From MacRumors on Apple tracking you with first-party apps:

For example, according to the researchers, the App Store app continually harvested a wealth of usage data in real time, including user taps, apps searched for, viewed ads, and how long a user looks at any given app. Along with these details, Apple is also allegedly able to gather details typical of device fingerprinting methods, including ID numbers, device model, screen resolution, installed keyboard languages, and internet connection type.

In another example, the Mysk researchers said the Stocks app sent Apple a user's list of watched stocks, stocks viewed or searched for (including timestamps), as well as a record of news articles viewed in the app. This information was said to be sent to a web address via a transmission separate from the iCloud communication necessary to sync user data across devices.

I was of two distinct minds when I read this:

1. Doesn't Apple need to know 80% of this stuff (what version OS, what phone, etc) when you're on the app store? And if you want to read an article, don't you need to request it? etc etc
2. Boy, Apple really doesn't dogfood, do they?

Re: 1. -- here's a screencapture from a related YouTube video:

That at first seems mostly like fair game info, doesn't it? But if you say "I don't want anyone tracking me," I can understand why you don't want and, what's more, wouldn't expect all of that pushed up into the pipe. As a developer, it'd be nice if Apple had to ask for that info the same as anyone else.

I wonder how much of Apple not truly dogfooding is so they can claim they can't split the software and hardware sides of the house. Because otherwise they really, really should dogfood as if they were any other app maker. Leveling the app-building playfield would improve every user's experience, because Apple could no longer take shortcuts when determining iOS' priorities.

"Oh, we can just grab that data from the OS," would no longer be a strategy, and, "Hey, we lose 90% of our conversion with this modal asking for full hardware info," would be enough for iOS to make those decisions move more smoothly, however that might be.

Oh, in other news, I finally got a Framework laptop. They had the 11th gen i5 refurb come back in stock for $600, and that's about what I'd pay to play around in this world. If there's a 13th gen CPU update next year that I can use, I might "really" shell out then, depending on how quickly and completely I take to Ubuntu. So far, versus my last foray into Linux on the desktop (admittedly over 10 years ago, I believe), it's nice and fast.

Labels: app dev, app store, apple, dogfooding, privacy

One thing I haven’t seen anyone mention directly is why Project Catalyst only lets iPad apps run on macOS, not iPhone apps: It’s because there aren’t enough good iPad apps, and Apple still wants to see people take the iPad as a platform seriously.

I mean, I understand. iPad apps should work much more cleanly on a Mac than apps designed for iPhones. That is, if your app is well-designed for the iPad, it’ll likely be a lot fewer tweaks away from being a good macOS citizen than an iPhone app. The resonance between “iPadOS”^* and macOS is clear.

If you’re Apple and wanted the most Mac apps, you’d let anything from iOS run there.

But if you wanted more apps targeting Pad, you’d bribe folks by saying their iPad-specific port gets them a macOS app for free, too.

Guess which Apple did?

^* The most recent Talk Show suggested that iPadOS was still just iOS by another, marketing-friendly name. I think that’s even better evidence this “iPad apps only” is a bribe, not a tech requirement.

Labels: app dev, apple, iPad, macOS

There's something in "massively multiplayer online games" called theorycrafting. It's when you take a game and play it with an eye to figure out the numbers beneath it. You've probably seen Dungeons & Dragons played in a movie or television show, where dice are rolled to see if a player, say, escapes from a monster's grasp.

When you're playing with dice, you can see the numbers. "To escape, you need to roll greater than a fifteen on a twenty-sided die," your referee might tell you. When you play a game online, like World of Warcraft, the "dice" are hidden, the server is the referee, and some software is coming up with all of the percentages and values.

But "theorycrafters" want to see the dice. They'll play in ways where they can take known situations and outcomes, change a single variable, and then see how the known values change. They'll record things in spreadsheets, or even use programs written specifically to watch and record values as they play.

What theorycrafters are trying to do is, in effect, exactly like counting cards in blackjack. If you know what the system is doing... that there are, say, six decks in a shoe, and 13 kings have been played... your odds of winning, and what the odds are for winning what you want, go waaaaay up.

With online games, it's sort of like playing blackjack without knowing which cards were removed from the deck. The servers could be running whatever numbers they want.

