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iPhone App Pricing Limits Developers
HardYakka writes "According to this post in the Fortune blog, the iTunes app store has been a boon for users but some developers are saying the number of free and 99 cent apps make it difficult for developers to create complex, higher priced apps. Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory says the iPhone may never get its killer app like the spreadsheet was for the Mac.
If Apple does not do something, the store will be left with only ring tones and simple games. Some are suggesting that overpaid developers are the problem and the recession will soon lower the wages and costs for complex apps."
Why not release a free, crippled version of your app that allows people to look at it, evaluate it & decide if it's worth $2.99? Now where have I heard of that business model before?
Honestly, there's so many development restrictions on iPhone apps, why bother publicizing this non-story.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Because in the Shitty New Economy, people will be blowing all kinds of money on applications for their overpriced smartphones.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
One developer said:
"Both developers and designers cost somewhere between $150-200 per hour."
That's too much. I haven't used iTunes, but if it isn't based on simple popularity but has some kind of after-the-purchase rating system, there shouldn't be too many worries. If there isn't, they should implement one. With reviews and ratings like Amazon.
I also have a hard time believing that only the most simple apps will get made, there seems to be a "10 Most Useful" iPhone App list every other week popping up at some social sites like Digg.
Another limiting factor on iphone app's is fact apple will kill off any app that competes with their's or anything they are about to put out.
Trism is a very simple example of an app that proves that developers can make money, and a lot of it. Last I hear, the guy that wrote the program has made over $250,000 on an app that he sells for $4.99. Why? It's really simple - it's a great game that's well worth the price. Free is fantastic and a majority of apps on my iPod Touch are free apps but, if the content is of quality and worth it, I'll pay for it. And so will thousands and thousands and thousands of other people. Complaining that some people are willing to do some coding for free isn't a way to make money. Make a quality product. If the people who complain about free apps making it hard for people to make money spent more time coding and making a quality app and less time complaining, they might make more money...
I'm more worried about the usage of the oxymoron "overpaid developer".
Code something that is 'insanely great' and you will survive to charge $4.99 for your app. Otherwise, perish in flame.
Sig this!
It might not be that you're writing a shitty app, you could be writing an app that appeals to a limited market segment. Suppose you wrote a great app for the iphone that transcribed single melody line audio input to classically notated sheat music. Your target market would then be people who can read sheet-music, have an interest in transcription, and own an Iphone. How many people fit that description? Suppose further, your software just outputs finale files, now you're market is the subset of music enthusiasts who own both Coda products and an Iphone. Suppose further that your software actually only transcribes bowed string instruments well, great now your market is for people interested in transcribing music played by strings who also own Coda software.
VisiCalc was first released for the Apple (not Mac), and sales skyrocketed. Apple's were the original business desktop computer.
It's a stupid rant. Look at the market for PC software.
There are a lot of *free* applications. Lots. More than I can every use.
Then there are inexpensive shareware stuff. $5-15
Then there are the mainstream shareware apps. $40-60
From there, applications go as high as you want to pay.... $100-500 $1000, $5000
All are available on the internet. Do free applications limit the abilities of developers to churn out $50 software? Or $100 software? No. People will pay what the software is worth.
This guy seems to be making the argument that somehow a low price sets the expectation of low prices. It's a dumb argument. If developers come up with an application that's worth $500 guess what... they will pay $500.
What he's really saying that the $1 applications are so good that he can't compete. And that's probably true. What he needs to do is make his applications worth more than $1. It's not the platform that's holding him back. It's not the price of cheap software holding him back, it's his own inability to write valuable software that commands a premium price. Seriously. Does he even understand that you can't write a general purpose iPhone app and expect to get $50 for it? He's going to have to hit some vertical market software (highly specialized) to command premium dollars. How about a full-blown VST/Softsynth app that will accept plugins for the iPhone? I'd pay $200 for that. How about working with a high-end electronics company to write apps to control lighting/music for home-automation? He could probably get $300-500 for that.
Just being a good programmer isn't good enough. He should know better.
