I can make sure to have a support forum before the thing is launched. I probably wouldn't need to spend a huge amount of my own time on the forum, those things tend to run themselves (support-wise) after a while. But $1 is insane, even for an intro price (and it'll probably get more than average buys in the first few weeks). That's way cheaper than other serious emulators that are more than quick and dirty ports. Furthermore, I think people will have a negative reaction to a price that's suddenly substantially raised, since that's not how it usually works. I'm not actually that concerned though, almost no one posts in them. Look at the nds4droid forum, 1-5m downloads and just a handful of posts. Or fms, he has a simple google groups forum for all of his emulators dating back years, long before the Android versions (
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fms.vgba) but there aren't really that many posts and these days it's mostly just him. Note this guy has literally sold his emulators for like 20 years.
I could be wrong on this, but my gut feeling is that there is such thing as too cheap here. If you charge much less than the expected price for what's a much higher performance emulator than what's on there people won't take it as seriously, possibly subconsciously they'll look for a catch. It's not the same as if you give it out for free, then people will know you have a different motivation for it (or commercial just makes no sense like with most open source projects that have a bunch of people working on it). The question is really $8 vs $6, maybe $5, because there's no way I'd go lower than that. I don't think people are going to be more likely to leave angry comments if it costs $8 instead of $5. I actually think that a higher price will encourage people to try harder to make the emulator work, which will usually be possible (so long as they try more than some games that happen to all be broken). The real risk is going to be if the emulator flat out doesn't work on at all on someone's device, at which point it's a problem that has to be addressed. Ultimately the best thing to do is going to be to provide refunds for the people who are really mad at it. All in all some angry 1-star votes are inevitable, some probably deserved, but I'm not that worried since it looks like maybe 1% of buyers tend to actually leave ratings for emulators.
I'd really love to be able to give people refunds within 48 hours or so, no questions asked at all, I'm just worried about the time investment of actually manually doing this. I think that would solve any problems of needing a demo and making sure it works, and people would be more confident to buy it if they knew this - and I don't think anyone is cheating me if they can only use it for a couple days. I may need to actually hire someone to do it this for me if it gets crazy. The bigger problem may be getting Google to actually honor the refunds.
I could also try to urge people to prepare as much as they can to evaluate it within the 15 minute official grace period but that'd be really hard for anyone who doesn't already know what they're doing :/ Apparently Google does have a 48 hour window for manual refund requests
http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57562188-285/request-refunds-for-google-play-apps-after-grace-period-ends/
but still surprised so cheap