Now, if you ask me, theorycrafting isn't fun. When I play, I want Blizzard (Warcraft's developers) to take my dice, please, and let me forget what I'm doing isn't much different from playing blackjack or slots.

Unfortunately, this attitude keeps me from participating fully in the game. In "raids", where 30-40 people cooperatively¹ fight the most powerful creatures in the game, everyone is supposed to be familiar with all sorts of theorcrafted knowledge...

• The best gear (armor, weapons, wraps, etc)
• Enhancements for that gear (armor kits, spells to make weapons stronger, etc)
• Character talents
• "Rotation" (which spells to cast in a fight and in what order)
• (No, believe me, we're just getting started, but that's enough for now... )

If you're not well-versed, and your character is wearing or doing the wrong things, especially in the toughest parts of the game, you're liable to get kicked out of the raid.² And those links I've included, above, were for just one "specialization" of the thirty-six in the game! Phew.

You get the picture. It's insane the amount of studying that needs to go on to simply know the results of theorycrafting, much less to do the theorycrafting yourself. And it kills some of the fun. Ultimately, there are other games I could be playing.

Which brings us to the lesson I'm trying to push here: Theorycrafters might be playing the same game as me, but being a theorycrafter is work, hard work.

Targeted advertisements are like theorycrafting. Discuss.

How does this connect with being an indie app developer? Well, MarkUpDown, my Markdown editor for Windows 10, is getting reasonably mature, and over the last year or so, I've had my ears open to other indie developers that talk about advertising. There's a decent amount of advice about how to market, but I noticed that I bristled when I heard about one kind of marketing in particular. It took me a while to figure out why: It's because there's a particular type of marketing that reminds me of theorycrafting, and I'm not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze.

I'm going to lump the advertising methods I've heard discussed into two categories: Broadcast and microcast.

(Dare you to figure out which one I like more.)

Broadcast advertisements

You're used to broadcast advertisements. Television, radio, and newspapers are the conventional examples. In a figurative since, there's always a lot of "bycatch" in broadcast. You're casting the net out broadly, knowing a good percentage of the people who are exposed to your ad aren't in your market.

You certainly want to cast the nets where you think you'll maximize the market you're after, but you're not being that careful. Fill it up!

Here's one example of a "new media" broadcast from John Saddington's blog, where he's talking about spending $9000 to advertise his Desk app on Daring Fireball:

So I began the paper-napkin math and figured that if I spent $9,000 on DF it would ultimately have to convert approximately 300 copies of my app to at least break-even. So I asked myself this simple question:

Do I really believe that Daring Fireball can create explicit value in converting 300 new customers?

News flash: It did.

The sponsorship went live on November 17th and I held my breath…

The short answer is this: Yes, DaringFireball worked for me.

Over the course of that first week’s campaign and sponsorship I had net (profit) proceeds of nearly $16,000, which means that my investment of the $9,000 was made back within the first week of sponsorship!

For those interested, the previous 7 days of sales were just north of $2,100, so assuming that I was on pace to do that again I was clearly in the black based on Gruber’s sponsorship.

But there were three more significant things that happened as a result of the sponsorship, the first is that I began to rank at the very top of the Mac App Store in not only the Productivity category but globally...

This means, at least in the dominant US-market, Desk App was the #11th most-grossing app in the entire Mac App Store marketplace. 

That's expensive, and risky, but fun.

An aside on advertising dollars

I can hear folks saying to themselves, "Nine grand?!! Are you OUT OF YOUR MIND?!!!"

One thing I feel I should point out: If you've written a detailed app, you've already invested lots more than nine grand in your endeavor. I don't want to think about it too much, but I probably have $30-40k of time in MarkUpDown. That's insane. It's a great Markdown editor -- the best on Windows, I don't mind believing -- and that's probably about what it'd cost to get someone with my experience to write it.

But that's a ton of cash -- or, to be kinder, a huge investment. If you won't drop $10k to get the word out on something that ran you $35k to write, well, your don't value your time enough.

I know, I know. As an indie, getting to write what you want is a huge part of the gig, and by "part", I mean "reward". And I know the feeling of wishing you could give some cash back to your employer to work on what you wanted to, even if it was constrainted to something in their app! I often feel that way about tech debt. Gosh, I'd work for half-price now to make my future work so much easier.

