If you needed an excuse to get on your Apple high horse, I got a new one yesterday.

My super old Android phone -- used essentially only when running for... reasons, mostly Pokemon Go reasons -- popped to its last page of apps after I unlocked it today just long enough to show three new apps there before it snapped back to the first page. Real useful ones like Slotomania and some tiles game.

I didn't realize getting apps slammed onto your phone was a thing. But it is! And has been for over a decade!

• Carriers Can Now Install Apps On Android Handsets Without Customers' Permission (Forbes)
• Why does Verizon App Manager auto-install unwanted apps? (Android Police)

What the absolute heck?

I've always sort of thought of internet-enabled devices as ecosystems where code fought it out for resources, especially after the Sony rootkit CD scandal. This is similar, I think.

My Android has a TextNow SIM in it now, for which I pay a total of $5 annually [sic] for a static number plus unlimited calls & texts, and, though unlocked now, the phone originally came from Tracfone, which still has a splash screen on startup and an app that I apparently can't erase, or can't erase without a lot of googling I'm not excited to do.

Maybe it's Verizon, since they bought Tracfone and they apparently install stuff without asking? Maybe?

But what a dumb, invasive, short-sighted way to squeeze a few more cents of revenue out of your users. I don't think iOS lets this happen. That it can happen on Android is "low key" (as the kids say) an argument against 3rd party app stores, which these carrier apps have essentially become.

Ultimately I don't know where these stupid apps came from, but at least I'm not hallucinating?

Labels: android, app store econ, ios

From The Verge on the Epic vs. Apple suit:

[Cook] was also, however, a little blunter about Apple’s own interests. “IAP helps Apple efficiently collect a commission” — for payment processing, but also customer service and the use of Apple’s intellectual property. Without in-app purchases, “we would have to come up with another system to invoice developers, which I think would be a mess.” If Apple let developers tell users about other payment methods, Cook said later, “we would in essence give up our total return on our IP.”

That's... interesting. It suggests free app authors are freeloaders, and that high revenue apps are paying a disproportionate amount of the "total return on our IP" -- which, again, includes "customer service and the use of [iOS]". That without the largesse of Clash of Clans, freeware apps would need to pay more than their annual $100 developer fee to keep iOS, well, if not afloat, then profitable.

Though you can't sell the hardware without iOS either, can you? Is the IP all of iOS or just the App Store? Do you have iOS without the Store? Do you have the same success selling your phones with these apps? Of course not. It cuts both ways, doesn't it? Whose IP is driving revenue for whom?

Is the insinuation, then, that Apple Hardware, Inc needs Apple Software, Inc's^* IAP to be profitable? I doubt it. iPhone would be profitable without the IAP revenue. Cook's statement is within the specific context of growing services revenue to, in turn, grow the stock price. That is, losing the revenue from IAP doesn't make Apple unprofitable. They'd still get a return on their IP. It's reduced growth, aka missed growth targets, a relative loss, not an absolute one, that keeps Cook working at night -- and preparing like mad (as he should) for his court appearences.

Which makes this another example of how Apple is no longer leaving the money on the table to allow it to concentrate on its strengths. It is now primarily motivated by company growth, not producing the "best" products. Sure, it's long-term, sustained growth, which is a much more mature approach than, to hyperbolize, Enron's, but its motivation is still growth. That's a change from "the Jobs years" (or at least Steve managed to fool me into thinking so).

^* I've got a drafted post somewhere about the distinction between Apple Software, Inc and Apple Hardware, Inc. In a nutshell, I'm worried Apple Software, Inc needs to split off from Hardware, Inc if we don't want to keep seeing complaints like Epic's.

Because Epic's complaint should have some weight with Apple Arcade competing with it. Spotify has an even better case. Netflix too, thanks to Apple TV. Amazon has several, not least the Kindle vs. Apple Books' store arena.

In all four, Apple's own options for games and music and TV shows and books have the obvious benefit that they get to avoid the 15-30% surcharge everyone else has to pay. Apple's products can be that much worse than the competition and still "win" simply because they avoid their own "IP" tax.

It's not wholly unlike Amazon Basics Limp Bizkiting a number of products others sell on the site.

A store abuses its power when it also becomes the seller. These are not simple generic brands; these are competitors, equals.

If Hardware Inc. kept the payment processing and IAP profits, but Music, TV, Arcade, and Books had to compete as Software Inc., a favorite third party, but a third party nonetheless, what would the market look like?

Labels: app store econ, apple, hats o' money

Over the years, Apple refused to offer more flexible pricing options to developers. There never has been (and may never be) such a thing as “upgrade pricing” in the App Store, unlike on more open platforms like the Mac. Developers either had to offer major new versions for free, charge current users the same amount as new users, or try to jerry-rig an in-app purchase system.