Seriously, he's all wet.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
This seems like a complete non-sequitur.
If an large expensive app will make me money what does the existence of 99cent ringtones have to do with my purchasing decision?
It sounds to me like developers of useless, unusable, and or badly marketed applications are not finding buyers and blaming free cheap apps for their failings.
Personally I have a hard time seeing many cases where it is worth signing the apple developers license (or whatever it is called, I cannot remember and cannot be bothered to download it again.)
As I recall the license that the developers agreed to basically said: All Your Base Belong to Apple, Suck it up.
OpenMoko, Symbian, and Android seem to have much better terms for developers. If you have a killer app and someone will buy the phone for your app, why put yourself at Apples mercy?
BSD Networking Release 1 was $1,000 per tape. and sold several hundred copies.
If you can sell BSD licensed software for $1,000 a pop, don't tell me you can't sell a high priced useful program on the iTune app store.
High priced crap on the other hand . . .
Work bio at MMWD
Yeah, I have no idea why people think the 'killer app' for the Mac was the spreadsheet. The Mac's killer app was desktop publishing and, later, graphic design. To this day, there is still no better platform for DTP and graphic design than the Mac.
My blog
Sure, having to compete with el-cheapo apps isn't anybody's idea of fun; but I find it very odd that their presence would act against complex apps. If the simple stuff is a mass of cheap and/or free, then the profit motive will lead developers to try to build products that distinguish themselves from the mass and can command a higher price(or, y'know, lobby for new laws, RIAA style).
Rather than "OMG cheap competition!" I'd be inclined to suspect a couple of things: First and foremost: Uncertainty over App store approval rules. Apple can, and sometimes does, just yank the rug out from under an app during the approval process. The rules are underdetermined and don't seem to be followed terribly consistently, and there is no real appeal. This is Apple's right, legally speaking; but is it any huge surprise that people are not rushing to make large investments in highly complex products?
Secondly, cellphones, even nice ones, are mediocre platforms for big highly complex stuff. Apple has done a substantially better job than usual; but nothing(presently available) can really disguise the fact that you are working on a tiny screen, with very limited input options.
Somehow, those terrible, terrible, innovation killing people who give software away have failed to destroy large, complex applications on the PC, I strongly doubt that they are managing that here.
Agreed. Especially when you consider the low product quality that results and higher developer-count required to deliver with lower-cost developers.
What makes it an oxymoron? There are plenty of developers who get paid way more than they are worth. Heck, some developers actually have negative value, because they can damage projects and cost money to clean up after.
Jeez, when will people accept that the only thing the mac is good for is paying for things that other people get free?
Jeez, when will people accept that time is valuable and sometimes Mac's "just work" while other systems take more time to maintain.
Developers: We can use your help.
And if thats not bad enough, Apple may at any time remove an app designed by us "overpaid developers" just because it may conflict with an existing (or to be existing) Apple app, or if it just pisses Apple off (IAmRich).
I've joked ever since I found out about this that Opera, the Mozilla Foundation and Sun should release their software for the jailbroken iPhones only, in addition to an Android port.
Mobile platforms are the new platform wars: Android (representing Linux), iPhone (Mac), and Windows Mobile (Win). The next generation developers will have to port apps painfully across these platforms, or pick and choose at the cost of some customers. Not to mention other platforms like Blackberry and the like that don't fall into those categories, save Sun's JavaME portability.
If I were ever asked to write a mobile client for any application of mine by anybody, public or not, I would probably shoot myself at the first thought of "But I have this phone". You can have it, spare me until the dust settles.
</rant>
Umm, Linux does quite a bit better for graphic design. Especially bigtime movie producers (pixar, etc) don't run Mac. They run linux.
Graphic design is not computer animation.
Jeez, when will people (like you) get a clue before posting comments?
Slashdot - The great and glorious cluster fuck of Internet wisdom.
Ah, it is a bit flamey but the intended statement remains, that Mac is not superior for design. People just like to use it. That's fine and all, but it doesn't mean it's the best or worst solution or something. Just a competitor just like every other brand.
