Polar Bear Farm

Thank you Apple!

Finally we’re starting to see some more ‘radical’ changes in the App Store. With the introduction of iTunes 9 today, came the most dramatic makeover of the App Store we’ve seen.

Perhaps the most important change is the addition of the “Top Grossing Apps” list. Something which I, and many others, have been pushing for for many, many months now. Even at these early stages, this new list is showing promise, helping to bring worthy apps out from the hidden back shelves of the store, and into some prime position. This list will only improve as developers make the decision of either playing in the compete-on-price bargain bin of the “Top Paid Apps” or, alternatively, focus on optimising their strategies for the “Top Grossing Apps”. I know where we want to be. I’m looking forward to this new list reaching its equilibrium over the next few weeks. It will take time for this to happen, as developers choose weather to adjust their pricing strategies, for this new radically different option. This addition alone is enough for me to consider this update a considerable leap forward.

A second, more subtle change, is that the price is no longer displayed on these lists. I see this as a good move, it’s going to help in breaking down the already well established price expectations and filters that a lot of App Store shoppers have developed.

There are some interesting new social networking additions for spreading the word about apps, with Facebook and Twitter integration, and a raft of changes with reorganisation of menus, and placements on the front page.

Despite all these changes for the better, it wouldn’t be the App Store without some special touches. It seems that this update is again rushed, and seems unfinished right now. The “Music” category has disappeared, as have the game subcategories for now. The category pages themselves don’t appear to have been considered at all in this update beyond the fact they now show the top 200 apps instead of the top 100 in the rankings. It’d be nice to see a “Top Grossing Apps” list in each category too.

Of course the App Store still requires a multitude of other features and fixes, and the whole process of getting iPhone apps onto the store desperately needs overhauling. But Apple have almost crossed the single biggest issue of my list with this update, and that’s progress. Hopefully they’ve got a flurry of other changes ready to go!

Layton Duncan

A lot has been written about the success of the App Store, over 50,000 apps available, 1.5 Billion downloads in its first year, talk about how it’s unprecedented etc. However I think it’s long past time for a reality check here. This is a no holds barred, deadly serious, but sometimes snarky look at the App Store. For those with short attention spans, here’s the 140 char summary of what follows:

http://twitter.com/PolarBearFarm/status/2880107386

It’s interesting to contrast the meaningless PR fluff around the App Store, with what was happening in Jailbreak, long before the App Store was around. This community was per device as successful in terms of number of downloads, and vastly more successful from a business viability perspective. There was significantly more innovation, and creativity in the app offerings. But just as importantly, it was very possible for us to run a real business even without any official development tools, with no seamless way to charge customers, and a potential market of roughly 1/50th the size of what exists today.

Given all those challenges in Jailbreak, you’d have though that the iTunes Store would take a good thing, fix the things which weren’t great, and introduce the world of iPhone Apps to a wider audience. Instead it has introduced factors which caused the bottom to fall out of the market, perhaps irreparably so.

Today, if someone offered me the choice between operating a business in a jailbreak style market (with exact same conditions as it was pre App Store) vs operating a business on the App Store, i’d pick jailbreak without question. Of course things have changed significantly since the App Store has been around, but the fact that a ‘hacking’ community had more business viably than the App Store, is a reflection of Apple’s failures here.

The sad reality of the App Store is that there is just no market there capable of supporting full time dedicated iPhone development companies. Everyone knows it, from the most establish games studios down to startups trying to build dedication companies around this platform:

Ian Lynch Smith of Freeverse: “The collapse of the initial pricing model of $10 and $5 games to 99-cent and $3 games has made everyone very cautious. We’re trying to keep our developments to three or four months at most.”

Jon Fortt of Fortune: “A casual observer surfing through the offerings on iTunes today could easily mistake it for a digital dollar store. Though the place is crowded with options, the app store bestseller list is dominated by 99-cent games like the Moron Test and Sally’s Spa — hardly the foundation of a new mobile economy.”

John Carmack of id Software: “If [iPhone] games could have a reasonable shelf life at $9.99, you will start seeing multi-million dollar development budgets as the market continues to grow. But if it turns out the only way you end up being successful on the iPhone is games that cost a couple dollars, you’re never going to achieve that parity with the other handhelds.”

