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!
