Tag Archives: iOS

Buying Market Share

May 23, 2013 – 1:18 pm

Android’s Market Share Is Literally A Joke | Tech.pinions – Perspective, Insight, Analysis: “The company that buys market share must inevitably go out of business or reverse its course and fight its way back up to profitability. The company with the value and the profits, on the other hand, has the advantage of holding the high ground and can choose to take market share at will.”

(Via John Kirk for Tech Opinions.)

This, in a nutshell, is what’s wrong with developers on the App Store trying to get to the top of the charts at any cost. They’re buying market share by maximizing downloads instead of profits. And most end up making little money as a result.

Kirk’s piece here is examining iOS Phones vs. Android, but the same concept applies to the software sold on these devices as well. Having more users is actually a bad thing when the cost per user is higher than the profit per user. 

People like to cite Microsoft when talking about the value of market share, but they always seem to forget that Microsoft never sacrificed profit margin to get that market share. It was the hardware manufacturers—Dell, Sony, HP, Gateway, etc.—who were caught up in the pricing wars. Microsoft pitted them against each other and sat back on a pile of gold as they tore each other to pieces. 

Google? Not so much with Android.

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OmniPresence

May 22, 2013 – 12:17 pm

I didn’t appreciate this when I was beta testing OmniPresence (because the beta was Mac-only and didn’t involve the iPad) but The Omni Group has really done something amazing with this new synching software. In essence, they’ve married the best of Dropbox and iCloud, and they’ve given it away for any developer to use.

The Problem with Dropbox

Dropbox is no question a rock-solid solution for synching files. And it’s about as simple as a synching solution can get on the Mac. Create a folder. Put anything you want in that folder. Everything in that folder is available everywhere. Perfect, right?

Well, it’s perfect on the Mac, but when you then move over to accessing your files with your iPad, things get a little clunky. And not just because of Apple’s restrictions about sharing data between apps. I actually believe in what Apple is trying to do with removing the file system on the iPad. No matter how much we nerds scream about it, the file system is probably the biggest barrier average users have to learning to use a Mac. There is an elegant simplicity to opening an app on an iPad and seeing only the files that app understands and nothing else. Using a solution like Dropbox on the iPad always feels like a step backwards, no matter how you slice it. Navigating folder structures just feels wrong. It’s simply not native to the platform.

The Problem with iCloud

iCloud, at the same time, is much better on the iPad than it is on OS X. It was created with the removal of the Finder in mind. That’s fine on the iPad, but we expect and want to use the Finder on our Macs. We get frustrated when we can’t simply see a folder with all our files in it on the Mac. Where did my shared files go? How to I share them with anyone else? iCloud is downright confusing and extremely limiting on the Mac.

The Solution

What OmniPresence manages to do is behave like Dropbox on the Mac and iCloud on the iPad. And that’s just brilliant. On your Mac, set up a folder, just like you would for Dropbox, drop anything you want in there, and it syncs. Move it around, make subfolders, whatever. But then open any OmniPresence-enabled app on your iPad, and you see just the files pertaining to that app in your document list. Make changes on either device, and the file gets auto-updated, just like with iCloud, even while open. Even if you create subfolders on the Mac, the documents all show up in your list natively on the iPad without having to drill down anywhere. And you’re not copying the file from your Dropbox app into the iPad app, making changes, and then manually syncing back; all changes are synched back in seconds automatically.

As if this weren’t cool enough, Omni then takes it another two steps by 1) allowing you to sync to your own server instead of Omni’s and 2) releasing the synch software as open source, so anyone can do whatever they want with it. This removes any ambiguity about security or monetization motivations. Don’t trust Dropbox or Omni with your files? Fine, just set it up and run it on your own server.

This may all sound like a commercial for The Omni Group, but I’m just stunned they’ve managed to pull this off so cleanly. I hope a lot of other app developers realize what an opportunity this is and start embedding this functionality into their apps.

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Release Notes

May 20, 2013 – 7:09 am

A little while back my friend Charles Perry and I decided to try our hand at putting together a podcast. While we’re fully aware there are lots of great tech podcasts out there vying for your precious listening time, we thought together we could offer our own spin on things and add a bit more to the conversations going on in the independent iOS and Mac development communities.

I’m a big believer in giving back to the community in any way I can. While my occasional rants on this blog are one of my favorite ways to do that, I also thought maybe it was time to start using my physical voice as well as my internal one. Plus, having a discussion with another developer who might actually disagree with me on occasion could certainly be interesting and beneficial to shaping my views. Charles is a really smart, opinionated guy, so hashing out these topics with him made perfect sense to me.

Release Notes, then, will be a weekly half-hour-ish show geared towards fellow independent developers. Those who are new to the game looking for tips and tricks, and those who are just curious to hear from two other people in the same boat. It’s not a technical show at all; our tagline is “everything but the code.” Rather, it’s about the business of app development.