You can then look at the strategy taken by EA recently, in creating offshoot 8lb Gorilla. Essentially forced into doing something because Apple have killed the viability of anything above $0.99. 8lb Gorilla is setup to churn out limited scale $0.99 games every few weeks. All in an attempt for EA to find some viable way to operate in a market they clearly feel a need to have a presence in. I have my doubts that this will work, even with the featuring Apple gives companies like this. This move by EA should horrify Apple. The alarm bells should be ringing, cause the ship is sinking.

These problems can be directly attributed to the market conditions Apple have created through either a total and utter lack of planning and incompetence when building the App Store, or an intentional strategy set out to suppress application prices, with the sole intent of helping to drive device sales.

What’s most concerning is when Tim Cook was asked specific questions around this in the latest financial results conference call. There was no acknowledgement of the real issues which exist around pricing, it was in fact dismissed, saying developers are just pricing based on elasticity analysis:

Charles Wolf - Needham & Company

Okay, well, let me ask a question about the App Store then. In terms of application prices, there appears to be a race to the bottom. I’ve noticed that there’s an increasing number of $0.99 offerings. Do you regard this as a concern and if so, are you taking any steps to enable consumers to separate quality apps from the garbage?

Timothy D. Cook

Charlie, we are always looking for ways to categorize apps differently and we do have some ideas in this area. As you know, today we do it by type of App and also have show popular apps and top-selling apps, et cetera. We realize there’s opportunity there for further improvement and are working on that. In terms of the price, the developer sets the price and so it’s up to the developer what to charge and I think what they are doing is they are doing what any good business person would do, is doing the elasticity analysis and deciding where to best set their price. I would think as the installed base grows more and more and more, it makes more and more sense to have a bit lower prices but that’s totally up to the developers and I am sure each of them may do that in a little different manner.

These comments infuriated me. It shows that Apple, at the highest level, has a total and utter lack of understanding of the issues which exist around App Store pricing and the consequences of that. The biggest problem with the App Store is not a categorisation problem, it’s more than clear that the App Store in its current implementation forces virtually all app prices to the $0.99 price point. There is no debate, there’s no elasticity analysis required, it’s the price point virtually all applications are pushed to. It’s unsustainable for all serious developers, and it’s killing investment in innovation and creativity, it’s killing the platform.

How could Apple get this so wrong? How have they managed to kill any REAL creativity and innovation on a platform which is clearly one of the best around, from both a user perspective, and a technical development perspective. A platform with proven business viability before Apple had even entered the scene.

Any developer who has experienced the business side of the App Store, iTunes Connect, the app submission process, is well aware that there is virtually zero care and attention to detail taken, it barely works for its intended purpose, and that lack of care and attention even creeps into the customer facing App Store. Put simply, the whole thing is entirely unprofessional, bordering on incompetent, and Apple should be highly embarrassed by it. The astounding thing is that this is so at odds with what most people expect from Apple: it’s certainly a far cry from the usual obsessive attention to detail in most of its consumer facing products.

There are so many fundamental flaws in the App Store design which i’ve written about previously, and filed bug reports a LONG time ago on. These have simply killed the viability of the iPhone platform for serious businesses. I won’t rehash all those flaws in this post, you’ll find them in my other posts.

There are two options to fix this as I see it:

1. Close the iTunes App Store storefont and simply give developers an API for payment processing and binary delivery using iTunes Accounts. That way Apple rankings, featuring, and organisation don’t influence the market at all, making for a truly free market.

OR

2. Fix the App Store like a LOT of developers have been politely requesting since last year! I’m not buying the “App Store is new” argument anymore, it’s not. Apple have the resources to be able to make the most important changes needed in a matter of weeks, what they lack is the will and direction to do so.

I’ve lost all hope that the App Store will actually see the real changes is needs. As it stands it’s poorly planned, poorly managed, poorly executed, and it’s an embarrassment to Apple. They should be ashamed to be associated with it.

As with many other serious iPhone developers recently, we’ve made the hard decision to kill all but one project in progress, and stop investing any resources in creating new applications. We’ll continue to sell and fully support our existing iPhone offerings, however we’re already moving to platforms which show signs of real viability.

It’s a shame, the iPhone showed so much promise, it’s such a fun technical platform to develop for, but Apple have simply setup a market in a way which kills real businesses.

Layton Duncan

With the latest iPhone OS update has come a raft of great new features and improvements, including a particularly interesting one for developers who’d like to offer services which previously didn’t fit with the App Store’s one time purchase model: In App Purchase.