Regardless, the advice here is don't be penny wise with advertising and pound foolish with your time. $5-10k is not a lot to spend on effective advertising.

The question I keep asking myself is, "What advertising is going to be effective?" And with that, we're back to our consideration of...

"Microcast" advertisements

Facebook and Twitter, even Google AdWords to a degree, offer a different sort of advertisement than traditional broadcast. Targeted advertisements allow you to cast your net more precisely, reducing the bycatch significantly.

Now, instead of broadcasting to everyone at a website (can you imagine if Google search had static banner ads?), you get to wait until the user has performed some action that hugely improves the chances they're interested in what you're selling.

• Someone searches for "Windows Markdown editor" on Google.
• Someone on Twitter follows John Gruber and Paul Thurrott.
• Someone on Facebook is a software engineer and hosts projects on GitHub.
  • (You're not writing your READMEs with a Markdown editor? Ouch! There's an easier way! ;^D)

These are increasingly specific demographics. You're no longer broadcasting to a group that you hope largely overlaps with your market. You're lasering in on people you already know are your market, and hoping your net works.

Of course, this service is going to cost you more per impression too.

Theorycraft and Microcasts

The thing that bugs me is how theorycrafty app developers sound when they're working on their targeted microcasts. Like theorycrafting a game, finding the right target for your advertisements is hard work. I understand the appeal that if you get everything dialed in perfectly, you could theoretically take your hands off of that perfect combination, step away, ramp up your advertising budget, and hit Phase 3. Profit.

But it always sounds like there are too many dials.

Here's a quick introduction to how it feels to use Facebook ads from Charles Perry and Joe Ciplinski on the Release Notes podcast, episode Sorta Cool, Sorta Creepy, from back in December 2015 (link is cued up to 8:33 - transcriptions and any errors therein are mine!):

Charles: You know… I wasn’t really familiar with Facebook ads before I started looking into this, and looking for options. And in fact I didn’t even have a Facebook account. But they know an incredible amount about the people who are using Facebook. It is just mind-boggling. They give a lot of that information… I was going to say that they give a lot of the information to their advertisers, but they don’t. But they do allow advertisers to target based on that information.

You can target based off of geography or travel inclinations or whether they have a friend who just gave birth. It’s all kinds of crazy things that you can do -- you really can [target people with friends who just gave birth]. It’s really odd to have that much insight into… the people that you’re advertising to. It’s great, but it’s sorta unique in that you don’t get that much insight into who is viewing your ads in any other platform that I’m aware of, at least.

And from the same episode a few minutes later on...

Joe: So you can target pretty much anything you want, and I know it’s pretty crazy. We did a very brief experiment with Setlists a while back, which I want to repeat, because I don’t think we did it right. We were able to say just give us people who have iPads… Just give me musicians. We could even just say give me singers versus guitar players versus… It’s pretty wild how specific you can get in that detail, and that’s why Facebook’s always asking you all those questions like where you went to high school or where you live… but they also glean quite a bit from your timeline and from what people post about you and what you post in return.

Man, that's a lot of dials. And each one could be the barrier to hitting your target market. Who is more likely to use Bombing Brain's Setlists app? What if it's, strangely, drummers, even though there's a huge emphasis on chords in the app? You might never think to add them to a targeted ad, though a broadcast ad on The Garage Band podcast (made up name) would've hit them all. That is to say, microcasts seem to operate as opt-in operations.

Or here's Curtis Herbert's blog post, That Dirty M[arketing] Word:

One of the (many) things I tried was Facebook app install ads...

Over a one-month period I tried all kinds of permutations, re-visiting my ads every day or two to turn off the clear losers to save money, and try new ones. Looking back at the ad manager for that time period my worst permutation was going to cost me $20 a user, and I had a lot in the $2 - $5 range, but by Jan 2016 I knew how to dial some of the knobs get users for < $1.

That sounds like theorycrafting.

Or on the Under the Radar podcast, episode #49, App Store Search Ads:

Marco: Another thing to think about is what percentage of your new users come through clicking ads? If you're thinking that you make 25 cents per user, but 10% of you users come from clicking ads and the rest come from other ways, then you actually might be able to bid a lot more than what that is to get those users...

