When I search for “tea” in the Android Market, yours appears way too far for anyone to find it (second page).

If I were you, I’d work a little bit on the rankings: play with the keywords, the application name, etc. That should take very little time.

Then, if your application suddenly starts to gain some traction (it’d be great), invest into it, push some features out there, do some updates.

Otherwise, ise what you’ve learned and the experience you’ve gained (was this your first app?) to start planning your next project! Maybe a brand new one, or maybe you can pivot your application into a new one about timing for other cooking-related tasks…

For the first apps, focus on having fun, learning, and getting the experience. The money is the next step.

And I agree, it is of high quality.

I’m certain that my app is of high quality, and that there is a demand for these kind of apps, yet to date I have only 6 active installs on the Android market, what gives?

If you are interested in checking it out the url is https://market.android.com/details?id=com.tylereastman.teatimerfree.

Any suggestions for improvement are greatly appreciated!
Thank you,
Tyler E

Now talking on the article – probably it is worth mentioning that one of the main reasons for having so many free Apps in the market is because developers from few countries can publish paid apps. Many countries are not yet in the “Green” list, especially ones from eastern europe and India, where there are many developers.

On the other hand, if Google broadens the list of supported paid countries, (but even it doesn’t) there should be some control over uploaded apps, otherwise it will(is) getting flooded with a lot of useless, totally low quality apps (and if green list is broaden these apps will be paid). Probably not more than 5% of the apps in the market are good ones – with nice design and functionality.

But here comes the other thing – if Google let’s developers from much more countries to upload paid apps, the ratio free/paid content on the market will change a lot and may become like the Apple App store. But users got used to the free content (some of them are even mad why the dev has put an ad in the app) and at first most of them probably will be frustrated. Some will look for pirate copy, but I guess most of them sooner or later will start paying for the apps.

I think that the best model is having a free version of the app, supported by ads, having a “pro” version, which has no ads and maybe some additional functionality. In that way the user could choose which one to use. The user could also make some profit for you first using the free version, clicking some ads and later on going for the paid one.