After helping my friend spread the word of his 2 android apps: CompareFirst and PriceText, I realised that it is really hard to do free advertisement, and gain users and downloads due to the lack of reach. How to do free advertisement for free? Easiest ways are through word of mouth to friends to help you to download and try the apps or through social media like Facebook. However, there are flaws to these methods. It is highly dependent on the number of friends that you have and how many of those friends of yours are close enough to you to bother helping you. These apps are not games where it can go viral easily but more of online shopping. In addition, if you look around you, you will find out that in Singapore, many people are using IPhone and it is not possible to ask them to download android apps. (Most of my friends use iPhones)
I have researched online about free ways to market apps but it seems like most are too time consuming or too difficult if you have no skills. Ways to market include making videos or websites to promote your app, write to popular app reviewers or to influencers to help. However, it is not the skills that we have and not quite possible to do unless we get someone to do for free, it will incur costs.
Hence, this just shows that we shouldn't be too blinded by success stories of apps that garner a lot of downloads and users, but should work hard on a good app that is marketable to apply to those influencers and reviewers. The dream of working from home or working for a while and let the app generate money for you is a far away dream and will take a lot of effort and luck to be successful. This also tells me that if in the future, I would like to jump ship to learn coding and make apps for fun, it should just be a hobby or a side job where I will still have a permanent job to keep myself alive.
