This month’s report is a bit late, but I wanted to get it into the iDevBlogADay roll since we’ve done so well since our last update.

What’s new with us

This month was crazy good. I’m not sure if it’s just the holidays, but we had a really good month in November, and it’s looking to be even better in December. I’m hoping this isn’t just due to the holidays, but we’ll see if our growth maintains through the new year. I’m not expecting much, but it sure would be nice.

I started working on two new applications in November, and Dave started working on one. We decided to work on our own ideas for a bit, so we can see if either one of us can come up with a money making idea. If one of us is successful, we’ll be sure to replicate across the other platforms. One of the best things about working with someone else is the ability to work on different projects, and focus efforts on whatever is successful. If you haven’t teamed up with someone yet, consider doing so soon.

What went right

Doubling Income!

This was an incredible feeling for us. In November we managed to double our income compared to October! Our apps seem to be picking up steam, and as we get more downloads, we get more eyeballs and ad clicks. I can’t wait until we double our income again. We look to be on track so far this month, so we’ll see what happens.

Started New Projects

Dave and I both started our own projects in an attempt to diversify our portfolio. I’m really excited about the next two or three apps I’ll be working on, and I can’t wait to get them launched. I’m moving away from the soundboards and trying to get into more utility applications, which is good.

iOS Meetup

November marked the sixth consecutive iOS meetup that I’ve organized in Orlando. Building an iPhone development community in Orlando has been one of the most exciting things I’ve been a part of, and is one of the events I look most forward to every month. I’m trying to get Dave to start an Android one so we can corner the mobile market in the city, so hopefully he’ll get on that soon. If you’re ever in Orlando, come check us out.

What went wrong

Didn’t Learn Lesson

File this one under things-we-should’ve-learned-but-didn’t. We wanted to put together a holiday themed application to try and take full advantage of the holidays. Unfortunately, we made the same mistakes in this project as we did for the Food and Wine Festival. We simply didn’t schedule enough time to bring the project to completion. I’m unsure of whether or not there will be a large opportunity cost, but it would have been nice to have an application ready for December. Hopefully we’ll learn our lesson the second time around, and make sure we have enough time to plan out our projects.

Split Focus

This is specifically an issue that I had this month. After I wrapped the Food and Wine festival application, I had two ideas that I wanted to work on that I was very excited about. Rather than isolate one of the projects and put all my focus on it, I decided to split my efforts and work on two applications at once. The result was very little progress on either project, and nothing to show for December. I decided to go ahead and put one of the projects on the backburner, and work on what I feel is the easier idea to implement. Hopefully that application will be launching this month, and will be ready for the new year.

Income Breakdown

November was a great month for us, as we were able to double our income from the previous month! We hadn’t quite doubled our highest grossing month, as we saw a bit of an income drop in October, but it was a great amount for us nonetheless. It’s amazing that this income is truly passive, and we’re beginning to be able to rely on a set amount every month. We only seem to be going up from here, and we’re really excited to see where we are this time next year.

Enough blabbing, on to the numbers.

Android Market

• Android – $268.45 (+210%)

iPhone Market

• iPhone – $9.13 (-7.5%)

Total Earnings – $277.58 (+201%)

We’re not sure if our income is beginning to ramp up due to the holidays, or if our applications are just rising in popularity. What’s interesting is that our income graphs follow our download graphs pretty accurately, with plateaus in downloads and income matching. If you have ad support applications in the app store, do you normally see an increase in revenue during the holidays?  I would love to hear what others are experiencing.

Upcoming Plans

Dave and I have set the following goals for December:

$500 month

What the heck, let’s try to take full advantage of the holiday season and try to have a $500 month. This would be our first major income goal, and would really help us believe that mobile applications are a viable, sustainable business. We’ll see what happens.

Launch Another App

Dave and I would like to launch one application each. That would clear a few ideas off our list and allow us to start the new year being able to focus on new ideas. Can’t wait to see how the new applications turn out. It’s always exciting when you have the chance to make some extra income!