Lots of people are hanging on the 10 years prior mentality of "mac is superior for design".
VisiCalc was first released for the Apple (not Mac), and sales skyrocketed. Apple's were the original business desktop computer.
And not only that, they were a key part of getting IBM to consider the microcomputer more than a toy. Enter the IBM PC.
i think if your product is as niche as the examples you've laid out, you shouldnt have a problem with competitors undercutting you to the $.99 price point. in fact, if you're writing software that niche you can pretty well set the price to whatever you want since there's nobody else for people to buy such a product.
on the other hand, if you're writing throwaway software (eg. todo lists) expect a lot of competition and that you're not going to be able to change as much as you want
TIAEAE!
No I wasn't talking about the same developers you are, e.g. coders that throw function pointers in directly with raw input and similar shit and wonder where the bugs/exploits come from (and get paid a wad to write those patches).
I'm talking about the high quality, underrepresented programmers that get stuck in a low-end job that not only underminds their ability, but pays much lower than the quality of code is that they write, which would be much more suitable for the big companies the shitty programmers get put in. When they would hear "overpaid developers", the first thing they would think of is "Yeah, all I need is less pay".
Not if you adjust for the number of PCs in the wild at the time.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I agree with you. I'm just pointing out that exclaiming the truth is often flamebait. For example, I can start up a discussion about Scientology, but we all know what a steep hill that would be...
I hear you :)
The thing is though, if nobody speaks up, no voice is heard. And people do hate truth and logic, but you have to just be willing to take the hits as you walk forward, so to speak. It does indeed suck at times, too though. People are impressively malicious overall.
Jeez, when will people accept that Macs are designed by people who themselves are designers and the OS is built around the typical workflow of designers and not that of code geeks and techies?
How is this different from other for pay software? I walk into a store and buy shrink wrapped software and 99% of the time I can't return it if I've opened it, much less decided I don't like it. They need something called MARKETING. And all they want is free marketing on the itunes store, but word of mouth or actual ads might work as well or better.
Would a digg like site for the app store help?
Think Deeply.
Your hired. You'll be paid $100k a year, and you'll write a new iPhone app for me every six weeks. An idea could be as complex as I like, and I still can't see it taking you more than six weeks to implement, unless you're a shitty developer or wasting time, in which case, you're fired.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
oy. Seriously...if I were a developer that was considering writing an app that could be construed as "killer", the #1 turnoff would be Apple's ability to cannibalize my work.
What recourse, if any, would there be if Apple decided to yank my $XX app off the store, only to have the same functionality trumpeted in a new firmware release? (like they already have done)
Futhermore, Apple chooses when and where to enforce their store rules. Google is allowed to break rules. Would a small development firm be so lucky?
There just isn't enough incentive or security to develop something much more useful than a game, ringtone, or eggtimer.
No, you have definitely got it wrong. Most of the iPhone developers I know are exactly the opposite of whiny. They are energetic, hard working, play by the Apple defined rules, and working really hard to justify their really expensive hobby of making cool software. They tend to do this because they have experience with lots of other technologies, and they like the Apple technologies better, they are more fun for developers, but they are, often, less profitable.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I don't get the whining. You can whine about apple banning apps that they don't like but whining about pricing? C'mon it's a free market (unless you step on apple's toes) and it works like every other market: People buy what gets the job done for as cheap as they can get.
If you build a top notch app that people want and that has no competition then it will most certainly sell for $5, maybe even for $10 or $50.
and I still can't see spending more than $100 Grand on it for an iPhone app.
100k goes fast, and that's not even considering non-development-related costs. If your app requires hosting or has any server-side component, that's going to be an ongoing expense. If you aren't selling your product as a service, or have a subscription fee, those costs are going to have to be paid out of the take from new sales. If your app proves to be really popular, odds are you're going to need a support staff. That hundred grand is gone. Pfft.
