Yearly Archives: 2013

The App Store Problem Is Not Price

Posted on by

We seem to go through this every few months in the world of App Stores: developers get together and start discussing how the lack of iOS App Store options such as upgrades means that developers can’t make a living. This kicked off again last week when David Smith mentioned that the lack of upgrade pricing for the $200 Logic Pro X app from Apple meant that upgrades weren’t going to happen. The guys on the Accidental Tech Podcast picked it up and had a long conversation about it as well [1].

First thing I recommend is a marketing 101 class then we can discuss this again.

The problem with app pricing has almost nothing to do with pricing. (Surprise!) The problem is distribution. And this also happens to be one aspect of the iOS ecosystem that everyone loves.

In the iOS world, there is only one place to buy apps: the App Store. Because there is only one place to buy apps, everyone goes there to find them. Because everyone goes there to find them and the contents are exactly the same for every app (a description, some keywords and a few pictures), it is nearly impossible to differentiate your product.

Saturday I walked in the grocery store looking for mustard. When I got to that shelf I found 10 different varieties from 7 different companies. Which did I buy? The cheapest one. Why? Because none of the brands were differentiated to me.

For 99% of us, there is no differentiation in the App Store. One company’s calculator is just like another company’s calculator. Sure, there are reviews to read and maybe you heard about a product on a blog somewhere, but most haven’t.

This is a vicious cycle. The lack of differentiation means the price drops, which means the money available to market an app drops, which means it is harder to differentiate.

What could help? Trials could help. That would allow someone to download an app and see the difference first hand, not just trust a screenshot. Apple has been clear, though. They prefer freemium. Getting out of the App Store itself can help. Building enough value to charge a subscription could help.

Productivity apps can’t survive and bring the long-term value customers demand at $2.99 or $4.99. At the end of the day, though, the app stores, whether Apple, Google or the like, are not going to solve our problem [2]. The only thing that will is rethinking the products so we can get out of the app stores and differentiate.

—

[1] Listening to Marco Arment talk about this problem is frustrating. The guy has an incredible personal brand, like Loren Brichter, and the things he touch get instant echo in the iOS chamber. Would The Magazine had been such a success if I had built it? No way. His personal echo chamber made that happen. (Note that I am not complaining in the least about his ability to do this. If anything I’m a little jealous.) [My apologies to Loren for misspelling his name in the original footnote.]

Update: I want to clarify that I meant it helps Marco’s app get initial interest, not that it guarantees success over the long-term.

[2] Are there App Store problems? Of course, and things Apple can do to fix them.

Victory Lap for Ask Patents

Posted on by

Joel Spolsky:

The America Invents Act changed the law to allow the public to submit examples of prior art while a patent application is being examined. And that’s why the USPTO asked us to set up Ask Patents, a Stack Exchange site where software developers like you can submit examples of prior art to stop crappy software patents even before they’re issued.

This is very interesting. There are a lot of very bizarre [1] patents that have been filed for software. As far as I’m concerned, I’d be okay if all software patents were disallowed. But this is a country run by lawyers who get big contributions from lawyers. It’s clearly time to take matters into our own hands, and luckily the government, along with Joel’s Stack Exchange company, are making this possible.

—

[1] Polite way of saying crappy.

—

For disclosure, I’ve filed a patent on some technology we are developing. While I’d hate to waste the money, I’d be happy anyway if software patents were eliminated.

Tarring An Entire Industry With Gimmicks And Tricks

Posted on by

David Smith on the problem with in app purchases:

There seems to be a culture developing around designing games and apps that are intended to intentionally mislead and coerce customers into making more and more purchases.

My most basic concern with this revenue model (and how it is currently being applied) is how it can become dishonest and intentionally misleading to customers. I don’t think anyone would contend that making a customer feel cheated or regretful of their purchases would be a good thing. The nature of many of the techniques currently employed is to create environments where customers make impulse decisions in the moment that they would not make with more context.

In it he refers to an article that talks openly about the tricks developers are using to get people to buy more with in app purchases. It is also worth referring to this post on how Nielsen’s usability heuristics are manipulated across the Internet to do the same kinds of things, primarily with mailing lists. (Example: Click the box to not be emailed.)

He’s right, of course. Using people in this way is damaging over time. People come to not trust that company to do right by them. Credit card companies have played this game for years, making us read pages of documents to keep our information private, navigate tricky language, and then do it every year instead of once. And look how much we trust the finance industry these days!

It would be nice if just these companies developed a bad reputation but it doesn’t work that way. The problem is all of us who write code are affected by these games played by app makers. When customers stop trusting one, they stop trusting all of us.