Set 2012 Goals

We’re going to discuss our goals for 2012, so look for a resolution post in January. Neither one of us can wait to see where we are with this business by this time next year. It’ll be great to get a fresh start, and really bring focus to our business.

Thanks for sticking through this post! I finally got RSS set up properly in our WordPress theme, so if you haven’t done so already, consider subscribing to our blog. We’ll continue to post these income reports, but I don’t want to flood iDevBlogADay with them every month. RSS is the best way to keep up with what we’re doing!

The slides go over a few of our numbers and help show how to get started with AdMob in your applications. I plan on recording myself giving the presentation to these slides, but for now, enjoy what I have up.

Let me know what you think or if there’s anything that needs clarification!

Google TV Beta Update: Logitech Revue

Users with Sony devices started receiving the update a few weeks ago, but Logitech Revue owners like myself are still waiting.  After hearing rumors that it could be another month or two, I started getting impatient. There were now users of the new Google TV market, and none of our apps were in there yet!

I decided to follow this Android update tutorial and install the Honeycomb beta update on my device.  After a few tries, all went well, and I was checking out new apps on my TV.

Updates to Applications

I immediately started in on updating one of our apps.  A little background: Android devices come in many shapes, sizes, and with varied features. Apps must declare which devices, screen sizes, and phones they will suport in their AndroidManifest.xml file.

The only change developers will need to make is to modify the Manifest to let the Android Market know that a touchscreen is not required (while my device does have a trackpad on its keyboard remote, you can’t assume that other devices will).

<uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.touchscreen" android:required="false" />

Back on the TV, I updated settings to allow installation of non-market apps (so I could test my own apps before deploying).  After recompiling, I installed the app on my GoogleTV and it was amazing to see the same version running on the big screen!

The only drawback is that sometimes a layout that works well on a handheld phone isn’t as usable with a D-pad controller.  I ended up creating a new layout specifically for the TV which would be easier to navigate.  This deserves a post entirely on its own, but for now, you can download our first Google TV app and let us know what you think.

Google TV Hangouts

Another cool facet of Android development is the open community.  Over the past two weeks, we’ve been attending Google TV hangouts on Google+ hosted by some of the development team themselves.  Over a video chat, they make themselves available for “office hours” to talk about porting your applications, upcoming plans, and just questions about the platform in general.  It’s awesome to have this open connection to Android developers, and I look forward to seeing how this platform evolves.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed an insight into Android development! If you’re interested, check out our latest Monthly Income Report.

What’s new with us

October was a crazy, crazy month for us. I had to meet a very tight deadline at my full time job and lost an entire weekend of my time to the dreaded crunch. I wound up working 35 hours over the course of a weekend and slept at the office to push this project out on time. The deadline was met, but I experienced pretty hardcore burnout and didn’t want to work on any apps for a while. Unfortunately this was reflected a bit in our income, and I wasn’t able to get a second app built this month.

Now that we got through the craziness of October, we’re back on track building new apps. We’re hoping to work with a graphic designer on a few projects in the near future. We’re also looking to get a seasonal app put out for the holidays, and maybe make some extra money off all those shiny new phones people will be receiving as gifts.

We’re going to make a strong push to generate more growth this month. We’ve set some attainable goals, but you’ll read about those at the end of this post.

What went right

Launched Food and Wine

Despite the hectic feel of October, we had a few things go right this month. We launched both versions of the Epcot Food and Wine App, so we have another completed project under our belt. It definitely felt good to add this to our portfolio. We finally have some variety in our iPhone applications, and we’ve got an Android app up that’s not a soundboard. We’re looking forward to getting a few more apps out by the end of the year.

Maintained Revenue

Despite not introducing any other new apps this month, we maintained our revenue stream. We had a bit of a dip in our earnings, but the dip small enough to not have a major effect on us. It’s great to know that we can rely on making a certain amount every month, despite how many new apps we put out.

