Selling one app in two parts, this is Google's new strategy

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For mobile software developers, software pricing is a difficult problem. If the price is too high, no one will buy it, and if the price is too low, it will affect their income. Every developer hopes to find the "golden price" that maximizes their income.

According to a recent report by the US technology news website The Information, Google (Weibo) is about to make a relaxation to the Play software store, called "A/B sales", which will allow developers to package a software into different "identities" and set different prices to observe consumers' purchasing reactions.

At the end of May, Google will hold the Google I/O Global Developer Conference in San Francisco, where it will announce a variety of new measures for developers in the Play Store. The above-mentioned A/B sales is just one of them.

It is reported that after submitting a software, developers can create introduction pages with different contents for the same software, and create icons with different colors or appearances for the software. Most importantly, the same software can be marked with different prices, such as US$1.99 or US$2.99.

The purpose of this policy is to help developers conduct trial sales and observe consumer reactions. For example, on the introduction page of a software, developers can see what effect will be achieved if a video is added to the software to promote downloads.

It should be pointed out that this is only a tentative sales phase after the software is launched. The developer will gradually adopt a certain icon, introduction page and software pricing based on the changes in download volume.

Compared with Apple's iOS software store, Google's move is an innovation that its competitors do not yet have.

Google Play Store is the only official Android digital content retail platform of Google and the largest Android software market in the world, with millions of applications currently available. Since the Android system is open source and provided to mobile phone manufacturers for free, the Play Store is the only channel for Google to obtain direct revenue from the Android system (the popularity of Android has also promoted Google's mobile search advertising).

Currently, the income of iOS developers is significantly higher than that of Android developers. Recently, an organization predicted that by 2018, the income of Android software developers will exceed that of iOS platform.