Google has been running a special event on the Android Market this month to celebrate 10 billion downloads, by offering 10 of their best selling apps or games for 10¢ each day for 10 days. That’s 100 really cheap quality apps and games in theory, but they’ve repeated a couple of their offerings.

Setting the price at 10¢ is a strange mentality. The difference betweeen $1 and 10¢ isn’t very much (and it’s certainly not a big deal), but people seem much more willing to buy at 10¢ (maybe because it’s on sale?). Secondly, I’ve noticed myself that there is a difference between this sale and Amazon’s Free App Of The Day. I’ve seen the same app/game on both, but had declined to download it from Amazon; yet I feel an urge to buy it for 10¢ on this Google sale. That’s a bit backwards isn’t it!

There have been some good deals, I’ve bought several things:

• Reckless Racing – the video looked like it might be fun
• ADWLauncher EX – I always use the Open Source version, but now I have the premium version
• Pano – Seems like a good tool to create panoramas, and I bought it before learning that this feature will be built into ICS
• Great Little Big War Game – the video again looked cute and fun
• Guns’n’Glory – a tower defense game with a wild west theme
• Zenonia – a well-known RPG with a number of sequels now
• Camera Zoom FX – Looks like a good replacement for the stock camera app (i.e., not for effects-based pictures)
• Majesty: Fantasy Kingdom Sim – You indirectly control heros in your kingdom, so it sounds interesting

Some that I would have bought except I already have them:

• Age of Zombies – I got this free from Amazon, and it’s a great game!
• Game Dev Story – Again, a great game which I paid $2.50 for.
• Paper Camera – Already paid $0.00 for this at the Amazon store, and it’s neat effects that I prefer over other filter-based camera apps

So I’m out a total of $0.80, although some I do regret buying (even for a dime)

The more interesting thing is perhaps the ones I thought about but didn’t buy (yes, even for 10¢), such as:

• The EA games (Tetris, SimCity Deluxe, The Sims 3, NFS Shift) – they all seem to only really work if you have a tablet, and it seems backwards to buy a $300+ tablet to play 10¢ games…
• SoundHound ∞ or Shazam Encore – these apps are cool but I’ve had them installed before and didn’t really use that much
• Swiftkey X and SlideIT keyboards – I find the Gingerbread keyboard sufficient
• The several games that were “on sale” but had < 1000 (some even less than 100!) downloads early in the morning (when I checked). I guess I approached the sale as a "greatest hits" type sale, rather than a app/game/publisher marketing campaign.
• The multiple repeats – I’m not going to buy it just because it appears a couple of times! It sounds like it would be quite easy to find 100 apps or games to put on sale, so why repeat some of them?

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, google