Record Single Day Earnings

This is a small thing that went right, but we managed to have a record earnings day. Our highest single day earnings by the end of October was $7.29, which is pretty great. I remember when Dave and I just wanted to make $1 a day, so it’s nice to know we’re slowly creeping up toward the $10 per day mark. This business is definitely for the long term, so while our earnings may seem small, you have to start somewhere. Can’t wait until the day we’re making $100 a day and looking back on our $7 days and chuckling.

Gained New Skills

Finally, Dave and I both added new skills to our developer tool belt. Though this doesn’t have affect our income directly, adding new skills allows us to build more complicated applications, and hopefully have better income potential. This was the first time we both worked with databases/Core Data, as well as sharing from a mobile app to Facebook. The results have been pretty good, and it’s nice to know that we have this experience behind us.

What went wrong

Food and Wine Woes

We had a few things go wrong this month, but we learned a lot of lessons. Two things that went wrong are actually related: we launched the Food and Wine iPhone app late, and we had to remove features that we wanted to include. We were on a really tight deadline for Food and Wine, so we knew that we might need to cut some features in order to get the application out. Unfortunately, we were right, and we had to cut out a few things that we really wanted to include.

Luckily the festival is an annual event, so we’ll be able to add the new features for version 2 next year. However, we knew that the audience for this app was extremely limited, so we wanted to make sure we knew when we should drop features and just push the app live.

The most important lesson here was to know when to cut your losses and push live. Had we continued to develop features, we would have missed income generation opportunities, due to the limited schedule of the event.

Delayed Next Project

Finally, I had to delay working on an application I wanted to start. I was given the opportunity to build an application for Florida Hospital and took the immediate income opportunity over the long term recurring benefits of another apps. Luckily the project was large enough so it was worth the time put in, but there was definitely an opportunity cost involved.

Income Breakdown

Another decent month this month, but we didn’t see any income growth. We were a few bucks under last month’s income, but it’s not so much that we were worried about it. So far we’re on track this month to pass October’s income, so we should see some growth in our next report.

Android Market

Install Google Analytics

The first thing to do, if you haven’t done so already, is to get Google Analytics to start tracking your website. It’s free and easy to set up. Installing analytics is outside the scope of the article, but it’s extremely simple to do. Just follow the link above to register and go through the installation process.

Most people know that Google Analytics can track your website traffic statistics, but did you know that in addition to visits, you can track individual events and actions? We’re going to utilize a function of analytics called “Event Tracking” to help us with this.

Add Javascript to Links

In order to begin tracking link clicks, we need to add a bit of javascript to the links that are pointing to our apps in the app store. Find a link on your website that you would like to track, and add the following onclick event:

onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Event Category', 'Event Type', 'Description']);"

Next, replace “Event Category” with a category you would like all similar events to be grouped under. For my website I chose “Application Buttons”. After that, replace “Event Type” with the type of event you are tracking. I chose “Click”. Finally, replace “Description” with the name of your app. If you have an app available on multiple platforms, I would add the platform name to the description.

As an example, my tracking event for the Epcot Food and Wine Festival App is as follows:

onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Application Buttons', 'Click', 'Food and Wine iPhone']);"

All of my apps are grouped under the “Application Buttons” categories. You could just as easily track hovers and mouseouts by replacing onclick with whatever javascript action you want to track, but clicks make the most sense. Remember, these onclick events need to be added to your links.

After getting your first event tracking code in place, click your link. You should be directed to your application, while Google keeps track of the link in the background.

Viewing Your Events

It’s important to note that Google only updates their site statistics once per night. This means that if you follow these steps immediately after installing your tracking code, you will not see the events being tracked. Be sure to check your stats the following day to see your tracking statistics.

You can view your tracked events by going to your site’s analytics report and clicking on Content > Event Tracking. You will be taken to a graph overview of your tracked events and you will see a summary of your events at the bottom of your screen. If you’ve waited until the following day to see your statistics, you should see a group of events named “Application Buttons” or whatever you decided to name your event category.

