Android: how to distribute paid application when paid Google Play is not available in my country

Question

I'd like to sell my Android application, but I live in Poland and in my country* Android Market supports only free apps (we cannot sell and we cannot buy too).

What is the best way to sell application in such situation? I can accept PayPal money transfers, but I don't know how to distribute APK package without exposing it to getting pirated. Did someone tried it already and succeeded?

* Author's country wasn't supported at the moment of asking
** You may find useful PayPal Mobile Payments Libraries

Answer 1

There are a few options available to you.

If you want to put your app up on the Actual Android Market you can try to find a business partner in the US or another country that supports paid apps and have your partner list the application for you. I know of a few developers that have done this without issues. Basically they had trusted friends that would create an Android market developer account ant these friends would list the application. This can be a somewhat undesirable option if you do not have a trusted friend in one of the countries where paid apps are supported.

Another option would be to list your paid application on a 3rd party market such as SlideME or AndAppStore. The founder of AndAppStore Al Sutton is a very active participant in the Android developers community regularly posting on the android Google groups and keeping his twitter feed updated with Android news.

Also be wary of linking to a 3rd party app store from your free program on the Android Market. If you want to sell your paid app from your free app be aware of clause 3.3 of the Android Market Developer Distribution Agreement

3.3 You may also choose to distribute Products for free. If the Product is free, you will not be charged a Transaction Fee. You may not collect future charges from users for copies of the Products that those users were initially allowed to download for free. This is not intended to prevent distribution of free trial versions of the Product with an “upsell” option to obtain the full version of the Product: Such free trials for Products are encouraged. However, if you want to collect fees after the free trial expires, you must collect all fees for the full version of the Product through the Payment Processor on the Market. In this Agreement, “free” means there are no charges or fees of any kind for use of the Product. All fees received by Developers for Products distributed via the Market must be processed by the Market’s Payment Processor.

Which basically says free apps are OK, but if you want to sell a full version of these apps you can only do it through the Android Market. When the Android Market first opened paid apps were not supported and some developers directed their suers to go directly to a 3rd party app store or their own payment portal and ran into issues with Google. I do believe you could get around this by encouraging users to go to your website and then have the paid version information available on your website.

Good luck.

Answer 2

You could use one of the alternative third-party markets for Android applications. Wikipedia has a list of possibilities of which SlideMe looks the most promising.

SlideMe has website where you can post your application, a Market Application which users may run on their phones and their own forward locking (copy protection) implementation. They say they support international developers but I don't exactly how payments to Poland would work so you'd have to check that yourself.

I uploaded a free application to the Android Market and SlideMe at the same time. I've had 30 times more downloads from the Market than from SlideMe. So it may be worth proving a free trial version of your application on the official Market but redirecting people to SlideMe for the paid premium version.