For awhile now, Makani Gadzair has been a steady member on our forums posting some really great stuff. Makani is the  developer of Red Card Rampage HD and a sponsor of Badaforums. The articles he writes are from a developers point of view who works with Android and iOS as well as the Bada platform. He writes a very good article so check it out below and give him props in his forum discussion!

10 REASONS WHY IS GOOGLE IN DANGER OF LOSING APP REVENUE

I released my game, Red Card Rampage, on the Android Market around 6 weeks ago.  Sales have been abysmal on Android, to say the least. It has been #1 on GameSpot for a while, and had some nice reviews such as this and been posted on pretty much every major English-language android forum. Priced at only £0.99, I found that even Samsungs’ tiny new Bada marketplace did four times as many sales in its 2 weeks so far than the game did on Android in those 6 weeks (net sales on Android; i.e., after returns with a rate of almost 50%; more on why later). On iPhone we got more in the first day of sales than the entire total number of downloads on Android so far (i.e., not taking into account returns even! Average rating on iTunes for 53 ratings is almost 5). Out of the 17 ratings on the Android Marketplace, I have an average of 4.7 (including 1 guy that gave it a 1 for some reason).

With Android sales exceeding iPhone, it begs the question, what the hell went wrong?

Well, I happen to have several answers:

1. We published the game in the UK. Google forces us to therefore sell the game in pounds to the world. Unfortunately, according to the last monthly report by admobs of May 2010 before they unfortunately got bought over by Google, 66% of all Android users are in the US. Well guess what? US customers cannot buy apps being sold in a foreign currency through their carrier. I know this first hand because a friend of mine refused to buy my game, because he could not buy the game through his US carrier (T-Mobile) on his Samsung Vibrant. He told me he did not trust using his credit card on his Android. Which brings me to my next point.