Click “View All” next to the category, and you will be brought to a summary of all of the events that have occurred under that category. At this point you should only see “Click”.

Click on the event name and you will see all of the event descriptions that you have set up under that category and action.

I know my downloads are abysmal. I actually forgot to set up my tracking code on a few links, but writing this article got me to go back and make sure all of my referrals are now being tracked. Thanks iDevBlogADay!

As you can see, we’ve had 7 people click to view our Food and Wine Festival app in the Android app store. Oddly enough, our Wolfenstein 3D soundboard only has 1 referral, but we get a lot of traffic to our site from the search phrase “wolfenstein 3d soundboard”. Knowing this, we can now take action to try to push visitors toward downloading the wolfenstein 3D soundboard. This may mean updating our copy on the site page or featuring the app somewhere else on our website.

So there you have it! As you can see, tracking your app referrals from your website is extremely easy. Hopefully this how-to has been helpful for you. If you have any other tips for tracking referral statistics, I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below, and share your knowledge!

Also, be sure to check back next week when I release October’s monthly income report. I’m trying not to bombard my idevblogaday posts with income reports, but I know they’re very popular. If you’d like to be notified when that article publishes, be sure to follow us on Twitter @codefortravel.

((UILabel *)[[[[[[switchView subviews] lastObject] subviews] objectAtIndex:2] subviews] objectAtIndex:0]).text = @"M";
((UILabel *)[[[[[[switchView subviews] lastObject] subviews] objectAtIndex:2] subviews] objectAtIndex:1]).text = @"F";

However, I found that building for iOS5 caused my application to crash when I was attempting to customize the label. I decided to investigate, and used a technique to loop through all the views of an object and spit out the class types. I ran the test for both iOS4 and iOS5 with the following results:

iOS 4
<_UISwitchSlider: 0x5a3dc20; frame = (0 0; 94 27); clipsToBounds = YES; opaque = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x5a3dca0>>
<UIImageView: 0x5a3e040; frame = (0 0; 94 27); clipsToBounds = YES; opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x5a3e070>>
<UIImageView: 0x5a3e0c0; frame = (0 0; 94 27); clipsToBounds = YES; opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x5a3e0f0>>
<UIView: 0x5a3e180; frame = (3 0; 88 27); clipsToBounds = YES; opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x5a3e1b0>>
<UILabel: 0x5a3e240; frame = (-40 0; 24 27); text = 'ON'; clipsToBounds = YES; opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x5a3e2b0>>
<UILabel: 0x5a36450; frame = (48 0; 32 27); text = 'OFF'; clipsToBounds = YES; opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x5a364c0>>
<UIImageView: 0x5a3e120; frame = (-2 0; 45 27); clipsToBounds = YES; opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x5a3e150>>
 
iOS 5
<_UISwitchInternalView: 0x19bcf0; frame = (-1 0; 79 27); layer = <CALayer: 0x19bd60>>
<UIImageView: 0x19bd90; frame = (1 0; 77 27); opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x19bdd0>>
<UIView: 0x19be00; frame = (1 0; 77 27); clipsToBounds = YES; alpha = 0; layer = <CALayer: 0x19be30>>
<UIImageView: 0x19bee0; frame = (-52 0; 79 27); hidden = YES; opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x19bf20>>
<UIImageView: 0x19bf80; frame = (-52 0; 131 27); opaque = NO; userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x19bfc0>>
<UIImageView: 0x19bff0; frame = (-1 0; 29 27); userInteractionEnabled = NO; layer = <CALayer: 0x19c030>>

As you can see from the output above, iOS4 provides a UILabel that can be accessed. The previous programmer’s code targeted this specific subview and set the label text. However, in iOS5 you’ll see that the UILabel is non-existent. When the code runs and attempts to use a UILabel, it finds none and crashes.

I’m speculating, but it would appear that iOS5 is using image views to render the text on a UISwitch. The only way to customize the UISwitch would be to build your own view to use.

