Revenue
- Google Play: $388.14
- Stripe: $126.74
- PayPal: $82.67
- Patreon: $56.05
- Bitcoin: $52.10
- Amazon: $44.78
Total revenue: $750.48
Google Play revenue comes from selling the standard flavor on Google Play. Stripe revenue comes from Liberapay donations. PayPal comes from Liberapay donations, selling the standard flavor on XDA Labs, and from direct donations. Patreon revenue comes from Patreon donations. Bitcoin revenue comes from Bitcoin donations. Amazon revenue comes from selling the standard flavor on Amazon Appstore.
Google AdMob ad revenue only pays out when the balance exceeds $100.00. Currently the balance is $98.09, which is up from $84.71 at the end of 2019. The amount of money the ads make is quite minimal, and dropped significantly when the passage of the GDPR gave me the option of forcing all the ads to be non-personalized. I have considered getting rid of the free flavor entirely, but I feel like it provides a nice way for users on Google Play and similar platforms to check out all the features of Privacy Browser before deciding if they want to spend money.
At the very end of the year, I received $56.25 in donations via PayPal, and a total of 20.1 mBTC, which is currently valued at $620.42 (this number has increased three times just while I have been drafting this post). These donations are not reflected in the numbers above because they have not been transferred to my business bank account. They will be included in the 2021 financial report.
My goal is to eventually quit my day job and work on Privacy Browser full time. To be able to do that, the amount of money it generates would have to increase by two orders of magnitude.
Install Base
Google Play reports some fairly detailed statistics about installations. The other distribution methods (F-Droid, XDA-Labs, the Amazon Appstore, the Galaxy App Store, and direct downloads from Stoutner.com) either do not track this information or provide only vague information. The screenshot below shows the installs of the standard flavor on active devices on Google Play, which is defined as the “Number of Android devices that have been active in the past 30 days with the application installed”.
Unsurprisingly, even though there are far more installs of the free flavor, there are fewer active devices. This is because most users either decide they don’t like Privacy Browser, or they switch to using the standard flavor.
In the future F-Droid is going to implement some install metrics, similar to Debian’s popularity contest. It will be interesting to see what those numbers show.