... I think [cost per acquisition] will make people think about their business models a little bit more and maybe charge more money and charge higher prices for apps that really, that can earn it, that deserve the higher prices. I think this actually might help raise App Store prices as people figure out, "You know, it'd be really a lot better if I could bid on these keywords and be a little more competitive on the ad side, but in order to do that I have to charge a real price for my app or I have to have some kind of recurring revenue scheme or something like that. Ultimately I think this might actually help ad pricing substantially.

Theorycraft or carpet bomb?

Look at the emphasis on cost per acquisition in the last two microcast quotes. That's the right metric, but I'd suggest "per user" is the wrong unit.

Maybe it's just mentality, but I think it's also largely medium. There are places your potential users live. If you can blanket one of those places that overlaps with your potential users closely enough, it seems worth it to me to broadcast there.

Now I figure part of the lure of microcast is microspending. You can spend $20 (or less) a month on these media if you want. If you target too broadly, your cash will be spent quickly, and you'll hit folks who weren't in your market. But if you start with the pico instead of the micro, you can work your way up, minimizing the cash you've wasted on bycatch.

But I also worry the time it takes to "pico-theorycraft"³ an advertisement... oh, the time. What features did you not add because of the time you spent theorycrafting advertisements? I think Curtis is happy with his results, but every time I have a process that complicated (including writing blog posts), I look up at the clock and say, "Where did today's time go?!"

And if the ads don't scale, even if our theorycrafted dials were working great, what time we've wasted! If I had to tune all those knobs over days or weeks, then cranked my spending from $20 to $2000, and didn't get 100x results, well, man. What a waste.

If you have a broad enough market, and the market congregates in a few specific places that are marketable, I think the lesson is that you go advertise on those media first. The broadest exposure is the best exposure, and has the best follow-on benefits. I also wonder how much of, say, Daring Fireball readers also would be the ones hit by a well-theorycrafted advertisement.

If I had a marketing department with people who really knew how to do this, I would expect them to make these experiments. When it's just me, well, easier is better. Time is money and all that.

But for a niche app like MarkUpDown, even though there was, a few years ago, at least one decent Markdown editor on Windows making enough money it got rewritten, I have to consider just how big my total potential market is. If I could reach everyone who would spend $23 on not just a Markdown editor, but my Markdown editor, how many would that be? If I could find Desk App's Daring Fireball equivalent, could I pull down 550 purchases? Or should I just consider this app a labor of love? If the market is thousands, and I can find the right source, broadcast makes sense. If I want to maximize the return on a labor of love, then I should keep up the hobbyist mentality and microcast.

(And then I think there's probably a middle-ground, where big companies carpet bomb with "targeted ads", but the ads really aren't all that targeted at all, since the markets are so large. "People who watch the NFL," doesn't really require theorycraft-level consideration, and if you're already advertising on TV during games, why not Twitter and Facebook too? Honestly, that's probably the best answer. If Saddington didn't market on Daring Fireball and then to Daring Fireball readers on Facebook and Twitter, he missed a great opportunity. If you buy into the whole saturation thing.)

In any event, there are my current thoughts on advertising, as I try to determine where to sink my hard-earned dollars so that they'll best make friends and bring more dollars home.

¹ No joke! From [wikia.com](http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Raid):

Raid groups are a way to have parties of more than 5 and up to 30 (40 for some old raids) people, divided into up to 8 groups of up to 5 players.

² Interestingly, as I've argued before, this means the game developers expect and effectively require you to play outside of the game to fully experience it. I'd argue that, additionally, Blizzard's level of financial success demands and depends on theorycrafters as well.

³ I realize I'm misusing "theorycraft" here. There are no hard numbers behind the scenes when you're talking about people. Oh sure, we can play amateur economist, or pretend our experiments in Facebook targeted ads are representative, or apply sampling statistics until we're blue, but we could be wrong too. See the major new networks from our last presidential election. That said, the methods between targeted ads and theorycrafters are similar, and the results could be too. Let's pretend the comparison works.

Labels: advertising, app dev, business, indie, markupdown

That text about Russia VAT changes I talked about yesterday is from an email I viewed in Win10 Mail. I cut and paste the content, and figured it was HTML format. It was, and MarkUpDown handled it... interestingly.

