Android Market Game sales bottlenecks and solutions (1)

Google Android Market recently launched its own app built-in billing system to support developers to provide app built-in payment functions. Although this is a huge improvement for all Android apps and game developers, in fact, before entering this platform, developers should considerAndroid Market Problems:

Android Market

1. Tedious billing process

Many apps in the Android Market belong to free products, and most games provide free download services (Note: Their downloads exceed 0.25 million times ).

One major reason most games on this platform are free products is that Google's app billing service is not in place. Apple's practice is different. It binds the iPhone user's credit card account to the iTunes account and supports one-click payment. Android users use their own Google accounts. They do not need to provide Google Checkout or credit card information during registration. IPhone success has benefited from two major factors: Apple asked iPhone users to enter credit card information when activating their mobile phone for the first time, and most users performed this operation. Second, it is related to the iTunes store. Before the iPhone was launched, iTunes already had a large number of registered users, so apple easily relied on this advantage to allow iPhone users to easily download mobile games.

However, if Android users want to buy a game, they have to enter their own credit card information, which means they have to carry a credit card with them when performing the payment operation, its tedious payment process also greatly reduces the conversion rate of paying users. This is one of the reasons why developers have to supply games and applications for free in the Android Market.

2. Platform splitting

Angry-birds-android

Because many device manufacturers have adopted the Android operating system, the split nature of the platform has become a difficult problem for Android. This phenomenon is the most evident when angry birds first logged on to the Android platform.

Not only are developers miserable, but Android users often suffer from this, because this split problem will make them unable to determine which mobile phone device is the best choice.

When angry birds fails to run properly on multiple Android mobile devices, the game developer Rovio had to develop another independent and lightweight version of the game one month later to solve this split problem. However, this does not completely solve the problem. Users still have to find out which version of the game should be installed on their mobile phones.

For developers, Google's distinction between the Android operating system of smartphones and tablets further deteriorates the split problem of the platform. According to Pocket-lint, Google will release an intermediate Android operating system for smartphones that can run Android 3.0 games. This will only aggravate the split of the Android operating system.

3. Application search Problems

Android_market_search

Although users can search for application content by different categories, Google Android Market still lacks user-friendly application search services. If you enter a specific game or developer name in a wide search, the system does not display clear search results. For example, if you enter the keyword "Angry Birds", you may find that the search results are filled with a large number of wallpaper, cottage applications, and a large number of junk applications. Obviously, this retrieval service does not create the best user experience, but it also brings inconvenience to users.

4. Lack of marketing tools

Android Market lacks marketing and promotion tools for developers such as partner programs and discount coupons, while third-party app stores such as GetJar offer a variety of services that support developers to promote games, from this point of view, developers have almost no feasible promotion strategies on the Android Market platform.

5. Limitations of sales channels

In the past, developers could only sell games in specific regions supported by the Android Market. At last year, Google expanded the list of these regions and added Hong Kong, Brazil and other 16 regions and countries. However, so far, developers of this platform can only sell games in 29 countries.

6. Apply refund policies

Google's app refund policy is also a major problem for Android Market. The platform originally supported unconditional refund within 24 hours, as a result, a large number of users downloaded the game within one day and then returned the game. Although Google has not long ago limited the refund time to 15 minutes, the impact of the old refund policy has been hard to erase, the harm is that it cultivate the refund consumption habits of Android Market users.