It’s been six months since the Ausdroid app was released onto the Play Store, and in that time it’s use has steadily grown to a current installed user-base of around 900 users; this is great!
We’ve had feedback from you over the last few months, and while the next version of the app hasn’t been a significant priority against others that we’ve been tackling, one piece of feedback has been fairly steady since the app was released — you’ve told us we should remove the ads.
The Ausdroid team considered this carefully; our advertising revenue is virtually all we get, and the ability to monetise our content via our app was (initially) considered a key feature. However, unlike AdSense for web platforms, ad revenue from mobile apps is virtually non-existent unless your app is stupendously popular. In the case of the Ausdroid app, while it’s popular by our measure — and well rated, too — it’s not a significant generator of ad revenue. Typically, the app has generated no more than $10 per month, and we’d prefer to forego that revenue and deliver a better experience for our users.
To that end, we’ve decided to remove ads from our app, effective immediately. We’ve done this without making changes on the front-end; you won’t need to install an updated version of the app. If you haven’t already, you should notice the ads gone when you next load the app. We’ve done this by disabling the ad-units in AdMob, and in the next version of the app (which should be released in the next month or so) the code for ads will be completely removed, resulting in a slightly smaller app footprint as well.
We’d love to be able to remove ads from Ausdroid’s website as well, but sadly those actually do pay the bills, and if we got rid of those, we’d be unable to survive. Fortunately, the ads on the website are significantly less intrusive than they were on the mobile app, and we do our best to make sure they don’t get in the way.
We’ve also heard your feedback about the Ausdroid Newsletter popup, and that will be reviewed, too.
Last, but not least, we’re gearing up for a busy week here — Google IO 2015 is this week, and our coverage has already begun. Daniel is in San Francisco champing at the bit, and ready to unleash our live coverage starting late Thursday night local time, and into the weekend as the announcements roll in throughout the two day conference.
Stay with us, and we’ll bring you the best coverage we can in the next few days, including a few surprises along the way!
