In February 2009, Arron La’s $0.99 Advanced Task Manager was one of the first paid apps on Android, allowing T-Mobile G1 users to do what was then a novel thing — close applications. (We immediately bought a copy.) Today, the app is all but obsolete, its functionality baked right into Android’s core, but Arron’s still making thousands of dollars a month. Why do we bring this up? Because nine months after Arron released the pay-first version, he unleashed an ad-supported variant as well… and since that day, each has contributed about the same amount ($30,000) of money. It’s not exactly an object lesson in what’s possible on the 50,000-application-strong Android Market, as this gentleman obviously had quite the head start, but it does show that when it comes time to monetize your best-thing-since-sliced-bread app, there’s more than one option — ads can be an equally good revenue source.
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