Here's the raw HTML:

<span style='font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;
mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;
mso-fareast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA'>Russia will become a
Microsoft remittance country where Microsoft (or its billing service provider)
will collect and remit the VAT on behalf of developers. <strong><span
style='font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif'>Effective January 1, 2017, Microsoft
will determine the VAT due, withhold such VAT from your App Proceeds, and remit
directly to the Russia tax authorities</span></strong>. The current VAT rate in
Russia is 18%. </span>

The problem comes when we put that into Markdown block format.

> <span style='font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;
> mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;
> mso-fareast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA'>Russia will become a
> Microsoft remittance country where Microsoft (or its billing service provider)
> will collect and remit the VAT on behalf of developers. <strong><span
> style='font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif'>Effective January 1, 2017, Microsoft
> will determine the VAT due, withhold such VAT from your App Proceeds, and remit
> directly to the Russia tax authorities</span></strong>. The current VAT rate in
> Russia is 18%. </span>

Bonus for anyone who can figure out the issue.

See how that leaves us with an HTML tag that's split over multiple lines?

> <span style='font-size:10.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;
> mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US;
> mso-fareast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA'>Russia will become a

The Markdown parser handles that quite well, but the > symbols threw off the code I use to align the live preview with the cursor's location as you edit, as it looks like bogus html with all the >'s in the middle. Not great.

So four hours later, I have a fix checked in that seems to be working integrated with MarkUpDown's code (please don't get me started about indie devs' attitudes about (against?) Test Driven Development -- I get that Marco would argue he understands what TDD is, but my guess is he's never actually tried it. That said, I'm not doing it here).

Sure, I also ate and interviewed a programmer in that time, but still... that's a rabbit hole of almost certainly over two hours for a problem only I was likely experiencing.

That's the benefit and danger of being an independent developer. Nobody's going to tell you not to scratch your itch. You're less itchy personally, but that's not always the "best win" for your users.

Labels: app dev, indie, priorities

From a Windows Developer email:

Russia will become a Microsoft remittance country where Microsoft (or its billing service provider) will collect and remit the VAT on behalf of developers. Effective January 1, 2017, Microsoft will determine the VAT due, withhold such VAT from your App Proceeds, and remit directly to the Russia tax authorities. The current VAT rate in Russia is 18%.

You know, when you give an app store (iOS, macOS, Windows) 30% of your take, you actually tend to get a lot.

• Free licensing
• Free update mechanisms
• Free downloads
• A pretty reliable landing page
• Free payment processing
• Limited marketing

That's not bad.

The question's not even, "Is that worth 30% of my revenue?" for many (most?) developers. The question is, "Is 30% too much to give up to release my app before I could have all of this other stuff ready?"

If you could release at Day 0 instead of Day 250, and 70% of the lost sales from 0-250 would make up more than 30% of all sales, then you're an idiot not to release with in an app store as quickly as you can.

What the store buys you is a reduction in time to market. Use that.

What it also buys you is more markets. There's no way I could keep track of VATs and taxes for every country, especially when these countries don't make up much of my user base. Microsoft is big enough that it's worth it to them, as part of the 30% they take from us, to make changes like this VAT charge.

Course it stinks. I'm now getting 70% * 82% = 57.4% of my list price in Russia. Ouch. I could make the price higher to cover the VAT, but for the sales I have there, I probably won't bother.

As Joel says, it's all about barriers to entry. Such a protective tariff should make foreign software more expensive in Russia. I wonder to what extent it does.

Labels: app dev, app store, app store econ, indie, taxes, windows store

From Vesper's own release notes:

We three at Q Branch — Dave, John, and Brent — are greatly appreciative of everyone who has used and said good things about Vesper. We love this app. But the time has come to say goodbye. We thank you, sincerely, for your support and enthusiasm.

From Brent Simmon's blog here:

I loved working on Vesper. It was one of the great software-making experiences of my life. We’d get on a roll and it was wonderful.

And now it hurts to turn it off, but it’s time.

... and here...

The code is all Objective-C. It’s an iOS 6 app with just enough changes to keep it working on iOS 7 and beyond. It knows nothing about size classes, presentation controllers, and so on. Doesn’t even use auto layout. It’s not an example of how you’d write an app these days.

