I think I'm a fairly well-versed Android user -- there are now five devices in regular use in my house, and I've been using it since the original Droid came out. All except one is rooted, and most are running unofficial ROMs.
I've only heard of two of the alternative markets: GetJar and Amazon. I have them both installed on one device, largely to see if anything interesting comes along. So far, my opinion is that they are smaller and even less well laid out than Google Play.
I suspect doing an alternative market right -- with good search and categorization, suggestions made on some basis other than "current promotion", friendly to developers -- could be a lucrative proposition. I'm not seeing that now from any current vendor.
What's going on with the blog post? Completely unreadable from my device, every time I zoom in that annoying black bar on the left grows to epic proportions and covers most of the content!
I'm sorry about that. The theme is not optimized for mobile devices. At least now I know I have to push mobile theme for the blog higher on my todo list.
A piece of (semi off-topic) advice for those indie developers that want to publish their apps in alternative Android markets: get a VA to do it for you.
It's a great way to get started into outsourcing, given that the task is so straightforward. We're currently having 6 of our applications published into 10 alternative Android markets at a very competitive rate by a freelancer we've contacted through oDesk.
This is an incredibly well written article. Thank you for contributing it. Even though I'm an iOS developer exclusively, I like seeing other perspectives as well. As a side note, I apologize for not writing this on your site, but I don't like to mix my Internet comments with Facebook.
More than half of the total downloads/day of my six Android Apps are from alternative Android markets. If you remove one of my applications from consideration, almost 80% are from alternative stores. (~400k downloads in the past year with most of my apps released last fall)
The distribution isn't consistent across Market stores. My most popular application on the Play store is my least popular application on Slide Me (yet still the most popular app of its type there). Slide Me is really not a productivity store.
Slide Me is the goto store for decent apps that have been banned but are still good apps (i.e. GameBoy Emulators). Slide Me also featured two of my apps with "above the fold" exposure. That could not happen on the Play Store. Also the Slide Me submission process is relatively easy and quick.
One of my apps is really only for young children, and it gets horrible reviews on the Amazon App Store by what appears to be 13 year olds. Yet they keep downloading it and downloads exceed what I get on the Play Store. To top it off they also pay $ for the ad-free version! The Amazon submission process is slow but not all that painful if you're patient. Also stagger deployment of your latest APK and do the Amazon app store last. After you know for sure that there are no last minute FUBAR bugs feel safe to submit the APK.
I've also found my apps stripped on Chinese App stores with the the certificate stripped off. One of them has more pirate downloads than all legit Android market stores combined. Also if you want to keep your ad revenue, don't place the advertising ID in the manifest file. Embed it in your code in a non-obvious way. You won't make as much because of the regions requesting ads but this turns at least turns piracy into something positive.
Android Pit and AppBrain were pretty good alternative app stores, but the Play Store has caught up to them in terms of functionality.
The AppsLib store is pretty sad as well. (appslib.com) Previously it wasn't that bad. But since [KC]or?by has jumped to GetJar, the # of downloads has stagnated.
GetJar requires you to be vigilant. The site can be a bit buggy and the submission process was a tad more painful than the Play Store. Approval took forever as well and I ended up having some of my apps duplicated on the store. Also please note that GetJar has been actively improving.
There are also carrier based stores that are so incredibly painful to use that they may give you an aneurysm. You have to submit your app on a per device basis. The nice thing about that is some of the carriers will send you a video clip of a bug on a device. (This was very helpful when I had no way to know that a device 'broke' implementation of the accelerometer. Input was off by 90 degrees in spite of checking default orientation and current rotation.)
I'm an iOS developer and as much trouble as iTunesConnect is to deal with, that sounds terrible.
How do you get any work done, ever? Deciding on which app stores to deal with and then having to learn all of their idiosyncrasies based on trial-and-error? Jesus.
I've only heard of two of the alternative markets: GetJar and Amazon. I have them both installed on one device, largely to see if anything interesting comes along. So far, my opinion is that they are smaller and even less well laid out than Google Play.
I suspect doing an alternative market right -- with good search and categorization, suggestions made on some basis other than "current promotion", friendly to developers -- could be a lucrative proposition. I'm not seeing that now from any current vendor.