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

Every three or four years I buy whatever seems to be the best "cheap-flagship" Android phone on the market to test responsive websites and Android apps I'm developing... but also to see what it'd be like to use Android as my mobile OS. I use a throw-away Google account (whose backup address is a main account, so they probably know what's up), but, past that small identify obfuscation, I usually allow it to know where I'm at and not worry about too many privacy revelations, a big change from how I act in iOS.

That said, I do tend to use DuckDuckGo, Here maps, and really like Fair Email, the latter the only Android-exclusive app I've paid for beyond a few Humble Bundle Android games years ago.

About four years years ago, I got a Nokia 6. Excellent phone. Nice big screen. Performance was kinda shoddy and the camera stunk. I only used it with my SIM a few times as my "real" phone, and wow, bad camera.

But it seemed like a lot of phone for $200.

I had no idea.

The $120 Android phone... with a year of service.

Recently I bagged a Moto G (2020) on sale at HSN with a "year's worth" of Tracfone service for $120. (thanks, SlickDeals)

It only comes with 1.5 gig of data, but it has 1500 minutes and 1500 texts that can be used over the duration of a year which -- combined with lots of WiFi usage -- might actually be doable. I'm flabbergasted.

The phone's size is right in between an iPhone 12 and a 12 Max at 6.4". I generally like smaller phones, and tentatively plan to get a 13 mini to replace my SE2, but I'm always jealous of my Android phones' giant screens. Cheap components, surely, but the larger size really is nice. It's as large as you'd want a one-handed iPad to be, which is essentially what it is, tall as you can stand and, like single-wides going down the interstate, width limited by the width of your hand.

It's hard to reach the tops of some poorly designed apps, and the app icons on my first home screen matches my limited thumb reach (see below -- can you do that on iOS? I think, short of empty spacesaver icons, no), which is weird to see, but when I'm reading and browsing, the giant screen is fantastic.

You can see how my home screen's triangle matches that orange space on the plus-sized phone screen.

I also want to admit that the "hole punch" selfie cam is great. It's so small (smaller than the red dot I put on the screenshot, above) that it seems like a single notification icon. Huge win over a notch. I realize Apple wants to put that under the screen, but until they do, this is superior. Apple really needs to figure out how to Face ID with less real estate -- or make it optional.

The fingerprint scanner is moved to the back of the phone to stay out of the way of the screen. Smart. There's no face unlock, which is what allows the single selfie cam, but I've hated Face ID since I bought an iPhone XR and gave up within a year. Performance is... amazingly competent. I only sense some slowdown occasionally. Gaming is okay. Asphalt 8 plays extremely well so far, but, strangely, Pokemon Go has stuttered a few times.

The macro lens (there are three lenses, macro, wide, and normal) is a waste of space, but it's otherwise a heck of an improvement over the Nokia 6, as it should be. I don't think it's as good as my iPhone SE2, but it's close. Give me more play time.

And the battery honestly lasts for more than day. You could go two, maybe three light days with this thing on a single charge, no problem. And it's USB-C, so charging or finding a battery pack is pretty easy.

It has 64 gigs of space, expandable to 512 with an SD card. Gosh I wish Apple allowed SD cards. With an iPhone 12, you're paying $150 just to get from 64 to 256 gigs of internal space. What a racket. Just buy this phone and put it in your other pocket.

For $120. Let that sink in. $120. $120 with, at worst, several months of minutes and texts.

Look, I like Apple. I use iPhones as my daily driver.

But how much is someone's privacy worth? Is it $300-700 every two years? Tough call. I'd like to think so. I also suspect that's an inflated view of my self-worth. What do they really learn about me, and how is that likely (lots of caveats here, admittedly) going to influence my life going forward?

You know what's more to the point? More to the point is asking how much someone can afford to spend on privacy. If I'm having a hard time making ends meet and you offer me a giant phone and ostensibly a year's worth of service for $120, I'm buying it every time. And the experience really isn't so far from iOS that I'm going to regret it in my day-to-day for an instant.