This is particularly true because any Apple-related product is going to be heavy on the graphics, and that's going to require art support (not many coders know their way around Photoshop or have any animation skills whatsoever.) Ditto on sound effects and music. A hundred grand sounds like a lot, but when it comes to software development and support nowadays, it really isn't.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Not only that, but they need to do something about user reviews. With iTunes music reviews, there's a reason to allow people who haven't bought those songs or albums to review them - there are a ton of people who will know them from other sources. With iPhone apps, though, Apple still allows people to review apps they haven't bought - even though Apple is the only source for them - and that policy lets dumb kids whine about complex applications being too expensive at a whopping $4.99, even though they've never used those apps and probably aren't the target audience.
Are all you guys talking about how this guy is a whiner and should be able to compete with cheap apps the same group of people who whine like a stuck pig whenever somebody mentions the idea of hiring coders or IT workers from India instead of the United States?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Jeez, when will people accept that Macs are designed by people who themselves are designers and the OS is built around the typical workflow of designers and not that of code geeks and techies?
That's well said--I have had a hard time explaining my dislike of Macs. However, a lot of geek techy coworkers of mine use Macs at home, so I'm not sure it's true.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
Uhm... "Flamebait" this was not. Using the exact same argument as its parent, applied on the flip side of the developer relationship (cost, rather than revenue) should have merited an Insightful mod. Alas, there is no "understands subtle arguments" requirement for moderators.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
These were all decent apps to make some users choose Mac. But none of these were really killer apps, at least not after 1990. Mac only has 8% market share.
If there ever is a real killer app, Apple should have 50% or more of the market.
By definition a "killer app" is an application so compelling that massive numbers of users buy into the platform to have the benefit of the application.
I.E. The app is at a real risk of hurting other platforms.
Vista for the Intel platform (and Microsoft EOL'ing XP) may eventually proev a killer app benefitting Apple's platform, though.
Just waiting for the owners of the 90% market share, Windows users to change platforms, so that the market share is: 10% Windows, 60% Mac, 30% Linux
Uhm, no. You only say this because you never knew about the ATARI ST and its 1040 ST + SLM laser printer combo.
and the first rounds were cheap... prices for good software rise as the market proves GOOD software is hard to make.
Right now iPhone is in "gold rush" mode. Every body is making everything thing at every price because nobody knows what the market is yet, it's been 6 months.. hardly time for doom and gloom.
I think it's time to START complex apps as small apps and see how the market reacts. What can you sell for $1.99? The market is not ready to commit $29.99 to ANY app yet.. frankly if somebody else can make the same app for $2.99 then your app is not worth the higher price.
There's three kinds of "complex". There's problems that are purely hard to solve like encoding video or building 3D game engines that take real talent to make it look easy. There are projects that are large and take lots of grunt work... ERP systems come to mind as simple programs but you need lots of them to work well or they take lots of content or research... think encyclopedias or the Sims again, it takes resources or creativity to make the volume of content required in a manner to sell it, not easy for good quality without money. The last are simply programs that are big... like office programs... They are easy to duplicate functions, but control the market because they have lots of little pieces and people using them. Unless you are in the first two groups don't expect to charge a lot.
Hockenberry is a former developer turned business owner.
His complaints seem to stem from three things:
1. Developers are selling cheap straight to the customer.
2. Developers charge too much for him to be guaranteed a profit from their labor.
3. These cheap apps don't reflect his ideals of a good application.
Could this be a microcosmic view of a sea change that is at our doorstep? Software engineers, labor, can now sell directly to the customer - and the product reflects "scratching an itch" simplicity. Corporations like Hockenberry's take a share of the income and add a certain level of quality control and interface polish. The customer has the power of the purse - and is choosing the discount route buying directly from the developer.
There is an advantage to being the low-price competitor, but such is the free market. It seems a more fundamental question is being raised by this market demonstration: Is the corporation adding sufficient value to the products that software engineers create to justify its piece of the action?
Over the past 30 years, the wealth-creation potential of knowledge workers has exploded. No longer the single-buyer creations of the factory worker, 21st century labor creates infinitely reproducible information products. The products themselves have seen an unprecedented rate of advance from the black and white blobs and monospace text of 20 years ago to the fledgling storefront websites 10 years ago to today's globally connected life utilities.