If you already own Fantastical 2, though, Flexibits has a pretty cool offer to help mitigate that feeling, in part. If there’s any feature in Fantastical 2 that is now a Fantastical Premium feature, you will still be able to use that feature in the updated app on the platform you own it on, even without a Premium subscription. You won’t need to sign up for a Flexibits account to keep that functionality. And Simmons tells The Verge you’ll still get free bug fix updates as well.

Labels: app store econ, apple

From a reply I posted to Michael Tsai’s excellent blog, this time talking about pushback to Apple’s encouragement of SUBSCRIPTIONS FOR EVERYONE!!!!1!:

I have no problems paying a bit more for quality apps, but either it’s pay upfront, or it’s highly unlikely I’ll subscribe to an app. Sorry, devs.

I don't believe this or the two comments on this story for a second. You're telling me nobody would pay $1-$2 a year for an app that costs $5? If you don't use it often, it's cheaper to have a full year to try it out [before putting it down].

Many apps are charging too much for their subscriptions. It's the "Cup of Starbucks Pricing Metaphor Fallacy" reversed. "Netflix charges $10 a month. so my subscription price should be in the ballpark. $4 a month is a steal for a subscription!"

No. $4 a month is insane for your app. Price accordingly. Microsubscriptions are the proverbial future.

And for expensive apps, well, MS Office and Adobe Photoshop have already shown the market doesn't mind subscriptions. And businesses have been paying for yearly subscriptions for years.

Labels: app, app store, app store econ, business

Yes, the title is an experiment in clickbaiting. Not that I expect clicks.

From Panic by way of SixColors:

• We are suspending the sale of Transmit iOS very soon
• Revenue was not enough to cover development — we won’t sell something we can’t actively develop
• This does not affect Transmit 5 for Mac. It’s doing extremely well
• This also does not affect Coda iOS and Prompt iOS, both of which are still going strong
• We really hope to bring it back someday in some form
  

...

Transmit iOS made about $35k in revenue in the last year, representing a minuscule fraction of our overall 2017 app revenue. That’s not enough to cover even a half-time developer working on the app.

...

Interesting for many reasons.

1. This is one of the biggest macOS specialist shops. They get "free press". And they can't sustainably sell an FTP app on iOS.
2. You won't sell what you don't develop? Code doesn't rust, man. It gets better. (Though see the Simogo counterpoint.)
3. Wait, doesn't Coda boast "Remote protocols include SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, DreamObjects, and FTP (Plain, TLS, SSL) support"? Isn't Coda a text editor wrapping Transmit?
4. Are we really that far away from iPad Pros being used as pro [web dev] hardware? (Though Coda on iOS is apparently doing well.)
5. Are "protocol apps" dying in general? Remember Unison?
6. What's the iOS hardware breakdown (iPhone sizes, iPad sizes, etc) for Transmit and Coda use? Is Transmit used as "FTP of last resort"? And is that too expensive at $9.99?

Microsubscriptions

I'm fairly convinced that the answer to much of this, "But I can't resell this!" hand-wringing is for apps to charge microsubscriptions. Ads don't pay squat, and only seem useful as an excuse to charge $2 to remove them.

How about you instead charge $0.49 a year to use your app?

Or, here, for Transmit, say $3 a year? Whatever's cheap enough that if you need it, you'll pay it without thinking. If I'm stuck in my car and a link's broken, who isn't going to pay $3 to fix it? I'm sure not buying Coda for $25.

Self-Unfulfilling Prophecies

Later on, Sasser does say...

My optimistic take: we hope that as iOS matures, and more and more pro users begin to seriously consider the iPad as a legitimate part of their daily work routines, Transmit iOS can one day return and triumph like it does on the Mac.

I'm still thrown off by, "If we don't develop it, we don't sell it," here, I think. Why not leave the canary in the coal mine to see when things do start lighting up? Isn't there a chance having Transmit available would speed professional use?

Remember Joel's rule of thumb?

To take over a market, you have to address every barrier to entry. If you forget just one barrier which trips up 50% of your potential customers, then by definition, you can’t have more than 50% market share, and you will never displace the dominant player, and you’ll be stuck on the sad (omelet) side of chicken and egg problems.

We could argue that not having a good FTP client on iOS makes this "iOS maturation" take that much longer...

Why not experiment?

I'm also surprised by this...

Also, paid upgrades are still a matter of great debate and discomfort in the iOS universe, so the normally logical idea of a paid “Transmit 2 for iOS” would be unlikely to help.

