GUIDE The ultimate guide to making money with Android apps in 2021. No coding required.

Unless you're an app developer, you probably never considered building a mobile app for profit. We've been taught that profitable mobile apps can only be built by startups backed by big investors. And in some rare cases, by lucky independent app developers who got the right idea at the right time.

Although most of that is true, what we don't hear about is the millions of small, yet useful apps that make a consistent recurring income ranging from $100 up to $5000 per month. We don't hear about these apps because they're not original and thus not newsworthy.

But these apps are still useful. More importantly, they are profitable. You may even have some on your phone right now. Like wallpaper apps, educational apps with tips on a specific topic, or small fun games with limited features.

Did I mention that most these apps have been built without writing a single line of code?

This (long) post will go through everything you need to build, monetize, publish and grow similar apps to a point where they are bringing a consistent and recurring income.

When you learn to do that once, you can do it a hundred more times, simply rinse and repeat.

Contents

• Picking the right niche for your first app.
• Picking the right tool for the job.
• Creating & publishing your app.
• Marketing your app and growing your userbase.

Picking the right niche for your first app

You wouldn't believe how much competition there is on the play store (The place where all android apps get published). Sure, you can say the same thing about pretty much any online marketplace. But the play store is a different beast. Every day, literally thousands of apps are published and each one is trying to dominate their niche.

Which is why this part is so important, if you want to dominate a niche, you need to pick the right one.

Niche vs Micro Niche

Let's start with a quick definition of what a niche is :

A niche is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.

For example, "Wallpaper apps" is a popular niche on the play store, getting millions of downloads every day.

Unfortunately, any broad niche like "Wallpaper apps" is going to be impossible to dominate at this point. Simply due to the high number of competing apps, some with huge marketing budgets.

Instead, let's look at micro niches : More specific niches within broad niches.

Think of the broad "Wallpaper apps" niche as a huge pie, you can cut it into a million different pieces, where each piece is micro niche.

Here are a few examples : Abstract wallpaper apps, Animal wallpaper apps, Car wallpaper apps...

You get the idea.

You can even go deeper and find smaller niches within micro niches, like the "Dog wallpaper apps" within the "Animal wallpaper apps" niche.

The 3 criteria of a profitable niche

Before we start doing research for our niche, let's identify the 3 required criteria for a niche to be profitable.

Criteria #1 : Popularity

The question we're trying to answer here is : Are people looking for apps within this niche ?

A simple way to do that is using the play store auto-complete search and simply writing the first letters of your niche. If the auto-complete search displays multiple results related to your niche, it's a popular niche.

The more results suggested, the more popular your selected niche is.

Criteria #2 : Profitability

You can determine if other people are already making money in the niche by looking at the number of downloads of the top 3 Apps from the search results of your niche.

If the average number of installs for the top apps is above 50.000 - 100.000, your niche is profitable.

The more downloads the top apps have, the more profitable your niche is..

Criteria #3 : Competition

Again, the most straightforward way to determine the level of competition for your niche is to search for it on the play store.

If you get dozens of pages of results all specifically targeting the main keyword of your niche. It's probably a saturated niche, and you'll struggle getting your first downloads..

Sometimes however, you may find a lot of results but none of the apps actually provide any real value, or a lot of the search results are targeting a broader niche which also contains your keyword.

In any of these cases, you can have a pretty good chance at getting your app to the top for your micro niche.

Brainstorming profitable niches

Now that you know how to identify a profitable niche, take a pen and paper and start brainstorming ideas.

We strongly suggest starting with your interests as a broad niche, and then breaking each one down into smaller micro niches.

Don't be afraid to go to deep in your brainstorm, the more ideas you get, the higher your chances of finding a profitable & untapped niche.

Once your list is ready, simply go to the play store and start searching for every keyword on your and taking notes of the 3 selection criteria (Popularity, Profitability, Competition).

Picking the right tool for your first app

In 2021, there are dozens of app builders on the market.

However, they pretty much all target brands and companies looking to build an app for their company. Because of this, they do not offer the right features for our use case, and are usually expensive.

If you're trying to build fun & useful small apps very fast, there are only a handful of no-code app builder that can do the job.

We've tried the best and compared all of them based on the most important criteria for our use case :

Although we are biased, we strongly suggest using Octodroid, the biggest reason is we do not share your revenue, whether you're making $10/day or $1000/day. we're also priced realistically for people just starting out.

Creating and publishing your app

The overall process of creating and publishing looks like this :

• Create a new app via the tool you've chosen in the previous step.

• Add content to your app. (If you're making a wallpaper app, your content would be wallpaper images)

• Connect your advertisements. (A simple copy and paste)

• Download your app.

• Publish it on the play store.

Now each step is going to be done differently depending on which tool you've chosen, and they're all going to have tutorials for each step, so we will not get into that.

The step where you publish your app to the play store should also be explained in the app builder itself, but if it isn't there are a lot of youtube videos on how to do that.

If you picked Octodroid, check out our getting started guides, we have dedicated step-by-step guides for every step of the process.

Marketing your app and growing your userbase

For the types of apps we're building, and considering the very low effort that goes into producing them, you should not spend a dime on your marketing, at least not before your app actually starts making money.

If you've selected the right niche with enough popularity and low competition, and included the keywords for your niche in your play store listing title and description, you should start getting downloads organically from google play's search. Then, if your content is good, you should get a few reviews from those early downloads, which will make google play's algorithm put your app on the top rows of the search results, which should bring more downloads, more reviews, and better rankings.

That is why, picking the right niches is essential.

But, if you want to give your app a little boost at the beginning, or grow it faster after you get your first 1000 downloads, here are a few ways you can do that :

Share your on app reddit & relevant forums

Simply find out where your targets hang out online, specifically forums or online niche communities like Reddit's subs, and share your app, simple yet very effective.

Share your app on relevant facebook groups

There are at least 10 facebook pages or groups for any niche or audience you can think of. Search facebook for relevant keywords and share your app on any related groups and pages you may find.

Create social pages for your audience

Instead of creating a social page for each of your apps, a good idea would be to create a social profile for each of your target audiences. Example : Let's say you have a recipes app, a Kids memory game, and a recipes app. Your audience would be : Stay at Home Moms - they love recipes, cooking, and usually have kids!

• In this case, it makes sense to create social profiles for "Apps for Stay at home moms", this will allow you get more traffic for all of your existing apps and any future apps you end up creating for this particular audience.
• It will also help you get that initial surge of traffic when you publish a new app later on, since you'll already have stay at home moms on your facebook page waiting to download it.

Eventually, you'll get to a point where you have multiple apps bringing in revenue, and you can allocate some of that revenue to marketing your new apps via paid advertising.

Conclusion

To conclude, the process of making money with android apps is pretty straightforward, all you have to do is get started.

With Octodroid, you can get started for free and start building your app empire right away!

Click here to join us.