Is anybody doing well from the new merchant system?

wwarby 1 month ago

Hi all,

I have one app in the store - it's popular, but I've never bothered to make another and I rarely update my app because I find the SDK so painful to work with. I get occasional donations but nowhere near enough to motivate me to pay any real attention to this side project. I'm pleased to see Garmin has at long last provided a first party merchant system, but with the first $100 per year going to Garmin, I suspect the market for paid apps on a Garmin watch may be so niche that there's not much opportunity there. I would be tempted to do a ground up redesign of my popular app and potentially make others, just trying to gauge whether I might make any money if I did so on a commercial basis rather than donationware. Would love yo hear from anyone who has actually given it a go and what kind of conversion rates you're seeing compared to people who previously downloaded your apps for free.

- William

0 flocsy🤠 1 month ago

I am in the same position, but the answer to the conversion rate I guess is 100% (unless you count a 0 times downloaded app as 0 to prevent division by zero :) because it's payment before download as far as I understand, and there's no way to pay in-app for some premium feature. In theory a dev would be able to compare the free version of the app with the paid app and see some percentage, but even that is impossible now, since we only see 10+, 100+, etc...

0 wwarby 1 month ago in reply to flocsy🤠

Yeah. I guess by conversion rate I mean a comparison in download numbers before and after switching from free to monetised. I don’t think I would start charging for an app that I’ve always made available for free, that seems wrong to me, but I might rewrite it with new features. My gut tells me though that the market opportunity for paid apps on Garmin is small.

0 flocsy🤠 1 month ago in reply to wwarby

I agree, but there's only 1 problem: my app had 198552 downloads on 2024-08-06 and 100k+ ever since...

0 wwarby 1 month ago in reply to flocsy🤠

Yeah that’s annoying me too. It’s nonsense like this that made me lose interest in working with the Garmin platform.

0 Gary_Naylor 7 days ago

I have to say I am dissapoined that this topic does not have more conversation, and I am struggling to think that the Garmin Merchant system is being used much. I second thecomments that the new download figures format is utterly useless whithout the actual figures being availabkle at least to developers.

I am keen to try the Merchant system but there is very little information available. I was expecting to see a healthy and daily active discussion here and am concerned enough to see this as alarm bell.

0 flocsy🤠 7 days ago in reply to Gary_Naylor

Yeah, I have no knowledge about the merchant system. The $100/y sounds a rip-off to me, no way it'll ever return the investment. But I would be also happy to know if those who sell apps via the Garmin Pay do see more detailed stats.

0 wwarby 7 days ago in reply to Gary_Naylor

Yeah, I’m not in a rush to sink any effort into this stuff any time soon. It’s too much of a faff to work with so many different watch models and ensure everything works on all of them, and the language/sdk/tooling all leave a lot to be desired. There’s less competition than the Apple App Store but there’s far less market opportunity. If Garmin wants this concept to take off, they need to remove barriers to entry for small developers.

0 jim_m_58 7 days ago in reply to Gary_Naylor

I don't use this, but I expect a great deal depends on the developer. For a new developer with only a couple apps, they will be harder to find, and a low download and review count may make people hesitant to spend money on it.

But for an established developer with a history and a number of apps with high ratings and download numbers (even if they are free), it likely goes much better.

So developer A might not be doing that great, while developer B could be doing OK to good.

0 Dan 7 days ago

It's the same thing , i don't have bigger sales