The other day,
Rovio released their popular Angry Birds game on the Android Market. It immediately got 1 million downloads on day one and has over 2 million by now. What’s more intriguing is that this $0.99 app on the iPhone is offered free on Android.
Rovio sold over 6.5 million copies of Angry Birds for iOS in August. At $0.99 and less the 30% cut of Apple, they netted about $4.5 million from the iTunes App Store. That doesn’t include the $4.99 app for the iPad.
After being downloaded 2 million times for Android, Rovio made a total of $0. The full version of Angry Birds for Android is ad-supported. That remains to be seen how much they will eventually make out of it.
For developers, it looks like the iOS makes for a better environment to make money from apps compared to Android. Rovio could have also sold it at $0.99 Android Market but they opted not to. A paid app is certainly much better than an ad-supported app from a developer’s perspective.
Here’s a question — if you’re an App Developer, would you rather make your apps free but ad-supported or go straight for a paid app?