Belief inside Q Branch: if we had started with a Mac app rather than an iOS app, Vesper would have been much more successful. That wasn’t clear at the time we started, though (Dec. 2012).

... and from the same post as above, describing what comes next for Simmons...

This is the last app on the App Store where I wrote all (or almost all) of the code. Odds are excellent that there will never be another app written largely by me on any app store.
...
I’m working on new stuff from Ranchero Software. I had planned two apps, but I think it’s going to be just one, just because two takes too much time. So I picked the one I’m more passionate about.

It’s a Mac app...

And then that will be my app. The thing I work on for the next 10 or so years, until I retire. That’s the plan. (To be clear, though, I don’t plan to leave my day job, which I love.)

What happened?

• "time to say goodbye"
• "but it's time [to turn it off]"

These quotes aren't helpful.

• "if we had started with a Mac app... Vesper would have been much more successful."

This might be useful. Sounds like the app wasn't making much money.

If it's a client-side only app, that's no big deal. It costs you very little (your Apple developer account cost) to keep something on the app store.

There are two problems with Vesper, however.

1. They're syncing everything into their own cloud service.
   • This costs money every hour it's open.
   • Syncing images (size) can be a bear.
2. The code isn't particularly easy to maintain.
   • See "It's an iOS 6 app... It knows nothing about size classes [etc]..."

The first means it's costing them money today (EDIT: Gruber adds that they were also paying licensing fees for the font. He's removed that portion from his post, but it was originally there). The second means it's going to cost them a disproportionate amount of time to improve the app tomorrow.

If today and tomorrow are overly expensive, it might be foldin' time.

Post Mortem Results?

Here's my guess at what happened.

• They're stuck with a crappy codebase (we all write some)
• Vesper has high server fees relative to new income
• It's a poorly chosen app category where there's too much competition
  • Don't forget that they were given a good Sherlocking when Apple updated Notes on iOS.
• Related to the previous: Nobody's buying
• Most importantly: The app's not stellar. Great design, decent start, not yet stellar.

It's amazing to think that folks with the name recognition, at least in Apple circles, of Wiskus, Simmons, and Gruber could fail, but they did. To Gruber's credit, he didn't pimp Vesper much at all on The Talk Show or, iirc, Daring Fireball a few months after release. But he didn't do the app any favors with that restraint either. Wear your own shirt.

I heard that Gruber was using Vesper on his Mac in the iOS emulator. I think that tells you something pretty important right there.

I think you can also piece together from Simmons' final statements that he wasn't interested in writing a notes app for the Mac, and I'd guess that this provides the three a good escape narrative. "If we'd only made a Mac app..." I'd counter with, "If that's a good market, why not do it now?" And if the syncing code works well, it's done, man. You're 50% of the way to a notes app already (sync and much of your design is done)!

Again, I don't think Simmons is interested in writing a notes app for the Mac. But I think the real answer is that a great Mac notes app wouldn't have saved them, even if the coding time was zero.

Good, but not great

Vesper was good, but not great. It was, unfortunately, buggy. There were a number of times that I couldn't see and/or add images in one screen orientation. Sometimes cursors would jump around. Sometimes I couldn't enter text. It's a notes app. That's bad.

The idea -- the design -- of Vesper was great. It wasn't a great app. Mediocre apps, regardless of design, tend to fail if they're not maintained and improved. Vesper's had how many updates since 2013?

Revisiting The Marco Effect

I think the most important take home here is that The Marco Effect is greatly overestimated.

That is, if Marco's apps were no good, he probably wouldn't stay in business. Heck, if Marco's stuff was decent, even solid, it might not be worth making.

If Marco had the same reach as The Talk Show and Daring Fireball, picked the wrong app, and that app was only "okay", they wouldn't be worth his time.

Vesper shows me we don't give Marco enough credit. It also tells me app dev is a very tough gig.

A cynic might say that Wiskus-Gruber-Simmons simply didn't want to "stick it out" (certainly they could cover even server-side losses for a while), or that 33% of the cash from decent is much less than 100%, or that Overcast is a labor of love & doesn't make tons of cash either (actually, Overcast does quite well), but I still see Marco being undervalued here. His apps do better because of both (business speak alert!) product-market fit and quality.