Labels: android, ios

Then it was okay if you skirted that a little and showed a composite image of your app that spanned two demo slots, maybe with some “Now 88% more cooler!!1!” lain over top?

Now we’re not even pretending there’s decorum. Do whatever. 

Labels: app store, apple, ios

Our favorite _DavidSmith has declared app support bankruptcy. With the success of WidgetSmith, I get it. He's got MUCH bigger fish to fry.

But I emailed a decently written bug request on September 24th, well before WidgetSmith blew up, and I just received this reply (to be clear, it's the first reply. Not even an autoresponse before, afaict), a short month and a half later.

No offense, and I think he'd admit it: That's email support bankruptcy.

Why good indie apps often have incredible support... initially

Again, as a developer with a small app store side business, I get it. It's tough to find the time to reply to every request, and the time it takes to reply is never a good trade off on its face. If I answer an email carefully once with a $15 app, I've probably lost money, and if I get into an email chain, it's, on some level, a time and resource sink I'll never climb out of.

But note: It makes sense to go overboard on support when you start, as you're looking for word of mouth at that point. If you can get your first 500 customers, then maybe you have a snowball big enough to lead to a sustainable business. And so lots of indie devs give amazing support (I'm looking at you, Daniel Jalkut) in ways that are simply unsustainable at scale.

The danger of success

I'm not sure when David made it to "sustainable snowball" stage, but I'm confident he's well past it and into avalanche stage with WidgetSmith now.

And I think this is a weakness of indie development. As much as David wasn't "in it to hit big", he's not against it. He's been writing apps for a decade (plus?) and taking a shotgun approach with good individual success. Now he's extremely successful*. What happened to that awesome support? (Disclaimer: I've never gotten awesome support from his apps, but at least with the hired help, I've gotten a reply or two.) 

As a sort of app experience comp, I'll also admit Marco's complete lack of support for Overcast, the podcast player, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Always has. I've emailed and posted a few bugs to Twitter, and nothing. Not even a "like". 

That's fine, and it's not a dumb decision (see above on time), but it's not a decision I really appreciate as a customer. 

Hire a contractor to go through and reply, "That's interesting. Does anyone else have the same issue?" to every Twitter post. If the contractor finds enough of the same thing, have them tell Marco and get an update from him to post on the issue. What does that cost? $50 once every week or two? Overcast gets 150+ new subscribers a week on a bad week. That's $1000 a week new income. With 50% churn each year, that's still... carry the one... enough to hire someone.

And that's really the issue. Marco already had a single app whose business was bigger than the snowball but smaller than the avalanche on some level. He hasn't had to keep pushing out apps to find success. He's easily making $200k a year on Overcast, which I'd call success. He doesn't have to find another app (though, given his history, I'm sort of surprised he hasn't). 

This is the danger for users of indie apps: Indie apps with enough success find that word of mouth for good support is no longer particularly important. 

Leaving the toy store

I'm reminded of this post from Brent Simmons:

People in the village love toys, but they also like to get to know the village toy-maker.

Brent was talking about having a blog, but I'd extend that to all communication from the dev to the user. When the toymaker discovers their Rubik Cube and goes to the big city, you don't get to really know the village toymaker any more. What's more, you'll find they've stopped making your favorite toys.

So though it makes sense in David's case to declare support bankruptcy and to put his limited resources on the cash cow, it's an off-putting move. I don't want to check out "his apps here". Which of those are being supported now? Why not just point me to WidgetSmith? Isn't that effectively the message behind the message? "For at least the near-term, until the fire burns itself out, we're a WidgetSmith-only shop." Nothing inherently wrong with that. At least it's honest.

Here's the important point for David: Realize, at least for the time being, that you're no longer the village toymaker.

Suggestions

Here are some more suggestions to improve the email. As someone whose even taught business writing a few times, I don't feel it's out of turn to offer them.