Is that really not worth trying? Do you really think Transmit buyers map to your normal app market?

Though, at the same time, I'm not sure Transmit on macOS needs half the new features it's got. I'm still on 4, and would probably still be on 3 if it weren't for some bundle deal, if I'm remembering correctly.

That's why I'm back to microsubscriptions. Not a month. Do a year. At impulse rates. Need it once? Charge a sensible price for that plus the promise of a whole year later. You'll get close to $10 pretty quickly.

Bad Marketing?

Thanks to the power of iOS, Transmit will also extend the standard iOS Share sheet — the one you see in, say, Photos or Voice Memos, when you tap the Share button — to include a brand-new Transmit button. That means you can now share your Photos directly to your SFTP server, or share a podcast voice memo straight to Amazon S3. It's incredibly powerful.

And there's one more cool iOS thing: in compatible applications, like iWork, you can Open a document directly off your server. And when you hit Save, it will silently and perfectly upload back to your server. In other words, you can use your server as your own seamless cloud storage. Amazing.

Isn't that a more interesting application than an FTP client? Maybe they need to repackage. I mean, Coda is simply a text editor wedded to a [file-transfer app]. But that integration on iOS is exactly what makes it worth the cash.

And then there's the sad irony...

Labels: app store econ, apps, business, ios, panic

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

Let's take a quick aside from yesterday's post where Adamson says Overcast "is only barely viable". Really?

Wow. 855 * $2 (after Apple) = $1710 a quarter = $6,840 a year.

That's iff those were the only patrons Overcast got all quarter. That seems a higher number than I usually see (On Aug 22, it was 481, and around 480-500 the next week), but let's start playing with 200 a week, and oversimplify to 800 a month.

If we say that they only pay the lowest amount once -- $2.99 for three months -- that's 800 x $2 after Apple's cut = $1600 a month. That's $19,200 a year. Not much, but if you can sustain that without huge programming costs, not bad.

But let's pretend that the patrons pick 12 months instead of three, and pay $11.99. That's essentially $8 after Apple's cut per patron, or four times as much as our first number. $76,800 a year. Again, well below market rate for an 8-to-5, but nobody's working 8-to-5 today on Overcast. (All that previous work is a sunk cost at this point.)

For 400 patrons a week, we double those revenue numbers. Now we're talking.

Here's what it looks like:

At today's rate of 855 (though remember, there's no way that's what it's averaging), assuming no attrition/full years from each, it's $328,320, if my quick calc is right. Not bad for a single app that's not without its bugs.

Let's ballpark a middle ground at $80,000 (maybe close to 400 a week averaging a little over $5.75 each before Apple's cut) for this year. Plus 2014's $164k. Plus whatever happened last year. For a single app plus updates. That's a good investment.

Labels: app, app store econ, business, indie

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

Edit: Great wrap up of Redacted by Michael Tsai (who is without peer at link sniping these things).

And some quotes there are as sharp or sharper than mine:

• "Why would an app that focuses on obscuring part of an image reach the very heights of the MAS — in the graphics category..."
• "I would also add to your post about Redacted, Sam did almost zero marketing."

So as any good, RSS-equipped indie dev wannabe knows, Sam Soffes blogged about the release of Redacted yesterday. I've watched the video, I've seen the website. I agree with you. It wasn't a great launch, and it isn't a particularly great app. I can pixelate all I want with Skitch for free. And making black boxes on top of images? RLY? How long have we been able to Windows-R, mspaint? Heck, you can make white ones in Preview by selecting and cutting.

I bet Soffes wouldn't argue any of that. He certainly doesn't argue that it was a bum launch.

All I did was tweet the video about it a few days before it came out and then tweeted that it was out early the morning it was ready. Someone else submitted it to Product Hunt after seeing my tweet. The results were pretty shocking!

Dan Counsell would not be proud.

I'm all for supporting the village toymaker, but Redacted isn't exactly hitting a pain point for me, so I doubt it's aspirin for other OS X users that heard about the app either.

It's the results, stupid

But our take home today isn't that the launch wasn't great or the toy isn't particuarly novel. It's that this cruddy launch of a cruddy app DOMINATED THE APP STORE!!1!.

... Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!

Let's let that do the proverbial sinking in. This barely tweeted app was #8 overall paid in the US Mac App Store. That's great! Wow, look what a blog and twitter account bags you, right?

What a blog and a twitter account (and #8 top paid on US Mac App Store) bags you...

