On the Android developer home page refer to Figure 8-14, click the Upload Application button.

207

Chapter 8: Publishing Your App to the Android Market

Figure 8-18: The released application in the Android Market. Watching the Installs Soar You’ve finally published your first application. Now it’s time to watch the mil- lions start rolling in, right? Well, kind of. You might be an independent devel- oper who’s releasing the next best first-person shooter game, or you might be a corporate developer who’s pushing out your company’s Android applica- tion. Regardless, you need to be aware of the end-user experience on various devices. You have various ways of identifying how your application is doing: 208 Part II: Building and Publishing Your First Android Application ✓ Five-star rating system: The higher average rating you have, the better. ✓ Comments: Read them People take the time to leave them, so provide them the courtesy of reading them. You’d be surprised at the great ideas that people provide to you for free. Most of the time, I’ve found if I imple- ment the most commonly requested feature, users get excited about it and come back and update their comments with a much more positive boost in rating. ✓ Error reports: Users that were gracious enough to submit error reports want to let you know that the app experienced a run-time exception for an unknown reason. Open these reports, look at the error, review the stack trace, and try to fix the error. An app that gets a lot of force close errors receives a lot of really bad reviews, really quick. Stack traces are available only for devices that are running Android 2.2 and above. ✓ Installs versus active installs: While this isn’t the best metric for iden- tifying user satisfaction, it is an unscientific way to determine whether users who install your app tend to keep it on their phone. If users are keeping your app, they must like it ✓ Direct e-mails: Users will return to the Android Market to find your e-mail address andor Web site address. They will e-mail you to ask questions about features and send comments to you about their user experience. They may also send you ideas about how to improve your app, or they may ask you to create another app that does something they cannot find on the Market. People love to be part of something. I’ve found if I personally reply within 24 hours less than 4 hours is really what I aim for, users become real happy with the response time. While this is difficult to sustain if your app has a million active users, it does make users very happy to know that they can get a hold of you if they run into an issue with your app that they love so much. Keeping in touch with your user base is a large task itself, but doing so can reap rewards of dedicated, happy customers who will refer their friends and family to use your application.