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After reading an interesting piece of market research around the general idea and reasons for building mobile applications, everyone always pointed out the fact that they wanted to make money off their applications, so I thought I would make an observation about it.

Firstly, money is needed. We need it to pay the bills, we need it survive, to remain clothed and to have a roof over our heads. There is definitely a very real need for money, I am not denying this. However if we look at successful online software products, very few of them first set out to make money. Their first goal was to attract a user base.

At the recent G|South Africa (Google South Africa) days, the key note speaker went a little into the methods that Google uses when building applications. He pointed out that the when presenting an idea, the last thing Google wants to hear is how you going to make money off it. The first thing they tell you to do is to get the users!

Why is this important? Well it is pretty simple really. If you don’t have people using your application, you won’t ever make money off it. If people cannot use the application without risk they won’t try it. Especially at the rate that applications are being released and the substandard quality of the product. I am incline to believe that the Apple App store is doing better just by virtue of the fact that people know they have quiet a rigorous quality assurance procedure.

So my advice to you is pretty much the same as Google’s. Build the application first. Release it for free, get the user base, then and only then try to figure out how to make money off it.

Just another point on the inability to monetize applications in South Africa through the Android Market. South Africa has some of the nastiest monetary policies in the world. Look how long it took us to get PayPal. So it is not because Google is not interested in South Africa, it is just incredible difficult to establish the mechanisms in South Africa.

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