Nice of them to let us dump our stuff before it disappears, natch. ;^)

Edit: Tell me what you really think

Ouch. The reviews have turned pretty nasty.

Customer Reviews

Oh well.

     

by .Dan79.

A good example of why subscription services are bad and why extremely expensive apps are bad. And this seems to be both. A $10 app for a service that is now closing and will be completely unusable. And if you haven't logged in for a while, you may have missed the closing notification and you'll be too late to recover important or invaluable data. I discovered this via Apps Gone Free. That's how I heard of it today and checked it out. Sad to see all of this.

About time you pulled the plug

     

by Robert White 74

Nice waste of money this app was. I bought it years ago based on the promises of one of the most opinionated, self promoting guys on the Internet. Turns out John Gruber & pals were a lot of talk & very little action. This app was abandoned almost immediately after it was released. Let this be a warning to others not to bother with promises of snake oil like this in the future.

I agree with those who are unhappy. Thank Gawd I didn't have to pay.

     

by Four2x4

There are several other note apps that are much better and have mush better functionality.
No way to add to an existing note. No way to unarchive a note, and the list goes on of deficiencies.
Sync is discontinued.
Pull the plug, call it a day.

Edit #2: Gruber weighs in, a little

Must've missed it yesterday, or it came in later than I catch up on RSS, but Gruber says he's going to do his own postmortem in a bit:

I’m working on a postmortem — or maybe more of a eulogy — but for now, I can’t express my feelings any better than those two short paragraphs from Brent.

Will be interesting to see how candid he is. I'd like Jared Sinclair, Marco Arment-level candidness, but I'll guess we'll take what we get.

Labels: app dev, app store econ, business, indie, ios, vesper

Chris Adamson on the App economy [via Dan Counsell's weekly email]:

People won’t pay for apps. Therefore, the value of an app is typically zero. However, they will pay for stuff behind apps, for what the app will do for them, or let them do, what it will show them, or let them show their ideas and works to others.

“Fixing” the App Store, saying that Apple needs better curation or promotion of apps, is like “fixing” Yahoo! [of the] the browsable collection of websites that Filo and Yang put together in their Stanford dorm room. It’s premised on a model and a value proposition that doesn’t exist anymore.

Much wrong. Many fix.

First, if you read earlier this week, I think Pieter Omvlee was right. The Apple App Store is a dollar store.. Many indie developers don't want to sell there.

Stop saying it's broken. If you don't have a dollar app, forget the App Store storefront.

What I added to Omvlee's talk is that even those who don't want to sell in App Store storefront still want to be in the warehouse. You have to be if you want to sell inventory.

That is, here are the things the Apple App Warehouse does not do for you, if you don't have a dollar store app:

• Sell your app.

Here's what the Apple App Warehouse does do for you:

• Gives you a URL for downloads.
• Tracks downloads
• Allows you to use affiliate links to get 7 of the 30% cut Apple takes back when you sell yourself!
• Handles updates
• Handles most security issues on the terminal (local device... you know, the phone)

etc etc.

You're really asking for Apple to open another app store

@_DavidSmith @marcoarment You're right, a parallel #AppStorePro (#AppStoreCurated?) sounds like a great idea. 😉

— Ruffin (@r_ffin) March 19, 2016

That's really all anyone's asking for when they say, "The App Store's broken." What they mean is that, "The current store is broken for me," which is to say, "The current store isn't where I want to sell."

For now, that means you have to make your own store on the web. That stinks, but would you really pay 7% of your gross to Apple to create a better store? Maybe. Maybe. If you knew you'd be featured, sure, but just because they make "Apple App Store Pro" or "Apple App Store Curated" doesn't mean you'll be in the window.

Take that extra 7%, put it aside for marketing, and sell like mad.

That said, Adamson has some interesting points. First, on why the Store is sufficient for Apple now:

You know that big check that Tim Cook will show in a keynote, like how Apple has paid developers $20 billion as of 2014? That pales compared to the value of all the companies whose existence is predicated on being a mobile app. A billion for Instagram here, a billion for Waze there, it all adds up. Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp nearly matches the Tim Cook check all by itself.