This gives developers a way of charging users for content and consumables though a users existing iTunes Account, with Apple acting as payment processor (for a not insignificant 30% cut). In the In App Purchase system, Apple are not responsible for delivering that additional content, they simply approve and handle the payment, developers do the rest.

One of the things Apple has stressed with this new system, is that they don’t impose a business model on developers.

But there’s an elephant in the room, and it’s trumpeting, and occasionally showing people with mud and water. It seems Apple have made a habit out of either ignoring or overlooking these elephants recently.

The rule of In App Purchase is that it is ONLY available from within paid apps. So lets see, that rules out perhaps the most common business model for software ever! Free to download and test, pay to continue using (try before you buy, shareware). A curious caveat given Apple’s masterful leveraging of this exact strategy, in an extremely successful way. Apple retail stores are founded on this try before you buy strategy. They load up their stores with as many products as possible, all tricked out with unlimited versions of their pro apps for anyone to come in and try out in all their glory, before taking the plunge and purchasing. Yet iPhone developers have no way of implementing any sort of demo or try before you buy scheme in the App Store. Apple go even further, seemingly going out of their way to prohibit it with this latest In App Purchase requirement. So much for not imposing a business model.

So what about subscriptions, that’s another popular business model, especially for content and service oriented apps. Developers have been asking for this capability from day 1 of the App Store. Let’s see how the new In App Payments options work for this. The first thing to note is that there is no concept of a subscription in the In App Payment API. As far as Apple are concerned it’s up to developers to implement tracking and re billing if they want to offer subscriptions. Sounds like a great customer experience so far: they sign up on a per month cycle, and developers have to keep annoying them with alerts to manually renew before they lose access every month. That may suit some customers perfectly, but a lot of customers just want set and forget: just bill me at regular intervals until I tell you to stop, ie a true subscription. Really what they mean by subscription, is that they make it possible to pay for an item more than once.

But don’t forget with subscriptions, developers are still required by Apple to have a paid app in order to offer this. This is where things get really dangerous. This is guaranteed to be a huge source of complaints and malicious customer feedback. Apple have been touting “free apps will always remain free”, arguing that when a customer downloads a free app, that they expect to be able to use it for free permanently, hence they will not allow In App Purchase in free apps. They’ve got this wrong. 100% wrong. In fact it’s the total opposite of the reality. iTunes store customers are accustom to purchasing apps at a one-off price. When they see an app priced at $0.99 they expect that the app is just that, $0.99 and they expect to be able to use the app in the same way in a year from now as the day they purchased it, without paying anything else.

So lets take a look at just one specific example of a typical subscription based app. Our latest app “Tweet Push”. It takes advantage of push notifications to provide Twitter users with alerts on their iPhone / iPod when they have new mentions or direct messages waiting. As this sort of service has an ongoing hosting cost for us, we offer it as a subscription, $0.99 per 30 days per Twitter account. Ideally we’d give the app away for free, users could then see and play with it before handing over any money. Once they decide they want to setup their twitter account to start receiving notifications, they’d be prompted to select how much credit they wanted to purchase. At this point, if they hadn’t already realised that this was a subscription based service (everyone reads the iTunes description right?), they’d now clearly know, before they actually hand over any money, that this was a subscription service, and could either continue, or delete the app if they so chose. If they do delete it, they’re not out of pocket, no harm done. But Apple require that this app be paid, not free, in order for us to offer In App Purchase. So lets look at that again, the same user downloads the app for $0.99 assuming it’s a one time payment, then launches the app to find that he only gets 30 days of service for the $0.99 he just paid. Furious he leave one star reviews all over the place even though we went to great lengths in the iTunes description to spell out the exact nature of the subscription and costs (but no one actually ever reads that stuff). The customer feels cheated out of his $0.99. Contrast that to the hypothetical customer who downloaded the app for free, and later discovered that it’s subscription based, he isn’t really that concerned because he’s not out of pocket.

This is just one of a few scenarios where the In App Purchase in paid apps only policy is just plain dangerous. Apple is forcing developers to dance precariously on the bait and switch line, with this totally artificial constraint. So much for not imposing a business model.

It’s clear from the vocal reactions at WWDC developers think this is ridiculous. Hopefully Apple rectify this quickly. This really is a bag of hurt waiting to happen, and everyone but Apple can see it.

