8 Alternative Mobile App Marketplaces

You have just developed a great app and you are ready to make some good money from it. The easiest way to do so is by paying $25 to get listed on Google Play.  You could also list in in the Apple app store, however, their approval guidelines are the most stringent and it takes the most time. Many app developers are not aware that there are several alternatives to Google Play, each of these mobile app marketplaces having their own audience, thus leading to more downloads and more cash-flow.

Some of these app marketplaces are tailored to serve a small audience while others are more localized. The majority of these marketplaces do not charge the developers for listing their apps in their stores. It can, therefore, be a good business practice to publish your application in a number of app stores. In this blog post, we shall look at the top 8 alternative mobile app marketplaces.

1. Amazon Appstore 

Amazon remains to be one of the biggest competitors of Google. The site offers the Kindle Fire and recently it has ventured into the Fire Phone. These devices are powered by Android and they ran a custom flavor of Android referred to as Fire OS. Despite the devices running on a custom OS, they can support an enormous number of Android apps.

With Amazon, developers can publish web apps and HTML5 on the Amazon Appstore. The store currently has more than 240,000 apps and they have a free app-of- the-day feature.

2. SlideME

This is one of the oldest mobile app marketplace, even older than Google Play itself. SlideME is installed on more than half of Android devices that have no Google Play. The Marketplace charges a fee of 20% and it offers a variety of payment options including PayPal, something that Google Play does not have. In some cases, placing your app in this marketplace for sale can lead to more downloads than Google Play, so it is absolutely worth a try.

3. 1Mobile Market

This marketplace only accepts free apps. However, this does not mean that we should ignore it. Uploading apps to this marketplace is free though there is an approval process that the app has to go through. This is to ensure that developers are not uploading apps that contain malware.

The marketplace claims to have more than 100 million installs with an average of 800,000 apps listed in its database. In 1Mobile Market, the users are provided with recommendations based on their preferences, making it a great place to discover new apps.

4. Samsung Galaxy Apps

Samsung is known to be the biggest manufacturer of Android devices. It also runs its own mobile marketplace- Samsung Galaxy Apps. The store is installed on all Samsung Galaxy series devices. Therefore, it has a large customer base. The only shortcoming with this marketplace is that it has fewer apps when compared to other stores.

5. GetJar

This marketplace has more than 30 million users and it comes with a recommendation service that is similar to the one used by 1Mobile. GetJar claims to have 3 million downloads per day, with 70,000 apps in its store. It encourages the developers to use a freemium model, which involves displaying of ads and using in-app currency instead of charging for every single app download. The marketplace also offers the largest virtual currency on Google Play, GetJar Gold. This currency is available to more than 100 million users.

6. F-Droid 

This marketplace contains open-source and free apps. Users can download apps from the official website or through the official F-droid app. Every app that you have installed through F-droid is automatically updated by the F-droid app. The platform is kept up and running by volunteers and it relies solely on donations to pay the bills. All the apps in F-droid must have a GNU or an Apache open source license. By default, apps that have advertisements or paid add-ons are allowed but not displayed.

7. Soc.io Mall

This marketplace offers the highest revenue share for developers at 80%. The apps are listed for free. Its store has not less than 10,000 apps currently. The store is not limited to apps as users can also purchase e-books, and games. The number of active users in this marketplace is not as high as in other marketplaces, but that means that the competition is also much lower.

8. Opera Mobile Store 

In this marketplace, publishing apps is absolutely free. However, developers only get 70% of the revenue from the apps. Opera is agreement with Russia’s biggest search engine, Yandex. This allows Opera to show its apps in Yandex App store and vice versa. There are more than 200,000 apps. In a month, 100 million users visit the stores and 2 million apps get downloaded every day.

Conclusion

There are numerous alternative mobile app marketplaces on which you can sell your app. Each of these stores has its pros and cons. Although, they many never replace Google Play and Apples App Store, they offer developers with more platforms to get more downloads and promote their apps to potential customers.