In order for someone to buy, download, or consume any application or service from your business, a certain amount of trust is required. This fact absolutely does not change whether you’re selling $50,000 cars or a $0.99 mobile Application.
Building that trust is often overlooked by developers (and tech companies alike).
Let me be blunt: Very few users are going to plunk down any money if they don’t trust that:
-The application is going to work as they expect it to work whether or not their expectations are correct.
-The application will not, in any perceived way, damange or hurt their phone, battery life, or any nearby kittens.
Apple, bless their draconian and organic socks, spends an unruly amount of time building users trust in 3rd party applications. By screening incoming applications, devoting huge piles of money to advertise some of the applications appearing in their catalog (which builds trust in the whole community) and rigorous enforcement they provide a safe environment in which their soccer moms can frolic. This means that, by default, any application released on Apple’s ‘App Store’ has a baseline of trust with every potential customer.
Android, on the other hand, does absolutely nothing of the sort. This means, on one hand, that Google isn’t telling you how you have to make your applications and you have a lot of freedom. On the other hand, this means that your users, by default, don’t trust your application at all. Google believes that user reviews will help bubble those worthwhile applications to the top. They argue that their app store gives users who buy apps that have great reviews scores confidence in their purchase.
This is like replacing the USDA with Yelp.
When it comes to selling on the Android Market, you’re pretty much on your own concerning getting users to trust your applications enough to buy them.
Building Trust
There are a few ways to build trust (and it’s younger brother loyalty).
Brands
Love 'em or hate 'em, there’s no faster way to inspire trust than to cover yourself in an existing, trusted brand. People know, for the most part, exactly what they’re getting themselves into when they buy something with the Nike swoosh or the Golden Arches. This remains true, to a much much smaller extent, to your brand as a company or developer if you decide to go it alone. The good news is, with each successful application you produce you’ll be making life easier for yourself. The bad news is, if you make a catastrophic mistake (like getting caught putting ads in the notification bar or selling user information), your entire catalogue will suffer. I’m no marketer, but I will say there are HUGE volumes of printed word to be found on the subject of building a 'Brand’. Do some reading on the topic if you’re going to strike out on your own.
Try Before you Buy
Consumers, for whatever reason, will try just about anything for free. Ask them to pay $0.99 and suddenly an entirely new part of the brain comes roaring into the decision making process. Folks will pay 4$ for a cup of coffee, but if you ask them to pay a dollor for your application they’ll throw their hands up in exasperation. While utterly unfair, this is just the way the mobile marketplace works. Giving people a free subset of your features and asking them to pay for the rest can be a great way to circumvent the 'don’t buy software’ monster living in all our heads. Also, users don’t seem to mind seeing advertisements in a free app. God help you, however, if you try to show them ads in a product they’ve paid for. This trick allows you to demonstrate to the user that your app isn’t a pile of crap, and might actually be worth buying. This is, effectively, garnering trust by demonstration
Word Of Mouth
Similar to the concept of the brand. Nothing is more powerful than a personal recommendation. This is why every single mobile application in existence has some sort of 'social component.’ By sharing that photo of your cat eating an entire lobster on twitter, you’re also sharing the url (and brand) of the application on which it was taken. This is the power of personal marketing. Consumers are MUCH more likely to purchase something if they know their friends have already done it. If you can work this into your application, do it, but if you can’t find a reasonable way, don’t force it. No-one likes a useless 'tweet-this’ button taking up space on their screen.
Perception is Greater than Reality
When it comes to building trust amongst uninformed users the perception of how your application works can be much more important than how it actually does. Case In Point: if people see your application is running in the background, they will always assume you’re to blame for their short-lived battery life. No matter how much youtune your service to use next to no power, many will see it there and blame you anyway. Further, by virtue of running, you must, in some part, be to blame for anything that goes wrong on the device (sadly, this can often actually be the case). So, if you need to do things in the background, keep as low a visual profile as you possibly can. This means using broadcast receivers whenever possible rather than servies (even if constantly starting and stopping your application in the background might actually use more power).
In the End you’re on your own when it comes to building and maintaining the trust of your Android users. I, personally, love that power and responsibility. I’ll always take living on the fronteer over the comfortable tyranny of Singapore, but it’s something you, as a developer, need to be aware of. That is, of course, assuming you want to be paid for your work.