All of this boils down to this point: Apple seriously need to consider their approach to the App Store, and urgently need to get developer input into how the store is shaped. I’m not talking about design by committee here, but we’re out here living and breathing the business around the App Store, and are begging to provide constructive and valuable feedback from a perspective which Apple simply does not have. We analyse this stuff to the nth degree because it’s our livelihood. Apple: you’ve assumed total control of app distribution, just remember with great power comes great responsibility.

Layton Duncan

Ahead of the iPhone OS 3.0 event this week, I thought I’d write a little on the state of the platform as we see it here. A little over a year after the initial launch, the honeymoon is over, and I think the coming months are going to be pivotal in determining the long term nature and perception people have of the App Store and the platform in general:

Is it going be a place which accommodates people who are looking for a wide range of apps to complement their iPhone or iPod, irrespective of price?

Or is going to continue to be a $1 shop, where the best of the cheapest are most visible, and therefore most successful, irrespective of value provided.

In the past 8 months, the flaws of the App Store have been exposed, and they’re not insignificant. There have been sporadic welcome improvements, the most recent being changes to the review system, something which although improved, I’d still argue it’s of limited utility in its current form. But there’s still a long way to go.

The problem in judging the success of the App Store is that there is no yard stick to measure it by. There’s no existing system which is comparable. I think that makes it harder for Apple to spot issues with it, after all, looking at the uptake and the revenues the store is generating, I guess it’s hard for Apple to justify on a financial basis, that the store could perform better with changes. I’m not arguing for a second that the App Store hasn’t been hugely successful, I’m questioning, could it be even more successful for everyone with some changes?

I and other developers have been pushing for some fundamental changes to the way the App Store operates. Changes which I believe will benefit iPhone developers, Apple, and customers a like. Changes which acknowledge the fundamental differences between selling apps, and selling music.

The most significant issue as it stands is quite simple. It’s the built in One Price Fits All Assumption which permeates almost every aspect of the store.

There have been many a commentator try to trivialize this issue, saying that it’s not a problem with the store, that the store is simply a warehouse of apps not a marketing avenue, and that developers can counter this by simply marketing their products.

The thing these people miss, is that the store isn’t a warehouse, it does have a store front, it does promote products, both through featured placement, and the Top 100 lists. To ignore that is ridiculous. Having created a great product, developers really are at the mercy of these two areas of the store. The advertising expense required to shift an app up the charts any significant way is prohibitive to the point of being uneconomic with the current system. For us, advertising is used for purposes other than generating immediate direct sales.

What about a “Velvet Rope” area on the store?

Last week Wired revived a rumor from a while back about Apple opening a Premium App Store. They suggest it could consist of apps of $20 or more, as a way of pulling more substantial apps above the noise of all the $1 and free apps. While this is surely better than nothing, the problem I have with this idea as rumored, is that it doesn’t address the real issue. Essentially all this does is turn the one price fits all assumption, to a two prices fits all assumption.

As long as app rankings are biased so heavily towards download numbers, rather than revenue generated, you’ll see unsustainable pressure on pricing. You’ll see the same thing happen in any Premium App Store built around this same premise. All the $30, $50 apps will be relegated to the depths of the rankings, pressuring prices towards $20, just as we’ve seen prices pushed to $1 in the existing store. In this scenario how does this help $10 apps? $15 apps? Why not address the real issue instead, and solve the problem completely?

Time for an App Store Roadmap?

One of the things I’d love to see out of Tuesdays event, above any device improvements or additions, is a roadmap of what changes, if any, are planned for the App Store. It’s easily the most frustrating part of developing for the iPhone, not from a technical point of view, but from a business point of view. Apple have created a device and development tools which are so far ahead of anything else, it’s frustrating to see the App Sore not live up to it’s potential. So I’d love Apple to layout their plans for future App Store changes. This is an area which significantly affects the types and scale of products we build, some clarity from Apple would be hugely useful.

Layton Duncan

I don’t think it’s any secret to most that the launch of the iPhone SDK and the App Store was rushed. Having seen the state of the iPhone frameworks in version 1.x of the iPhone OS through my jailbreak work, version 2.0 of the OS really did clean a lot things up quite dramatically, there was a lot of work done. It was actually an extremely impressive feat. To anyone who had developed under jailbreak it was clear why Apple had not released an SDK for developers when the iPhone first launched, it simply was not in a state which was releasable, Apple were still working things out themselves.