I tweeted asking people to guess how much I made yesterday (after Apple's cut)... Here are the actual results:

Results

Units	Proceeds	Sales [Gross]
94	$302	$452

7 of those units were promo codes I sent out. Only 59 of those units were in the US. It's pretty nuts that 59 sales is top paid on the Mac App Store in the US.

Wow. #8 in the US == 59 sales, at least on May 7th, 2015. And that bagged him $302. If he stayed #8 all year he makes $110k.

(Hint: He's not going to stay #8 all year. That said, by following the new, "I'll share my numbers with you indies, and then you'll buy my app," marketing plan, he's #2 currently. Sounds like he's getting $1000 today. See what a little marketing does for you? Dan's happier now. Not happy, but happier. ;^D)

Who is Sam, and what's the lesson for indies?

I almost decided to stay indie and work on Whiskey as much as possible to make a living on that. I'm glad I didn't. (I work at Venmo as of May 4th.)

I like the way he quietly slid his move back to full-time employment in there, but I'm not sure that's the right reaction. This is a guy who, about a year ago, made his goal to retire a year from now, at 25. Probably not going to do that at the 9-to-5.

This is also a guy who, just over seven months ago, said:

2 What advice can you give to someone just starting out like me?

This junk is hard. Don’t give up. Basically anything is possible if you just do it.

That's just sad, man. And it's pretty common, I think. I follow a recently pretty quiet blog from White Peak Software. The guy hit it fairly well at least twice, once on the Mac before iOS, and once during the iOS gold rush. And he's been working as an indie (plus contracting) for 10 years.

But he talks about a goal of making $700-1500 a month on software alone at one point, and apparently isn't hitting that goal. That stinks.

I'll probably blog more about this later, but the lesson seems clear: Go big or go home. Target business users somewhere, somehow in your business plan. News flash, niche seekers: You can't help but shoot for a niche, but, oxymoronically, shoot for a big one. Don't go out of your way making your ideas more niche. Simply find it. And don't expect any single marketing trick (perhaps excepting the aforementioned, "Here are my numbers; buy my app" trick) to push you into the black/green/what-have-you.

And don't expect to retire at 25 if you're the village toymaker. It could happen. It shouldn't be your goal.

Let me be clear: I really appreciate folks blogging about what's essentially failure. Soffes hasn't failed yet, but he was on his way if he just left Redacted on the Mac App Store pile without any more marketing. You could read what I'm doing here as a pretty hard slam. It isn't, though it's not slam-free.

Redacted has to be a side project for him. That is, I don't get the feeling this was the equivalent of Sinclair working on Unread:

I began work on Unread at the beginning of July 2013. I spent about six weeks on the overall design of the app, then plunged headfirst into Xcode, not coming up again for air until the following spring. I estimate that I worked sixty to eighty hours a week every week from July 2013 up until the launch of Unread for iPhone Version 1.0 in February 2014.

Getting several thousand dollars from a for fun side project ain't failure, man. It doesn't mean go back to Cubeland. Though getting $300 for being #8 Top Paid in the US might be. Reminds a little of Charles Perry's fable of "Pareto Distributions and the Long Tail":

Luckily, there’s a lot of money to be made in that long tail. At the top of the long tail, in position 871 on the U.S. Top Grossing list, an app still makes over $700 in revenue per day. That’s almost $260,000 per year. Even number 1,908 on the U.S. Top Grossing list makes over $100,000 per year.

I sent Perry an email after that post, and he was exceptionally kind with his time and replied, in detail. He's, imo, stuck on seeing the glass half full. Fair enough. But after hearing a number of people say targeting the Mac, where people will "still pay real prices" (I think Daniel Jakut, among others, has said something to that effect, though that's where his bread is buttered already), I'm not sure if the tail on OS X's store (not including straight sales, natch) is as long, and I wonder if the iOS App Store's is as fat as we thought.

I can agree strongly with Charles on one thing, though, that I believe he said on Release Notes: We need to grow the pie.

Soffes' big project was supposed to be Whiskey, a Markdown editor. I'm using a great, free Markdown editor right now -- MacDown. I don't see a single must-have, Markdown editor-evolving-feature on Whiskey's feature list. He's got to get better ideas, man, or he's got to gain a larger following. Note that I didn't say more original ideas. Just plain old, solid, "invest in gold" kinds of ideas.

And going back to work full-time is a sort of failure within the goals Soffes' expressed for himself. Though there's still hope: Soffes tends to fall in and out of full-time work. It'll be interesting to see what happens in a year to 18 months.

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

Today's headline is essentially the flip-side of a a post by Release Notes' Charles Perry that Marco shared yesterday. The post's conclusions on app revenue would make that Jump to Conclusions guy from Office Space proud:

In fact all apps above number 3,175 on the U.S. Top Grossing list produce enough revenue to at least make its developer [<<< sic!!] the United States household median income for 2014 ($53,891). And this is just for a single app.

