The App Store 5 Months On…
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
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:14 am
The $1 app issue is unfortunately not one that I think Apple can fix, as it’s not them causing it. It’s the consumers. Consumers seem to have it in their head that it is ok to pay $5, $10, $20 and up, for desktop applications, but that an iPhone app for some reason shouldn’t cost more then $1. Maybe they are stuck in the mind frame of old school cellphone apps/games that were absolute crap and not worth more then $1 (if even that), or if they just don’t understand what it really takes to make a beautiful, stable iPhone application. Personally I think it is a combination of those 2 and that when the app store opened people were not sure what to charge, and some of the bigger name companies came to the AppStore with free and low price apps, and this set the consumers in a mind frame that free or almost free is what is expected. Who knows, maybe they are just cheap. The only way around this that I can see is for all or at least a large amount of developers to “ban together” and start charging a fair (to both sides) price. No doubt it will hurt sells at first but perhaps we can get passed the misguided mentality.
December 3rd, 2008 at 1:20 pm
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