• It's been over a month at this point. Again, on some level, why engage at all? You've already sent the "I don't quite have time" message loud and clear.
• But if you do communicate -- 
• Is there a FAQ of common errors/issues? Can you identify if my issue is on that?
• Is there a forum where the community might help? (Could you [hire someone to] stand one up?)
• Maybe try this: Ask me if I've found a solution in the last 45 days.
• (Spoiler: I have.)
• Give users a realistic timeframe before they can expect "real" help.

Labels: business, communication, indie, ios, support

Labels: apple, ios, windows phone

Labels: apple fail, first world problems, ios, left-handedness

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

Today, I had to make up some quick wireframes for a possible freeware iOS app. I did a quick google to find a free wireframe tool, and boy, they're almost all pay to play, or not only are they pushing you to pay to play, the few free features are hidden behind a sign up you have to perform before downloading.

I did manage to find a decent one in wireframe.cc. Not heavy on the tooling -- I think it brags about being minimalist -- and there are a number of things you have to roll... yourself... every... time (like buttons, which are rects with rounded edges that you then drop a label on top of and move together later), but for free, it's very nice.

Here's an example of one screen from the insanely complicated (har har) UI I made.

(I'm helping a charity that distributes goods, and wants to ensure they haven't served anyone twice before everyone's been served, regardless of location. At the same time, we want to track an absolute minimum of information, and nothing that could be used as PII. So voila.)

I didn't see a way to use my own image, like a gear icon for settings, but for a mock-up, it's perfect. Quick and painless.

Labels: design, ios, noteToSelf

I like to listen to artists by album, and I like to pick which album to start from. No luck in iOS Music-land. From macrumors.com:

OMG Seriously! Far out, Apple have done bad! 

Thanks for that though 

That was not particularly discoverable.

But it gets worse...

That certainly works, but the albums are still sorted in reverse chronological order (and have been since iOS 7).

So bad. Big league! This has driven me crazy for years. You'd think Apple could get the iPod part right by now.

I tried Cesium. Something eventually talked me out of it... I think, in addition to the fact that Siri only uses Music, that I recall a few nasty crashes.

Doesn't seem like a music app would be this difficult to get right. There were lots of decent ones on OS 9-, for instance.

Labels: apple fail, ios, iTunes, music

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

• I love the San Francisco font. Much easier to read than before on the tiny devices.
• News isn't all bad.

• iOS decided to sign my alt-Apple ID out of Game Center and sign me in with the ID I use on the rest of my phone. That's not exactly cool.
• My iPod touch 5th gen is showing its age. 
• A fair number of crashes.
• A little more "chrome slow-down" now that I'm on iOS 9, I think.
• Safari content blockers apparently require 64-bit procs.
• I know; that really belongs in the previous set of "my touch is old".
• Yes, I know there are lots of jokes that come with that phrase.
• This:

Labels: apple, apple fail, fimp, ios

Appbot's blog has some neat information on it, but I'm not always sure they pay their raw data enough careful attention when showing ways you could usefully use it.

Take the most recent post, Feeling the love: Sentiment in the Top 10 Free vs Paid Apps:

There are 7.5x as many reviews about bugs for the top 10 free apps as there are for the top 10 paid. Interestingly, given that there were 8.7x as many reviews overall for free apps, this actually means that bugs are reported proportionately less often for free apps than paid.

Would be nice if they normalized that in the image. It's nearly useless now, as it just shows total numbers. There's no real eyeballing possible.

For the top 10 paid apps only 17% of reviews about updates are positive, compared with a massive 93% for the top 10 free apps! If you have a paid app, it seems your risk of upsetting customers with an update is significantly greater than with free apps, where updates
seem to be very well received.