It’s also interesting how the launch of both the iPhone and the App Store forced Apple to stray briefly from its usual tight lipped policy of never commenting on unreleased products. The iPhone was announced months before it was available, as was the App Store. There are a number of reasons why they really had no choice for this particular product launch. I’m sure one of the reasons for their standard no comment policy is that it forces hard deadlines on themselves. My perception is that Apple don’t like shipping products which are not ready for prime time, they’ve made that mistake in the past and paid for it. Hard deadlines can interfere with that philosophy, hence the first most people know of new Apple products is when they’re released. I think those deadline pressures came very close with the original iPhone, then again with the launch of the App Store and 2.0 firmware.

The App Store has been modeled almost exactly off the iTunes Music Store, in many ways it’s the obvious way to go. It’s got the store front, it’s got the ranking logics, it’s got existing user accounts and billing info, it’s got the reporting, etc etc. The Music Store is a clear success, so why tinker with a winning combo? Well fundamentally, apps aren’t music. It’s that simple. The one price fits all model of music just doesn’t jive with apps. Why? Because apps are wide and varied in their complexity, function, target market size etc. The Music Store is optimised for this one price fits all scheme. The ranking algorithms etc are all perfect for that case. That’s really the first major flaw in the App Store design at the moment:

The One Price Fits All Assumption.

The ramification for this assumption in the App Store is that as sales on the store are driven significantly by visibility. The Top 100 list rules. You need your app on that list! While the exact details of the algorithms used to generate these rankings are secret, it’s clear that it’s overwhelmingly driven by app download count, on some sort of rolling average. The easiest, cheapest way to increase your download count, is by dropping the price of your app to $1. It use to be that developers would change their app to free for a few days, then switch to paid, then ride the Top 100 Paid list that way, but that practice has since been blocked by Apple. $1 is the new free in this game now. So the end result of this one price fits all assumption, is that in general apps tend to converge on one price, and that one price being $1. This isn’t just speculation either. We’ve experimented with pricing a little, and the results are disheartening. As one fellow developer put it: “The App Store makes me feel dirty… dirty as in I just participated in a shit fight and now I have to go home and take a shower.”

First looking at ‘Record‘, our successful audio recording application. On October 16th, we doubled the price from $1 to $2, subsequently download numbers dropped by 59% to 41% of their previous numbers. That’s significant. At the same time we increased the price of ‘Note Pad‘ our iPhone notes replacement application, from $2 to $3, and downloads dropped by 63% to 37% of their previous numbers. On November 22nd we again increased the price on ‘Note Pad‘ from $3 to $4, and once again download numbers dropped disproportionately by 60% to 40% of their previous numbers. Clearly it seems that in our experimenting, it is not possible to maintain revenue while raising prices. These are sobering numbers, and support the idea that the one price fits all assumption, which powers much of the app store rankings, is a positive feedback loop biased towards pushing most app pricing towards the $1 price point. Of course there are other factors involved in this, however I think that this assumption is a dominant factor driving this. So what’s the solution? Easy, tweak the ranking algorithms to try and avoid the current natural discrimination against variable pricing. Simply give more weighting to app revenues, and maybe even bring in ratings into the ranking algorithms to try and push more of the best apps into the list, rather than the just the best of the least expensive apps.

Demo Applications

The ability to offer demo version on the App Store is simply not possible. This also contributes to the low pricing trend. Many customers are reluctant to shell out money, even $5, $10 or $15 for an application they can not test in some way first. ’Lite’ versions are not demos. With all the applications we create, we’re trying to build up trust within our customer base, so that when they see one of our apps on the store that they don’t own, they can purchase it with the confidence that it’ll work, and work well. The ability to offer time limited demos of applications is a simple way to help build this customer trust and confidence quickly. Currently it’s easier to discount the price of applications to a point where people don’t care if they download an app, and it turns out to be absolute crap. It’s simply not a good situation for customers or developers.

Customer Reviews

This is where some improvements have already been made on the App Store, which is great to see! From a developers stand point, while there are many changes which would be good to see, two of the biggest additions to the system would be the ability to flag blatantly false reviews, irrelevant comments, and the like on your own apps and have them investigated in a priority ‘developer reported’ queue across all stores. Currently there is no mechanism for developers to report customer reviews in stores outside the one they hold an iTunes account in, even using the existing reporting methods. Secondly, many customers see the review section as a support forum. It’d be great if developers could have one reply per review, to respond to questions, or to correct inaccuracies.

