Google announced that developers can now reply to reviews in Google Play, Android’s app store. I thought I would add a few Do’s and Don’ts for us developers to consider. For instance,

DO reply to correct facts.

This is worth doing. A customer says your product doesn’t have feature XYZ and you respond, saying it does and how to find it. I would highly suggest being very polite about it, though.

Another one,

DO answer feature requests.

A lot of customers will request features through the review system. It is a great use of the reply option to tell them the app is adding this with the next release or that you will consider the suggested change.

As a corollary, though,

DON’T tell the customer a feature is coming and then fail to follow through.

If you fail to follow through, you are now a liar and the customer will feel obligated to tell everyone in all reviews moving forward. Not much worse than this.

Oh, wait, there is something worse than this,

DON’T argue with customers over opinions.

A spitting contest won’t do you any good and you can’t argue with the customer anyway. Others will just read it as argumentative. Or as John Moltz points out, “This could end up being [your] opportunity to go from being labelled ‘developer of lousy, one-star app that should be free’ to ‘asshole developer of lousy, one-star app that should be free’.”

Since I like to be positive, let’s finish off with this one,

DO wait before posting.

This is the “don’t be an idiot” rule. (Okay, that wasn’t very positive.) People say rude things, especially when there is a cold-hearted company on the other end. After all, to them there is no difference between Microsoft and a sole proprietor. It is easy, as someone who has sunk heart and sole into the product that is now being ripped apart to rip back. This will end badly. So write that response, read it over a few times, chuckle to yourself regarding your witty repertoire, then delete it. Trust me, you’ll be better off to forget this one.

Marco Arment linked to a blog post and commented that paid iOS apps are not dead:

In most categories, if you either solve a new problem that a lot of people have, or solve an old problem in a new and better way, you can sell a paid app today just as well as you could in 2008. In fact, the market is much bigger now. But, as with any maturing market, you’ll need to do more to get noticed since so many problems have already been solved so well.

Bull, unless of course you make games. Apps — of the productivity persuasion — are indeed dead. If you can’t make a living, what’s the use. In 1999 Palm sold 6 million units. Infinity Softworks, in its first full year of sales, sold $200,000 worth of software. That means we made about $0.03/device sold. I was breakeven and made a living for myself. In 2009, our first full year of selling iPhone apps, Apple sold 20 million units. We brought to the table a decade of customers moving to iOS, an App Store in its infancy (less competition), and an app far more capable then anything I wrote in 1999. We made about $50,000, or a very pathetic $0.0025 per device sold. Yes we have had more success since mostly because we were involved with the iPad launch, but not one of these years has approached our peak Palm years. (1999 was not our peak.)

In other words, not only is there no market for paid (Android and iOS productivity) apps [1], there probably never really was. The occasional hit comes and goes, but the peak is too short lived to sustain a reasonable productivity app. A few of those early apps (like Instapaper) had staying power, but there were precious few of them, and far less than in the Palm/Windows Mobile days, especially when you consider how many more devices are being sold now than before.

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[1] I want to be very clear here. I am talking about one-time purchase productivity apps, the kind where you buy the app and use it. In the old days we sold those apps and then sold upgrades. I believe the market for productivity tools is moving to subscriptions.

Two posts ago I talked about Marco Arment selling Instapaper to Betaworks. Last time I expounded on the psychology of being an independent developer and projected what might be going on inside Marco’s head. In the last of my trilogy on Instapaper and Marco, I want to talk about the app itself and the potential path forward.

Instapaper is a read-it-later product. It is very simple to use. You find something you want to read but don’t have time to read it. Marco provides a browser bookmarklet (a bookmark that acts like a little app) that, when you click on it, sends the current page’s contents to Instapaper. When you run the app, the article downloads, sans all the ads and junk on the page, and makes it available to read with or without an internet connection. Like DVRs, it is about time shifting, moving things from the time you don’t have to the time you do. Five years ago there were few services like this but now there are a quite a few competitors, almost of all of which are free and have big money behind them.

As I have explained before, I believe we want to put products into a box. There is a job to be accomplished and I want to know which product I use to get it done. The job to be done, say grocery shopping, goes into the Safeway box. The job to be done, say syncing files across devices, goes into the Dropbox box. Products that don’t have a clear box, that aren’t clearly hired to do a job, disappear. Finding the right box is the hardest thing about starting any business.

Instapaper has been a success by finding its box. The job Instapaper is hired to do can be looked at at a number of levels:

1. It’s hired to shift time from now, when I don’t have it, to later, when I do.
2. It’s hired to hold onto articles and stories I want to come back to later.
3. It’s hired to fill gaps in my day, downtime if you will, with something to do.

With these ideas in mind, the low hanging fruit becomes obvious and timing is on Instapaper’s side. If it was up to me, my first target of attack would be RSS feeds. With Google Reader going away in a couple of months, it is a perfect opportunity for Instapaper to add RSS reader capabilities into the product. RSS brings the news to you. I quickly skim the list of articles marking the ones I want to read later. A single product that could take stuff I want to read later from anywhere — Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, random web sites — would be a fantastic extension for the way I already use the app. Best of all, it is worthy of subscription revenues, the holy grail for us software developers.

I’m certain that Instapaper, as it is today, is just scratching the surface of its capabilities. With the correct attention and skill set behind it, Instapaper can be a powerhouse for years to come. I’m excited to see what Betaworks does with it.

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This concludes Part 3. Part 1 | Part 2