Infinity Softworks received this support email this weekend, and by all accounts this is a fairly mild one:

Not what I expected. I needed actual Financial calculator not just the problem solving feature. I’d like either my money back or the option to have a calculator as option. I will voice my opinion regarding this. Very disappointed. Kind of pissed.

The author doesn’t trust us. We’ve been tarred and feathered by gimmicks and tricks of companies past. The author feels that we have misled and the only recourse will be to get vocal about it.

Never mind that it is probably a simple misunderstanding.

If I Were Running Microsoft…

Posted on by

(I do this periodically regarding companies I think are screwing up royally. The last few times RIM has been my target. This time it’s Microsoft.)

Microsoft is moving in completely the wrong direction. The company is sadly disintegrating before our eyes, suddenly trying to emulate Apple and become a hardware company. Microsoft has little hardware in its blood, though. If I were running Microsoft, I’d focus Microsoft’s future on Microsoft’s past: making developers really really happy.

In the late 1970s Microsoft focused on developing and selling tools to help developers write applications. MS-BASIC was their big application. They licensed it to hardware companies, including Apple, and sold it to developers for other platforms. When IBM came calling, it was really originally because of MS-BASIC. IBM also needed an OS and, with more history then I want to explain here, MS-DOS was born.

Over the years the Windows-Office-Server triumvirate has reigned supreme but now Windows is faltering. The first thing I would do is spin out the Windows division into its own company, making it responsible for PCs, tablets, phones and gaming systems. In other words, I’d finish what the Justice Department failed to do ten years earlier: break up the company.

The second thing I’d do is double-down on developer tools. Now I use this term loosely. To most the term “developer tool” means the kind of tool a developer would use to write in C or .net or some other programming language. But in this case I have a much broader meaning. Yes, I mean Microsoft should still create those tools, working closely with the Windows Company to give them away for free, but it should also focus on a series of developer tools we don’t really consider tools: Azure, Server, and Office.

Azure is the perfect 21st century developer tool set. Developers upload their code to Azure, integrating basic services like push notifications very easily, and paying Microsoft a monthly sum for the benefits. Small business? Not likely. For Microsoft it is already a billion dollar business. Amazon and Google make serious money off these services, too. Fully focusing on a suite of tools that help developers make and deploy apps across all platforms is a no-brainer for Microsoft and gets them even more services revenue, the kind of revenue all software companies should be looking for.

The second group of developers Microsoft should focus on is the IT departments. Yes, controlling workers is still big business (and again with recurring revenues) and even more critical in a world where bringing your own devices to work is quickly becoming the norm. What apps get developed, how they get deployed and how those employees access corporate resources (or don’t when they are fired) is mission critical and also big business.

The third group are end-users. The amazing power of the Office suite is that any poor schlub on the street can “write an app,” or rather build a solution for their specific needs. With Word I can create a beautiful, custom made document. With Excel I can work with my lists or numbers. With Access, tons of data can be analyzed and collected. And on the back-end of all these is a programming language for the more adventurous. But these tools are designed for a mouse. The question I’d focus the new Microsoft on is what do these tools look like on touch devices and how do we tie them into their Office 365 platform? That’s a question well worth exploring.

Is this a drastic step? Of course, but one I think is required to keep Microsoft relevant in the 21st century. This new Microsoft, the one in my mind anyway, is no small company. It is however repositioned for success in a world where the desktop operating system is only one of many its customers will be using.

Maximum Viable Product

Posted on by

Allen Pike writes:

We enthusiasts love maximal products because they inspire us and delight us. As such, we support these highly polished apps. We buy them, we write about them, we celebrate them, and we buy the t-shirt. We pay $2.99 each to try two different alternatives to the free Twitter app. These fans love what you’re making so much that they can support your business.

We call these folks prosumers. Consumer enough to care about polish, craftsmanship, and the emotion behind your product, yet still pro enough to put money where their mouth is. They are enthusiasts, either of the task at hand or of apps as a craft.

A prosumer seeks out Maximum Viable Products.

Interesting thought, although maybe more difficult to execute than minimum viable product. After all, spending the time to build out that maximum product before knowing whether anyone will pay for it is dangerous.

Given that, a lot of minimum viable products don’t implement a revenue generator, which means that the MVP isn’t testing the most important piece: will anyone pay for this? While not charging at first might have worked for Dropbox and Twitter and Facebook and a few other big companies, they also all had access to vast amounts of capital. They are the exception to the rule; we are not.

My focus is on minimum viable product to start, one that has enough to charge for so we can see the reaction, but also one that has legs and can become a maximum viable product over time. After all, I don’t want to become someone else’s feature.