android apps. Two other major marketplaces for Android apps are AppBrain (at www.appbrain.com) and GetJar (at www.getjar.com), which serves up free apps for more platforms than just Android. Consistent ...