Of course we as developers need to take responsibility for the success of our applications, we can’t rely on Apple to sell our products by virtue of simply having them listed on the store. However the things i’ve mentioned are significant issues which in my mind need to be improved. Hindsight is 20/20 as they say, but a lot of these flaws really do beg the question, did anyone at Apple really think through the App Store design and operation, or was it just a case of hacking on an apps section to the Music Store to meet a deadline?

Finally I urge developers and customers alike to contact Apple and express your opinions and thoughts through the channels they provide: enhancement requests through http://radar.apple.com Developer Relations contacts, and Technology Evangelists for developers, and Apple’s official feedback channels for customers: http://www.apple.com/feedback/ They can’t improve things if they don’t know about them, so help them out by letting them know what you think.

Layton Duncan

It’s coming up to 5 months since the App Store launched, and things have panned out very different to how I had imagined. You know I had been looking forward to the launch of the App Store. We could finally get our software out there, support it properly, and have all the time consuming overhead of managing payments, license key generation, distribution etc out of our hands, and spend more time doing productive stuff like developing and making our apps better.

We were making good money off our Jailbreak apps selling them for $10 a piece, some people liked them so much they donated over $80 a piece for them. We invested countless hours developing them, not only because it was a fun challenge, but because the support was there from our customers to be able to live off this and be able to develop them full time.

This was a market with at its peak maybe around 1 million phones, users had to pay using PayPal on their iPhone (a horrific experience if ever i’ve seen one), then wait for a license key to be generated so they could enter it into the app on the phone, which would unlock all features or to get rid of popup reminder dialogues. This is a world away from the seamless experience of purchasing songs or apps from iTunes. Naturally we though that the launch of the App Store would not only open us up to a significantly larger market, but that the time consuming process our customers had to go through previously would disappear, and sales would continue heading upwards.

The reality is that we barely manage to match the money we were making with our Jailbreak applications through the App Store. Even at the peak so far, where “Record” was Top 10 paid downloads in 22 countries, and DuckShoot in 10 countries, sales barely reach those seen in Jailbreak.

The point here is that in the current market it is very difficult for professional iPhone development companies who’d love to commit fully to developing great apps for this platform, to be able to do that sustainably. The market is not at a size where $1 apps can really sustain dedicated iPhone development houses, skewing the market towards part time, after hours developers with a day job to support themselves, and App Store income as ‘pocket money’. 

While that in itself is not a problem, we know first hand how hard it is to provide the level of support we need for our products. It’s a time consuming part of the business, one we’d love to improve, but one which is a constant time battle, there’s simply not enough resources, which ultimately comes down to not enough money. This time balancing act is even more apparent for part time developers, and often does end up effecting quality, both in customer support, and continued application development.

But all this isn’t just groaning about the state of things, it’s something to hopefully start triggering thoughts about why the market is currently skewed like this, and how it can be improved for customers and developers alike. We want to be around to see our 2nd year anniversary, still helping to make this great platform even better, but ultimately the market and developers themselves will decide how things play out over time. I’ll add my opinions on things, having seen things from the very start of this game.

I have to say this is a topic which i’ve been reluctant to write publicly about until now (i’m expecting some ‘interesting’ responses), preferring instead to file bug reports, feature enhancements, and talk directly with our Apple Developer Relations contacts about, even emailing the top dog himself on one occasion. Apple does listen, but clearly can not always act as nimbly as some would like. But it’s far easier for them to fix or change things if they get feedback directly through the channels they provide. While the App Store has improved slowly since launch, it had major flaws from day one, which is the topic for part two of this post, along with some cold hard stats on App Store economics.

Layton Duncan

On the 24th of October we will be celebrating our 1st birthday. I thought i’d write a little about how the company started and the experience up to now, not only because hopefully it may be interesting to others, but also because in the day to day business of getting things done, you often forget to sit for a minute and reflect on where you’ve come from. Being the first commercial developer for the iPhone and iPod Touch has made this last year one of the most interesting and enjoyable of my life. I started out a year ago, releasing a small application called “Search”, it was the first application to allow people to search contacts and calendar events by keyword on the iPhone, a feature which is still absent from the phone. It instantly became popular amongst the jailbreak community. At that stage, there was no official SDK, no documentation on how to develop, just header files dumped from the framework binaries from the phone, and the foundations of the iPhones desktop operating system counterpart to go by. But that’s only half the story, none of this would have been possible without the talented and dedicated people who spent countless hour in first jailbreaking, then building a toolchain for those who where chomping at the bit to develop for this platform. While we supported the jailbreak community, even sponsoring a significant repository for applications when it was threatened with closure, for us, jailbreaking was not a rebellion against Apple’s control. It was simply out of a passion for the platform, that we couldn’t wait to write applications to make the phone even better. We assumed that Apple must have been preparing official means of native app development, that was what we were wanting and hoping for, but in the mean time, we couldn’t wait.