Episode one covers tech conferences. Why one should or shouldn’t attend them. How to get the most out of them. Even some specific conferences we recommend.

Next week, episode 2 will cover the scary prospect of quitting the day job and going full-time independent.

After that, given the timing, we’re going to talk WWDC. (And I’ll give away some of my secret tips on where to find the best coffee, bourbon, and Scotch whiskey in San Francisco.)

Hope you enjoy. We’d love to have your feedback. We’re just getting started with this thing, and already I can feel the conversations are just going to get better and better over time.

Find out more about Release Notes at releasenotes.tv.

Subscribe via iTunes, or search for us in your favorite podcatcher software. Our feed is http://releasenotes.tv/feed/podcast/.

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Sometimes We Kick Tires. Sometimes We Buy a Car

May 10, 2013 – 11:10 am

Free Trials and Tire Kickers – Marco.org: “But PC-class pricing would fundamentally change iOS buying habits, and we may not like the results.

Browsing the App Store and getting new apps, often spending a few bucks along the way, is a form of casual entertainment for a lot of people. This role used to be filled by movies and music. Today, it’s filled by browsing the internet and playing with mobile apps. Usually, they’re games, but not always — modern mainstream culture, especially younger people, seem to be more interested in media and social apps than games.

This apps-as-entertainment market falls apart if app pricing rises above casual-disposable levels for most people. Few people balk at spending $1-3 for something that doesn’t end up being that great, but when someone’s $30 app is disappointing, that’s going to stick with them and inhibit future purchases.”

(Via marco.org.)

Marco is absolutely right when he says that free trials on iOS wouldn’t solve every developer’s problems, and could actually hurt certain categories of apps. 

The thing is though, for anyone making apps that aren’t games or “tire-kicker” experiences, the lack of free trials is absolutely crippling. I don’t want the average selling price on the App Store to be $50 for weather apps. I’m fine with casual apps that are priced according to their purpose. I just want my phone and my iPad to do a lot more than “apps-as-entertainment” allow them to do, too.

We’re not seeing a more sophisticated level of software on iOS not because the iPad is a weak computer. Not because touch interfaces are toys. But because the economics of the App Store make sustaining such an app near impossible. It’s simply not worth the investment.

That’s not just bad for developers. It’s terrible for Apple in the long run, too. And it’s terrible for customers.

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A Step Towards the Visceral

April 15, 2013 – 5:42 am

I surprised myself last week by working up yet another new version of x2y. I thought it would be a few months before I had a chance to finish up the optimizations and polishing I wanted to do for 1.5. But another project required me to do some research into animation in UIKit, and thus I couldn’t resist bringing some of that fun into x2y as well.

A short while ago, Foster from Mysterious Trousers wrote a nice piece about the “visceral” elements of some apps. The little unnecessary but delightful things that speak to our gut when using software.

I believe when properly done, a visceral app actually causes your body to release endorphins.

(via mysterioustrousers.com.)

Reading his article, I couldn’t help but think of all the examples of this in the apps that I love most. And I immediately thought that perhaps this was something missing in x2y. Sure, the app looks good and functions perfectly, but could it do a better job of “surprise and delight”? Always.

I had actually thought of adding one particular animation early on in the development of x2y, but I thought it would be way too hard and complicated for someone relatively new to Objective-C to implement. When the swap values button is tapped, I thought it would be cool to have the values actually slide over to their new positions, rather than just immediately change in place. That movement from left to right, right to left, would not only look cool but also serve to make clearer to the user exactly what was happening. Much like the “Genie Effect” in OS X with minimized windows, the motion would actually convey meaning, not just be a cool whiz bang effect. Later, I thought when tapping the double and half buttons it would be cool if the numbers “flexed” a bit, growing slightly and then coming back down for doubling, and shrinking slightly and then growing back up for halving. Reinforcing to the user which values had changed.

x2y animations on the iPhone from Joe Cieplinski on Vimeo.

I thought for sure all of this would be a major undertaking, but UIKit makes this far simpler than you’d expect. And so after a lot of experimentation and fine-tuning to get everything just right, I had managed in a day or two to get all the animations going just the way I wanted. I even added a fun animation for when you add a new Common Aspect, which is particularly nice on the iPad.

x2y animations on the iPad from Joe Cieplinski on Vimeo.

Once I had these cool animations on my iPhone and iPad, I couldn’t wait to get them into the shipping app. I found myself just tapping on the swap button for fun, rather than because I wanted to actually swap the values. It was speaking to my gut, which was a good harbinger of how my customers might react. So I hunkered down and did all the optimizations I wanted to do. I managed to shrink the overall file size of the app back down to under 6MB, and I tightened up some of my code after analyzing it a bit.

The result: an earlier than expected maintenance release, with a few added extra surprises. Not bad for a few weeks’ work.

Hope you enjoy the more “visceral” x2y. I know I do.

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