The application distribution methods you choose to employ depend on your goals and target users. Some questions you should ask yourself are
- Is your application ready for prime time or are you considering a beta period to iron out the kinks?
- Are you trying to reach the broadest audience, or have you developed a vertical market application? Determine who your users are, which devices they are using, and their preferred methods for seeking out and downloading applications.
- How will you price your application? Is it freeware or shareware? Are the payment models (single payment versus subscription model versus ad-driven revenue) you require available on the distribution mechanisms you want to leverage?
- Where do you plan to distribute? Verify that any application markets you plan to use are capable of distributing within those countries or regions.
- Are you willing to share a portion of your profits? Distribution mechanisms such as the Android Market take a percentage of each sale in exchange for hosting your application for distribution and collecting application revenue on your behalf.
- Do you require complete control over the distribution process or are you willing to work within the boundaries and requirements imposed by third-party market places?
- This might require compliance with further license agreements and terms.
- If you plan to distribute yourself, how will you do so? You might need to develop more services to manage users, deploy applications and collect payments. If so, how will you protect user data? What trade laws must you comply with?
- Have you considered creating a free trial version of your application? If the distribution system under consideration has a return policy, consider the ramifications. You need to ensure that your application has safeguards to minimize the number of users that buy your app, use it, and return it for a full refund. For example, a game might include safeguards such as a free trial version and a full-scale version with more game levels than could possibly be completed within the refundable time period.
Now let’s look at the steps you need to take to package and publish your application.