Search was such a success, that a week after it was released I decided that I wanted to go take this to the world and exhibit at MacWorld ‘08 in January. I called long time friend Guy Horrocks who had always been interested in entrepanurial startups and asked him if he’d be interested in coming on board and help build this company. A week later we had a 10′ x 10′ exhibit booth booked in San Francisco for MacWorld 08. So we were two guys from the bottom of the world in New Zealand, where the iPhone wasn’t even legitimately available, flying half way around the world to San Francisco to attend the worlds biggest Apple conference, exhibiting software for the worlds most revolutionary mobile platform, which had no SDK, no official way of distributing the software, without even knowing whether there would be native 3rd party support in the future! Looking back on it, it was kind of a cheeky, and risky move, but one which i’ve never regretted.

In the few months before the show, I was playing with various aspects of the phone and software, but the thing I was most interested in, was finding out what the limit of the power of this device was. I spent hundreds of hours playing with layer kit (core animation as it’s now called) in particular the CoverFlow interface. Hours were spent trying to reverse engineer the methods used by the iPod app on the phone trying to get a customizable CoverFlow interface we could use in applications for non music uses. I eventually gave up trying to figure it out, and wrote my own CoverFlow version from scratch, using layer kit. (As it turned out, my previous code which tried to use existing API’s was only a line of code away from fully working!) I even managed to get live video playing in a CoverFlow style interface. The abilities of the phone shocked me. This lead me into thinking about video recording on the phone. Apples iPhone presentation demo rig which mirrored the iPhone display on an external display, and later the Aspeslagh Bro’s (Ecamm) video streaming hack demo, triggered a video obsession in me. Could the iPhone record video? This was a huge technical challenge, after a couple of weeks of sustained work, reversing various frameworks, looking for hints and methods which may be useful, trying many different approaches. The biggest challenge being, how to actually get pixel data to write to the iPhone’s flash memory. I finally cracked it at 5am one morning, after working trough the night and several straight days. An immensely satisfying moment which went on to produce ShowTime, the first video recording application for the iPhone, which was ready for release just a week before we left to exhibit at MacWorld.

MacWorld exceeded all our expectations. Interest in what we were doing and our applications was through the roof, especially from Apple employees. The days, while long and exhausting, were encouraging for the future in this industry. These two applications, Search and ShowTime, were and are still two of the most requested additions to the iPhone, and it’s those two products which truly launched us as a serious iPhone development company, before any sight of the SDK. Search went on to reach over half a million downloads, and ShowTime well over a million downloads, including a significant number from within Apple, in what was an ‘underground’ hacking market. A feat which we’re immensely proud of.

Since then we’ve been lucky enough to have worked with some of the most interesting in the community, travel to various places, and meet with some of the biggest brands in the world! On the back of MacWorld we formed a close relationship with a company called GoGo Apps (now known as Tapulous), after meeting CEO Bart Decrem at the show. Since then we’ve worked along side them writing the initial jailbreak version of Twinkle (a Twitter client with a heavy focus on location), camping out at their Downtown Palo Alto office for the month around WWDC and the lead up to the App Store launch, we had the pleasure of working with their team which at the time included Sean ‘iApp-a-day’ Heber, Thomas Muldowny, Mike Lee, Louie Mantia, and others. We’ve also had the opportunity to travel to various large corporate headquarters and conferences.

Now with our existing products on the App Store, Telegram, Dictaphone, Note Pad, and Duck Shoot and with some longer projects simmering away, we’re thrilled to be celebrating our first year as a native iPhone developer, making us one of the oldest around! Keep an eye out closer to the 24th of October, as celebration plans launch into full swing. So from the team here, Guy, Cody and Myself, thanks to those that have supported us from the jailbreak days, through to our App Store transition. You’ve helped build this company from the most unlikely beginnings! Stay tuned, we’re just getting started!

Layton Duncan