Luckily, I found a set of classes that allows you to do just that. The class is called DCRoundSwitch and was written by Domestic Cat Software. The class was super easy use. Simply import the header file and instantiate a DCRoundSwitch instead of a UISwitch. You then set the ‘onText’ and ‘offText’ properties of the switch to customize the text displayed.

DCRoundSwitch *switchView = [[DCRoundSwitch alloc] init];
switchView.onText = @"M";
switchView.offText = @"F";

This is obviously much better than trying to target a specific subview which may or may not exist. If you’re looking to build round UISwitches that need to be customized, you should definitely download that class.

Their github account has a project file you can download and play with.

Warning: After compiling an old project into iOS5 using armv7 architecture, be sure to go back and extensively test your application to see if problems like this occur. The above problem may have been caused by not including the armv6 architecture when I was running my tests, but it goes to show you that it’s important to test your applications completely after a new SDK version comes out.

Hopefully this is helpful for some of you. It’s my first technical post, and was pretty fun to write, so I’ll probably post more in the future. I’d love to hear what problems you’ve run into with iOS5, so if you’ve hit any bugs, tell me about them in the comments.

Every month we’ll be posting how much Dave and I make on the various mobile marketplaces. This is in an effort to both hold ourselves accountable to build our business, but also allows others to learn from what we do. He handles Android development while I take care of iPhone. With our powers combined, we hope to have a six figure business within the next two years.

What’s New With Us

September was a pretty crazy month. We’ve been trying to put together a mobile application for the Epcot Food and Wine Festival and we were hoping to launch it a few weeks ago. Unfortunately we missed our deadline, but I’ll talk more about that later.

No new apps were developed this month. Despite not building anything new, we are  continuing to generate revenue on the applications we already have on the market. That’s the best part of having passive income!

What Went Right

We increased our profit!

Despite not putting any new applications on the app stores this month, we still managed to generate more revenue than the previous month. We noticed a significant jump in downloads and clicks for our most popular app. Hopefully it will continue to generate the more money every month!

Started Blogging

We finally started our blog and wrote a few posts. For some reason it took a while to find the time and motivation to put the site together. We’re using a simple theme for now, but it feels good to finally have something up. It’s been fun watching traffic spike whenever we write new posts, and it makes managing our iPhone and Android Apps landing pages a lot easier.

Joined iDevBlogADay

In September we made the decision to join the iDevBlogADay community. This is actually a post for that community, but if you’re reading this and you’re unfamiliar with them, you should check them out. iDevBlogADay is a group of bloggers who write helpful and interesting posts about iOS development. I will be posting every two weeks on Tuesdays. This post is a make up post that I wanted to launch this past Tuesday. Expect the next one on October 18th.

Updated Street Fighter 2 Soundboard

Dave put out an update to the Street Fighter 2 Soundboard that allows users to save the sounds to their phone and use them as ring tones. This functionality is something that our users were clamoring for, so we delivered. Nearly every review under 5 stars said that it would be a 5 star app if only the user had the ability to save the board sounds as ringtones. Those e-mails and app reviews taught us the important thing we learned this month. Listen to your users’ feedback. I can’t stress how important it is to stay in tune with what your customers are asking for, and to implement the changes they want. Happy users are happy customers, and it can only do great things for your brand’s image.

What Went Wrong

Missed Our Food and Wine Deadline

We are located in Orlando, FL, so we’re constantly hearing about events that Disney puts together. One of our favorite annual events is the Epcot International Food and Wine Festival. This is a really fun event where you go between different food kiosks and sample foods, wines, and beers from countries around the world.

We wanted to put together an application that would allow users to keep track of what food and drinks they have tried. The original plan was to allow for Facebook sharing and a review system. Unfortunately, we didn’t have as much time to work on the app as much we’d have liked, so we had to cut a few features. We originally planned to allow users to submit reviews and ratings for the foods they try, but we scrapped this feature for now. Despite cutting features, we still missed our deadline. The Android version is in the Android market now, but the iPhone one is still under review. We’re about a week late, and I’m sure we’ll take a revenue loss, but it was still a fun app to work on. If anything, the app will be a great portfolio piece.