I'd stopped listening to the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP) after they took on Cards Against Humanity as a sponsor -- that game really is evil. It's, as I've said elsewhere, the I Ching (which is not evil) of hate speech (which is) -- but this was interesting too:

And yes, again, there are exceptions, but consider: Marco has admitted on the last two ATPs that his patronage model for Overcast is only barely viable (and he’s starting from a stronger position than most of us), and my friend Curtis stands to make about $20K/yr on his terrific Slopes app, something he sets aside about a third of the year to work on. These are the success stories. Care to speculate what the median is like?

I've been realistically bearish on indies in the App Store for a while:

• In 2014, Overcast bagged Arment $164k, and your app ain't Marco's.
• #8 in the Mac App Store for a year could mean $110k yearly.
• The iOS App Store can only support 3175 developers, total

(That last is a little clickbaity, sure, but only in its simplisticness. It could be a lot less.)

At the same time, I'd want to reframe the conversation a little, like I did when talking about attacks Jared Sinclair got for his Unread numbers.

Stop thinking about working as an independent app developer as something that should pay you something comporable to a 9-to-5er cubicle coder. You could make a lot more as a banker than as tax return dude with a shingle, but you chose the latter. It's a different field.

Stop seeing $20k for one app over a year (really $25k, apparently) as failure. See it as Curtis Herbert does...

My goal with this experiment wasn't just revenue, it was sustainable revenue.

Apps are investments. You sell these investments from the Apple Dollar Store or from your own storefront, your choice. They're delivered from Apple's App Warehouse. You create and maintain enough investments, and you might rival a consultant for salary.

That's the profession you choose. Enjoy your time. That's its best perk of all.

Labels: app dev, app store, app store econ, apple, business, indie

Interesting quote from the appbot blog:

97% of Google Play reviews go unanswered! What better way to turn 1 star app reviews into 5 star reviews, get valuable feedback and make a user happy than to actually reply to them and solve their issue?

I keep hearing that the ability to respond to reviews is one of the pieces that needs to be fixed in the iTunes App Store (for iOS), and I still buy that the ability to reply would be wonderful, but that's a heck of a number.

Why might it be so low?

1. Face it, tons of apps are abandoned.
2. If you reply to half of the reviews, you're well above average.
   • That is, even The Good Ones aren't offsetting the empties that quickly.
3. Good reviews probably don't need answering.
   • I know I get tired of, "Thanks!" replies in comments.
4. Replying to reviews takes time.

It's that last one that I wonder most about. Even the most adamant iOS indie developers probably aren't going to reply nearly as often as they believe they would. They might reply when they see something they feel is insanely unfair -- replying could be an effective way to vent, and, if composed carefully, the vent could be productive -- but I doubt it'll be used as often as folks believe.

I still think it's important to be able to reply, however. When I'm eyeballing a three star app, and am about to tank the purchase, my mind could be easily swayed by a developer that's engaged and can explain why, eg, what appeared to be a bug wasn't. Simple engagement, a "proof of life", almost, would go a long ways, if the replies are carefully written.

Still, 97%? Ouch. Abandonware.

Speaking of abandonware... I think I started an abandonware post mortem for BlogGo a while back. Will probably do one for WorkBurst too. It seems like these two folks did everything right, yet their well-marketed apps seem to have tanked. Why?

I mean, anything showing an "introductory price" nearly two years after its last update, and with only five reviews of that version, is probably D-E-D dead.

The fate of these apps is both kind of sad -- and scary -- to possible app developers. I'll talk more later with abandonware post mortems, but, to tie it into today, I'm not sure either app producer would spend a lot of time replying to negative reviews today, even if they could.

Still, 97%? Wow.

Labels: abandonware, app dev, app store, indie

Castro and Unread provide variable height rows for episodes and article summaries respectively. This approach feels true to what Apple intends for iOS. Twitter clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific do a great job here but unfortunately it's rare to see podcast or reader apps take this approach.

Have you ever noticed how many apps show their content in fixed-height rows? In these apps, text and images are cut off at the exact same interval, regardless of their intrinsic sizes. [sic on the lack o' question mark]
...

For our apps, instead of imposing a single cell height, we want to defer to the content by letting it tell us what size it needs. In Castro, episode cells include up to 4 lines of text if we have them, otherwise the cell collapses down to show the number of lines we do have.

Labels: app dev, design, indie, podcast app