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Boost donations - Monetization

Fsallstrom
over 1 year ago

Hi, I am a hobby developer and have built and published a few apps here in the app store. I have some 40k downloads so only small volumes. I wanted to ask here in the community what you do to boost donations for your apps.

I don't think I will ever  make any big money out of this and that is not why I do it, but I have some costs related to hosting backend services in the cloud for my apps, and also wanted to fund a few devices so I don't have to borrow devices from friends when I need to test on a specific target. 

Currently I have a donate link in app store to my PayPal account (If you like it - sponsor it, kind of thing). I get a small donation every once in a while and its always nice to get the apprciation, but lately the donations have become a lot less, and I wanted to explore if there are other things I could try to boost donations. I don't want to force users into paying, for a coupe of reasons: 1) I dont control the source of the data I use for my apps, they are fetched from an external service that can be shut down without notice, and 2) I started to develop these apps to help people, not to make a lot of money out of it. 

Is there anything else I could do to get more users to donate a little something? I was thinking to add a semi-annoying splash screen that would be disabled if the user makes a donation. That would mean some additional dev work for me so need to be sure it will be worth the effort. 

Is there anything else i should consider? Again, just looking to get a few more users to make a (small) donation if they like the app, I don't want to force people to pay.  

Thanks!

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to dpawlyk

    When I write an app, I write it because it's something I want.  I don't do it to make a dime,  Once it's ready, I'll publish it, and if I get a donation, that's cool, but not a driving force.  I have a number of "beta apps" in the store that only I can download, but need to use app settings or fitcontrib.

    With my apps, I seem to get donations based on "uniqueness"  If there's other apps that do close to the same thing, lower (or no) donations. If I do something unique, higher donations.  And in neither case do the number of downloads play that big a part.  I get very few with one of my apps with 500,000 downloads, and more with some of my apps with 100,000 downloads.

    That said, the paypal account where I get donations has gotten over $1000US at times

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to jim_m_58
    jim_m_58 said:
    When I write an app, I write it because it's something I want. 

    This, of course, is fine. 

    If one cares about money, make a paid app. Don’t worry about donations. One can always make it free later. 

    It would be nice if Garmin built a payment option in their own store. 

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Fsallstrom

    6 apps and a combined 2.5k downloads won't get many donation.  You got to figure that maybe half the people that download something may just look at it/try it for a few minutes and then move on.  There really aren't that many potential donors.

    Something else which may help (I see it for a few posters here..) is hover over the posters name or avatar and you'll see something like this:

    You can define what's shown, and in this case I have a link to my apps in the store, so it's easy for someone to find.

  • 0 26 days ago in reply to jim_m_58

    hello, it seems to me that now it is a bit different. Am I now forced to use the Garmin IQ Monetization System? Or i can go on using the paypal for donation? Actualy i'm stuck with most of the app not visible in certain region (europe too!!!) because the regional limit and the mysterious form poped up some days ago. I filled up the form and still waiting for approval. Any chance to know if i am doing right? 

  • 0 26 days ago in reply to Drake1969

    you can use any monetization that you prefer