It has been five years since Charango Master was published in play store. I had started playing Charango a year before and had gotten tired of carrying around a book of chords every time I had to play somewhere. After unsuccessfully looking for an app to replace my book, I decided to develop my own app. With very little knowledge in OOP, I finished the app in a month. Then I spent a month creating the impressive database of over 2000 chords. Since then, I have created a new app every year, venturing into different niches and testing different technologies.
During those five years, I have gone from a novice developer to an experienced developer. My apps have helped me in several ways, including getting my current job. But all personal development aside, how have the apps performed in the last 5 years? Here are 5 charts that can answer that question:
Charango Master leads the downloads, but I predict that the Santa Biblia apps will eventually surpass it. The games (Don’t feed the duck & Century) are just a very small percentage of downloads. All income is from ads. Charango Master contains two ad banners in the two most used screens (main menu and chords screen). Santa Biblia has an ad banner in the settings menu, which is not used that often. Don’t feed the duck has a full screen ad after 2 minutes of play after the game over screen. Century has an ad banner in the main menu. Santa Biblia 2 has no monetization. I have tried to make the ads as non intrusive as possible. This reduces the income, but my priority is making apps that I can and want to use myself. Expenses come from ads for the apps. Most of it has been spent on publicity for Santa Biblia. It was quickly clear that organic growth usually has much higher retention rate than purchased growth. Since then I have kept the investment in ads to a minimum.The most important metric: Active users. This metric has only been available since 2016. My prediction is that Charango Master has reached its peak amount of users. Santa Biblia 2 has had a slight and constant natural increase which will probably continue. I get a lot of positive feedback from users due to the fact that it has no monetization. Santa Biblia has seen a decline since I reduced the investment in ads for it. I believe it is stabilizing now. The app market is pretty saturated in that area and that app has no significant differentiators from hundreds of other apps. The recently released games ( Don’t feed the duck & Century ) have not gotten much traction yet, but I predict this will change in 2020.Stacked version of the previous chart. Overall there is a slow but steady increase in active users
Can’t wait and see how things will develop in 2020. From the development side, the plan for this year is at least one update per app. The major project is a complete rewrite of Charango Master, though that will probably not be ready in 2020.
