How to (and not to) sell your Android app

I'd like to briefly preface this post by saying that I'm writing it as a (potential) customer and not as a developer/vendor.

In preparation for releasing my Android photo blog, Da Giorno a Notte, I needed to gather as many photography-related apps on my phone as I could find. I downloaded many of them from both the amazon app store and the Android Market. All of them were free (either through amazon's free paid app program or through Android Market demo/ad-supported).  Among all demo/ad-supported apps I downloaded  Little Photo and Vignette Demo are the ones I'd like to focus on.

How To Sell Your Android App:

Little Photo is a bit unusual. Super minimalistic UI (perhaps a bit much sometimes), adds the effects in place for direct preview and you only see unobtrusive banner ads right before you save a copy of the app in your SD card. The developer is constantly pushing updates, adding needed features, organizing the menus a bit better, etc. This is exactly what I like to see as a potential customer. I want to see that the developer cares about the app (and invested/immersed in it) , I want to see updates, I want to see communication with the user base, but above all else, let the potential customer use your app to its fullest and if your app is worth its salt, they'll probably fork the money to buy it.

How (Not) To Sell Your Android App:

Vignette Demo, on the other hand, has a very user unfriendly UI, things/menus seem to be slapped around for no good reason. Blind editing: you cannot see the changes until after you close the effects window (which is superbly annoying and time inefficient). Has a lot of "filler" effects i.e. instead of presenting the user with a dialog to choose a variation of a given effect, they're listed (and feature counted!) as a different effect. To make matters worse, the developer decided to limit the size of the pictures to save/share to couple hundred pixels on the longest side unless you pay for the app (which is about $4 at the moment). In-app, feature paywalls are ridiculous, IMO, and it will not make customers upgrade to the paid version, it will drive them to find an alternative.

In closing, if I had to choose today which of the two apps I would buy, I would choose, hands-down, Little Photo. Not only it offers a MUCH better user experience, very nice feature set, but also has a developer behind it that it's passionate about both the app and photography and smart enough to not limit the app's potential hoping to force the customer to buy the paid version.