452 downloads!!!

Well it's been over a week since my little text 2 speech app launched. I decided to pop onto the marketplace site and see if I had any feedback. I was shocked to find that I was already up to 452 total downloads! WOAH! It looks like 48% of those are active installs which I am assuming means that about half of the people ended up uninstalling it. I figure that's not too bad considering the app is pretty basic. This is exciting news! Also on an interesting note, it looks like only about 60% of my active installs are "English" while the rest are other languages including quite a few from India and Germany. I am guessing this is based on the language version of Android they are running on their device. Well this is pretty exciting for me becase it means that over 220 people actually using this application on their device! Imagine if my app was even cooler!

I also checked on my errors that were reported and so far there have been none, which is good I suppose. I have 4 ratings so far with an average of 4.5 stars which seems pretty good and the one comment I received so far was in what appears to be spanish. My best guess at translation is that they like the app and it serves their need but wish it had options for other voices. That's certainly something I can look into trying to figure out. Not sure if that's available or not but I will defanitely look into it.

Now my next step is to test what happens if I make the app a paid app. Will it continue to get downloads? Will the download rate drop off? Will people see enough value in it to keep the application or will I find that people uninstall right away for their money back? I think what I will do is wait a while and see if I can get the app to over 500 downloads first as that puts me into the next bracket. I noticed this because the app market shows number of downloads as "100-500". I'm guessing the next bracket is probably something like "500-1000" and I think that the number of downloads has some effect on the SEO ranking within the marketplace. Hopefully my next blog will be about the money I have made with it.