This one scares me a bit more -- just because the word "update" is in the review doesn't mean (though I'm not sure it isn't usually a safe assumption) the review is speaking about an update that was just released. It could very well -- and this was my first assumption for paid -- be complaining that there hasn't been a recent update to add more functionality. I can't tell how well they're checking review content before categorizing it. If it's just the word popping up, the processing here isn't worth much.

A later comment plays into a similar line of thought as mine:

The only difference in the top 5 topics was for the third most popular with "feature requests" coming in third for paid and "performance" in third place for free. Paid users seem more inclined to proactively ask for things – and rightly so :) Reviews for the performance topic tend to focus around speed, load times, buffering issues, and so forth. Perhaps this is a greater issue for these top 10 free apps simply because of the huge scale they operate at.

Ultimately, the conclusions Appbots makes from the data are pretty, well, disappointingly qualitative:

If you look at the data for individual apps you'll find that getting your user sentiment up to the level we see in the top 10 paid apps requires a bespoke approach for your app specifically. It's not enough to just throw money at, for example, design and UX because we can see that it's important at a high level. You need to know what improvements your users are asking for and what criticisms they have about your design and UX, in detail, then nail each point.

This, you didn't have to pay to know.

And finally...

highlighted that the app is the best of it's kind,

Pet peeve: Why can't we either give up on using "its" or use it correctly?

Also, a quick, random annoyance: Why can't I set up Touch ID as my password for iTunes purchases, etc without having to set up a lock code? It's not like it's more secure to have to hit my Touch ID once to unlock the phone and then again to authorize a store purchase. I don't like to have my iPhone locked, and I don't like typing my Apple ID password in the "open" to authorize something. Would be nice to leverage the Touch ID there.

Labels: app store, indie, ios

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

1. Table stakes (do what everyone else does)
2. Killer feature
3. Lucky launch
4. Profit

I thought Manual was way too niche. How many people actually wanna set ISO on their smartphone? It never crossed my mind that it could exceed Everyday's launch. The launch went so unbelievably well. I was blown away. People were tweeting, the press was great, Apple featured it immediately. Shock and awe. I will toot my own horn and say that the video I made with Oliver helped a lot.
Manual was available for 100 days in 2014. Here’s my dinky:

95,621 total sales.
$123,413 USD total revenue (after Apple’s 30%, before taxes).
$91,773 USD in the first month.

Yeah it was [screwed] up. In terms of up-front expenses it was minimal, the investment is our time. I spent $1,500 on the website, video, sound design, domain, and stock photos. There are no substantial monthly expenses.

I submitted Manual a week before the iOS 8 release from Phoot Camp over shaky wifi. Including a fun last minute sprint to create new screenshot sizes for the iPhone 6 and plus. We got lucky and Apple approved Manual a few days later.

Labels: apps, indie, ios

His list of expenses leave out one really big thing: marketing. Through hard work and good fortune, Marco is a well-known figure among many of Overcast’s potential customers. This kind of exposure would be expensive for the average indie developer to replicate. For example, ongoing discussions of Overcast on the ATP podcast (before, during, and after the 1.0 launched [sic -mfn]) would have cost thousands of dollars — at least $3750 per episode. ... Promoted tweets that reach 78,000 interested Twitter followers wouldn’t be cheap, either, relative to $160K in revenue. Overcast also benefitted from numerous conversational mentions from friends of Marco’s like John Gruber, who carry a lot of weight behind their recommendations.

Perhaps Marco intentionally left out these things because he was worried about sounding like a jerk. I’m having a hard enough time writing this article as a third-party without sounding like a [punk], so I can appreciate the backlash he might endure if he mentioned them directly.

Labels: apps, business, 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

Apple has pulled iOS 8.0.1 from the Developer Center and it is also no longer available via an over-the-air download.

Embarrassing.

Labels: apple fail, 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

The Amazon phone is a direct line from my wallet to Jeff Bezos' wallet.

Labels: amazon, android, apple, hats of money, ios, smartphone

Labels: android, c#, fail, gui, ios, xamarin