Income Breakdown

This was only our second month on the mobile marketplaces but we’re already seeing an increase in revenue. This is despite the fact that we did not submit any new applications to the app stores. I don’t really know what to attribute the growth to, but this really shows how great it is to have passive income. Despite not putting any new products out there, we are still generating income.

Android Market

• Android Earnings: $135.98 (+81.3%)

Apple App Store

• iPhone Earnings: $4.39 (-1.6%)

Total Earnings: $140.37 (+76.8%)

I still haven’t resolved the copyright issues with the iPhone apps, so we didn’t see any sort of income from those this month. Android on the other hand had a great amount of growth. I don’t expect us to continue to see numbers like that until we submit new applications, but it’s great to know that we have an increased user base that’s helping us earn more money every month.

Upcoming Plans

Dave and I have a spreadsheet full of ideas for apps that we want to build, so we’re going to take this month to get started on one or two. I’ve also been contracted by my day job to help update an application outside of normal hours, so that should keep me busy. My plan is to put out one simple app this month, so I need to get cracking.

What are your plans for this month? What are you doing today to help generate revenue for the future? I’d love to hear what you’re working on, so leave a comment below.

My name is Andrew Kozlik and I am a mobile applications developer based in Orlando, FL. I’ve partnered with my friend Dave Younker to build fun and useful applications for people to use on their iPhones and Android devices. I handle all of the iOS development, so it’s mainly my voice that you’ll hear on these posts. Hopefully Younk will chime in once in a while and we can try to compare and contrast iPhone and Android development.

For our first post, we decided to share a few people and companies who inspire us to do what we do. Hopefully you can find something inspiring from these people as well.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income

If you’ve done anything in the online business world, you’ve heard of Pat Flynn. He was the first person who truly showed me that you can build a viable business on your own ideas and hard work, and it’s thanks to him that I stay motivated to build a business of my own. Though the majority of his income does not come from iPhone development, I’ve found his blog posts and podcast to be incredibly inspiring and motivational. If you are interested at all in building passive income streams, his blog is a must read.

Be sure to check out his article where he interviews Benny Hsu, the creator of the popular Photo 365 iPhone application.

Noel Llopis - Games from Within

Most of you probably know Noel Llopis since he’s been blogging on idevblogaday for quite a while. I found the idevblogaday community through a post of his about a year ago, and I’ve been a lurker ever since. Noel’s blog taught me to look outside the box for ways to make money through your iPhone apps. His post, Finding the Loose Change made me think about the potential of cross app marketing and iTunes affiliate links, and showed me that there are more opportunities to make money on the app store than just iAds and paid apps. He’s also written some very insightful articles about game design and the amount of work it actually takes to develop a high quality iPad game.

I’m sure you’re reading his blog already, but if not, be sure to check it out.

FIPLAB

While I’ve been following my previous two inspirations for quite a while, FIPLAB is a company that is new to me. They recently wrapped their 4 part bootstrapping series and I’ve been blown away by the amount of success these guys have had. Though we’re still in the beginning phases of launching our company, I’ll be looking to FIPLAB in the future for inspiration. I’d be stoked if we had a fraction of the success they have had, and hearing about how they build a $30K per month company helps push me to start building.

Well, there you have it! Three great websites chock full of inspiration and ideas to keep you moving on your iPhone development projects. Hopefully you find those sites as useful and motivational as I have. I’d love to hear what inspires you, so be sure to leave a comment with the people and companies who inspire you to do what you do.

Thanks for reading, and I’m really looking forward to becoming part of the idevblogaday community!

These posts will document our journey toward a sustainable passive income. We have just started building applications for profit, but given enough time we hope to add a few zeroes to the end of these numbers. We hope to find a way to support ourselves with our applications, and we hope we can inspire you to start giving it a go yourself!

What’s new with us

August was the first month that we began developing applications for both the Android and iPhone app markets. We were inspired by the stories found on Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income blog and we aim to find a fraction success that he has. We’re well on our way,  as we put together our website and launched our first five applications.

