Google “Not Happy” With Android App Purchase Rate

The Android Market is certainly a little rougher around the edges than Apple’s store. It seems harder to find the decent apps and Google’s more hands-off approach seems to let in a lot more crap than on the App Store.

App purchases are also much higher on iOS, something which concerns app and game developers.

To remedy this, Google’s Android product manager Eric Chu has said that they are “not happy” with the amount of people not buying apps on its store and has told developers the the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco to “stay tuned” to Android’s 2011 roadmap.

According to Forbes, Chu said that they will be implementing various features to promote further revenue for devs.

An in-app purchase system will debut this quarter, helping developers employ micro-transactions and add-on sales to their apps. On the iPhone (which got the functionality last year) this means extra levels or items in games. Of course it also means that games can simply be portals to endless micro-transactions (cough, FarmVille) and not full games.

Chu also highlighted the issue of discoverability, noting that there’s a team dedicated to rooting out apps that violate the store’s terms of service (Kongregate fell foul of that, we can assume). Google will also be working to improve the ranking algorithm to make it easier to find the best apps.

He also touched upon carrier billing, where users are charged for purchases on their monthly phone bills; using users’ address books to make apps more social; and mentioned HTML5 in app production, although he didn’t elaborate any more on the last two points.

It’s worth remembering that Google has already canned the 24-hour grace period on apps, replacing it with just 15 minutes. That was a move specifically aimed at developers. Some, especially game devs, had complained that users were simply playing the entire game in 24 hours and then getting a refund.

But how bad is the purchase rate problem? While the current figures are unknown, estimates by AdMob in July 2009 (before they were bought by Google) showed a 19% rate on Android with a much higher 50% on the iPhone. Of course, these figures aren’t applicable to the current situation but it gives you an idea of the problem.

All of Chu’s gesturing shows how valuable developers are to Google (too any platform, in fact) so expect them to continue this courting of devs. For them to be directly addressing the problem also shows the potential problem of purchase rates on Android. While us users may have to start buying apps each micro-transaction at a time as Google bring in new measures, it might actually end in us getting better apps overall.

via: Engadget