[Spirit FM] mikereidis:
Every paid Android app is highly pirated. I get 10-20 debug logs from pirates every day, and about 2 requests for support.

Are you aware that there are very strange and very undocumented methods for figuring out how much to pay devs for the ads their apps serve ?

I presume they somehow calculate what your users eyeballs are worth, but the current market for ad sales is a factor too. When I first enabled ads I got a very generous "CPM". A few weeks went by and they dropped to almost 0.

How much do you think eyeballs are worth when they belong to people in low income countries who never buy apps ? Roughly zero.

"Something" (instead of nothing) ALWAYS comes with costs. Should I ignore free user support requests ? Doing that, and releasing free on Play means the ratings and reviews end up being trash.

Most free users have no idea how difficult it is for a single person to do what Google (one of the world's largest corporations) has said they don't have the resources for. (IE a real OTA FM app.)

Free users are MORE demanding than paid users.

I do my best to create a quality app and in this niche, support and ongoing bug/problem fixes are VERY important. I average about 5-6 new releases every month, many to work around some new problem in some new ROM ! Personally, I'd much rather have 10,000 paid customers who I can support reasonably well, than 1 million free customers who complain because I can't support 2000 different phones and multitudes of ROMs stock and not. I do testing on some of my cheaper phones and especially with old stock ROMs I see problems that frankly embarrass me and make the app difficult or impossible to use. I'm sure there are thousands of users that feel Spirit is "crap" because of this.

Between 1 year ago and 2 years ago I had a free version on Play. I was making almost NO income. I had to come up with a workable plan to make money, or abandon Spirit and go work for big evil corporations again.

I lowered the free version capabilities and suffered a HUGE backlash from hundreds of self-entitled free users who felt that I owed THEM something for their "supporting me" by using my free app (without ads). ((Actually a silent backlash from thousands. "Hundreds" only includes those who raised their voices on forums or in the app reviews and those who voted silly and hateful comments/reviews as Most Helpful.))

I removed the free version from Play, created a 99 cent Light version with more features than the Free version ever did and said effectively "If you're going to complain about 99 cents then I don't have the time to support you".

Since that magical moment 1 year ago, my income has been sufficient to keep Spirit moving forward indefinitely.

Please point me to YOUR apps or some evidence of your business knowledge in this area and I'd be happy to consider your ideas.

Having some vague idea that you know the apps business because you use or buy apps isn't enough for me, particularly if your thoughts tend to directions that my experience, and the experience of many, MANY other devs, indicates is a barren direction.

When I started out, I too thought that ads might be a viable monetization strategy. There were plenty of articles about this (and very few now, interestingly.) I tried it, it didn't work, and I found most devs had the exact same experience.

Ask any of the leading devs on XDA about how they feel about ads. Please point me to any that have publicly said ads are doing well for them. Do you think they/we are hiding the major incomes being made, and that we are secretly quite rich ?

And please don't mention Angry Birds thinking that it's somehow representative. It's a group of mass market apps and even physical items now.