What went right

We got a few apps out the door
Dave was able to get a lot of applications cranked out this month. We decided to launch a few soundboards as our first applications, just so we could get a feel for the application submission process and gain a better understanding of how Admob integrates with our mobile apps. We sure are glad we started small since we both made mistakes, but we didn’t have to learn those mistakes after spending 6+ months working on an application. If you are getting started in this industry one of the best piece of advice I can give is to start small. You will make mistakes, and it’s better to learn those mistakes after spending a day to a week on an application rather than learning them after dedicating a lot of your time and energy on more complicated apps.

We learned how Admob works
We learned a lot about how Admob works from integration to payment. Dave and I were both new to integrating banner ads into our mobile apps and didn’t know what to expect as far as CTR and the amount of revenue we could generate. It was fun watching the clicks roll in and our revenue go up. Our most pleasant surprise concerning Admob was seeing them readjust our earnings for previous days. There were days we would log in to check our earnings and see that the previous days’ earnings were increased by a few dollars! Apparently Admob takes a day or two to come up with it’s final revenue numbers, so it was always nice to see that we earned more than we expected.

We made profit!
Finally, the best thing that went right this month was that we actually made some money. You’ll see the exact amount in the income portion of this post, but it was nice to make a decent amount of cash right out of the gate. We thought we would have to wait a few months before we saw any income, but thanks to one of Dave’s apps we were able to start making money right away.

What went wrong

The Apple approval process seems inconsistent
If you look at our products you’ll see that the majority of our applications are in the Android market. Unfortunately this is because we ran into some problems submitting applications to the iTunes store. Our initial applications were soundboards, but Apple is a bit vague in regards to what they consider an acceptable soundboard for the marketplace. Two of our applications were denied due to copyright issues despite the fact that similar applications already existed in the app store. I’m still working on getting one of the apps approved but this encouraged us to move past soundboards and start building more complicated applications.

We submitted the wrong OS version to the Apple app store
This is one of the key things we learned, and one of the top reasons I’m glad we didn’t spend months working on an application without any experience. After submitting an application to the App store your first few days of downloads are crucial to build popularity. If your app isn’t noticed by the masses within the first week of being in the store it’s doomed to be buried by all the new incoming apps. When I submitted our first application to the app store, I accidentally submitted a binary that required the user to have iOS version 4.3. This excluded the majority of potential users and caused our application to miss a lot of downloads. Unfortunately there are no second chances, and now our application is sitting at the bottom of the app store.

We over estimated how much we could do in a month
August was a very busy month for us, and we set a lot of difficult goals to hit. We wanted to have several applications launched in both the Android Market and Apple App Store, post several new articles to our blog, put together our website, and launch a template iPhone application on Code Canyon. The only goal we met was getting applications submitted to their respective market places. This month we’ve set more attainable goals, which should help keep us motivated and make us feel like we’re making progress in our business.

Most of our income was from one app
To be honest, this was a bit expected. This month in the app market really proved to us that the 80/20 rule is real. The 80/20 rule states that 80% of the work will be done by 20% of the workers, or 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your products. One of our applications was extremely popular with the Android crowd and was the source of the majority of our income. This just reaffirms our belief that you have to keep plugging away at developing applications and hope that one of them will hit. Nothing in this industry is guaranteed, and it’s important to continue to push on building products with the hope that something will be noticed.

Income Breakdown

I’m not sure how much information Admob will allow us to disclose, so I will only list the total amount of money we made with our applications.

Android Market

• Android Earnings: $74.93

Apple App Store

• iPhone Earnings: $4.46

Total Earnings: $79.39

Upcoming Plans

Well, that’s it for our first income report! Thank you for taking the time to read about our experience. I know these posts are long, but I want to make sure I keep everybody up to date on our progress and hopefully inspire you to get out there and start building apps of your own. Good luck to you if you decide to enter this market, and be sure to come back next month for our September report.

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