Let's pretend his calculations are on the money. I don't know if they are or not. He mentions "Pareto distribution" with the requisite link to wikipedia, and, well, his n equals 1, so it seems legit. ;^)

It seems that even with the revenue curve tilted so heavily towards the big hits, the shape of the App Store still allows room for sustainable businesses to develop in the long tail. It seems that developers who work hard, mind the details, and treat their business like a business have a real chance of making it.

Really? That's Perry's take-home? "A real chance" as in, "if you don't buy a lottery ticket, you don't have a real chance to win"? I really enjoy Perry's podcast, but this post is horribly rose-colored.

Take another look. If your app is top 3175 for an entire year (which it very likely won't be, okay? Check out Exhibit Jared Sinclair), you'll have median income -- about what a reasonably experienced teacher makes, afaict. You know, those folks we always say are underpaid, largely because they deal with our brats day-in and day-out, but let's face it, unlike that of most key-masher engineers, it's not an unseemly, brat-resisting, over-the-top salary.

Again, that's iff your app doesn't fall out of the top 3175 for an entire year. Essentially Perry's pie-ish in the sky-ish numbers don't factor in app ranking churn. What you really need to know is how long it takes for an app like yours to drop from, say, 500 to 4000. I bet it's not very long.

Look, let's put this another way. Let's say that app ranking churn isn't nearly as volatile as I'm betting it is (even though, let's face it, I'm not wrong). If we define median income as our goal, if these numbers are accurate, only 3175 developers worldwide made median income or above on the app store for however long these revenue numbers are accurate. And that's only if each of those apps was written by a one-person shop! Perry does put in a caveat, implicitly asking, "What if you had two apps in there?!" Are we assuming they're both in the top 3175 for a year? Really? Guess what that means for the number of viable professional indie app developers?

And look, let's assume he does has access to non-median revenue fail apps. What did they make? Do they fit the curve and his predictions? What does our ranking over time look like? How long does an app sustain a "median wage" ranking if it breaks into the top 3175?

Each successful app on the way down but still in the rankings is another spot you can't get on your way up. I'd almost rather grow hand-cultivated wheat. Less risk.

These numbers are awful. That's not even a large company's worth of people. Ouch.

Good luck, everyone, in this year's hunger games. Or Thunderdome, or whatever your version of "scarce resources favor predators" metaphor is.

Labels: app store econ, business, hats of money, indie, ios

$164,134 total revenue after Apple’s 30% but before any taxes or expenses.

For most people, the App Store won’t be a lottery windfall, but making a decent living is within reach for many.

It had a perfect launch that far exceeded my expectations — it was the best launch an indie developer could possibly hope for, with tons of great press, a mid-level App Store feature, and thousands of tweets on launch day.

Labels: app store econ, apps, business, indie, ios

• He spent eight months building what, as he rightfully says, "is objectively a really nice app."  
• He's attacking a pretty well-used niche, all things considered.  
• 200k subscribers for Daring Fireball.  If he gets 5% -- not insane -- that's $50k right there.
• He's had, "an appropriate amount of press", which, honestly, it one of the things that scares me the most about trying to go indie.

I made Writing Aid in under a month, on and off. Thankfully, it sold well and produced a fantastic sales to hours ratio.

Imagine a scenario where it didn’t do that well. I would have essentially wasted a month of work … but that is a hell of a lot better than wasting a year of work. You hedge your bets by moving fast and moving on. [Emph mine]

"Jared Sinclair spoke of pricing strategies, and I think Marco Arment’s latest app, Overcast (a podcast player), is a good example of a general-purpose productivity/entertainment app that does it well: give limited demos of the paid-for functionality but make the app available to try for free, and use IAP to unlock those features, not a separate “Pro” version of the app. But that’s hard to pull off as well, and Marco has a lot of experience."

Sinclair’s results are not a “solid piece of evidence” of anything. They are an anecdote. And as long as we’re drawing grand conclusions from single data points, I thought it might be useful to look at someone on the other side of the spectrum. So I called up another friend of mine, Mike Love.

What stands out to me about Love’s approach was that from day one his differentiation was not based on design, ease-of-use, or some other attribute we usually glorify in developers. Rather, he focused on decidedly less sexy things like licensing. Sure, licensing is particularly pertinent to a dictionary app, but the broader point is that Love’s sustainable differentiation was not about his own code. Sustainable differentiation never is. [Emph mine]

Labels: app store econ, apps, business, indie, ios