How to Price Your Android or iPhone App

One of the biggest challenges you’ll face in releasing an app is determining its price. We highly recommend taking some time to figure out the realistic price for your app. Take a look at how similar apps are priced to get the picture of a price range in your category. Thoroughly compare your app to the competing ones to see what features they have in common and the advantages of your app over all the others.

Basically, you can opt for two pricing strategies: either you want to be the low-price leader that offers great features at the lowest price or a premium-priced app that provides more features at a higher price, catering to a particular audience.

Both of these strategies work fine, but you have to make sure the quality of your app is really high. Whichever approach you take, feel free to point out your advantages in your apps description.

An interesting fact though is that by offering a discount on your app you can potentially double your sales. Clearly, this requires very thought-out calculations – the amount of the discount must be sufficient to attract enough buyers, otherwise you might end up like 40% of developers that lose their revenue in the sales period.

It’s easy to determine which categories of paid apps are the most competitive and, therefore, the most profitable – just look at the number of apps available in each category. When it comes to numbers, Personalization, Entertainment, Tools, Books and References and Lifestyle are the Top 5 most popular paid categories, getting noticed in which should be really hard for a beginner. But let’s not confuse the app’s popularity and income potential.

Surprisingly, the category that generates the largest profit is Weather. The reason is that, first of all, the number of apps in this category is not that big, hence the less intense competition, and second of all, virtually every smartphone users has a weather application installed on his device. Another profitable category is Business – clearly, the number of downloads is smaller, but the average price of these apps is almost three times as high as that of any other category, and let’s face it, business people are willing to pay.

Let’s figure out what makes some Android apps so successful.

For example, take Akinator the Genie – one of the most popular entertainment apps that has over 100,000 downloads within the last 30 days. There are several factors that make it so appealing to the users: unique concept, great design, relatively low price, availability in several languages.

Or Beautiful Widgets – a personalization app that was downloaded over a million times within the last month! It contains a set of widgets like a clock, weather informer, etc. and such huge demand can be explained by its multifunctionality, usefulness and smooth performance at a low price.

When it comes to establishing prices for paid apps, developers tend to go different ways to ensure maximum profitability. Stats show that an average Android app costs a lot more than an iOS app, however the price isn’t everything. In case of iOS apps, users spend much more inside the game, purchasing in-app content, while this approach is rarely used in the Android apps.