During the same period, wealth has been concentrating with executive management (see income distribution, 1970 to present). The 90th to 95th percentile of income, largely the range software engineers occupy, has seen its income remain flat relative to GDP. Meanwhile, the top 0.1% has seen its share of GDP increase by about 6x (see Piketty Saez 2007).
Another point to consider is advertising. The corporation, which uses advertising to create a perception of value (sometimes justified, sometimes not), has not yet figured out this new market. The market is acting without the benefit of the siren song (for better and for worse).
Interesting data points, those:
1. Over the past 30 years, the wealth creation potential of knowledge workers has been on a meteoric climb.
2. In that same time, the income of the pay bracket those knowledge workers occupy has stagnated - while that of corporate senior officials has risen by a factor of 6.
3. The distorting effect of advertising has not yet reached this particular market.
4. Customers are foregoing corporate products in favor of buying direct from the software engineer at a discount price.
5. A representative of the corporation, the traditional bearer of risk in ventures, is complaining that he cannot be guaranteed a profit.
Seems to me there may be a force other than foolhardy consumers at play here.
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Jeez, when will people accept that Macs are designed by people who themselves are designers and the OS is built around the typical workflow of designers and not that of code geeks and techies?
If you knew anything of the internals you'd know just how wrong you actually were. Who among the code geeks and "techies" would not appreciate a mainstream computer that comes with Bash, Apache, Perl, PHP and Ruby built right in? Or can appreciate upcoming things like OpenCL?
It's true there are ALSO a lot of great design oriented features added atop the very nice technical layer - but the technical innards are very much aimed squarely at the people you think have no interest.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Linux is only free if your time is worthless.
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
These were all decent apps to make some users choose Mac. But none of these were really killer apps, at least not after 1990. Mac only has 8% market share.
A "killer app" can be restricted to specific segments - the Mac market share was much higher than 8% in some specific areas, like graphics design and desktop publishing.
Linux may have come a long way in three years, but a business can't just up and change to a new desktop operating environment just because it has passed some arbitrary point for usability. I work in an organisation with about 75 000 employees and we use a frozen XP standard operating environment. Change, though not impossible, is difficult enough that is doesn't happen "just because". This may explain why we still use Novell...
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
> Linux does quite a bit better for graphic design.
Er no! All you have is the Gimp, which although very useful, is a child's toy compared to Photoshop CS4.
> Especially bigtime movie producers (pixar, etc) don't run Mac. They run linux.
What are you talking about - movie producers like Pixar don't do graphic design. They're a computer animation company! And they're using Linux only for render farms - their desktop computers are Macs!
> It used to be premiere for DTP and graphics design. No longer.
What do you mean "no longer"? Windows is still well behind in this area (and I'm a self confessed Windows lover), and in turn Linux is MILES behind Windows for DTP and graphic design, so what platform are you thinking of?
I have a feeling I'm simply falling for your troll.
For me its inability for developers to offer trial versions of apps using the App store. I'm not going to pay more than a few bucks for something i cant try before i buy. Screenshots and reviews just dont cut it for me, so how about Apple allows developers to do x Day trials. I'm sure its possible!
Not many people are going to by a complex application for a platform that they may not choose to keep. Buying for a workstation is one thing, but people change cell phones a lot more than they choose their workstation. Also, the iPhone, for all its hype, has some severe limitations (no Java, no Flash, no cut-and-paste). Add to that the possibility that some new and sexier mobile phone is always around the corner and could have a completely different architecture that won't run these iPhone applications, and that leaves people with the idea that buying an expensive application might be a waste of time and money.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
I develop for the iPhone. What restrictions are there in iPhone development that I'm missing? Why do people keep saying it is restricted?
What apps can you create in Android that you can't on the iPhone? I have yet to see any.
You are not required to release your software for 99 cents or free. You can charge whatever you want. The fact someone may release a similar product for less is called the free market.
Macs cannot compete with Microsoft because of Steve Jobs' compulsive need to throw innovation down our throats. Do we really need yet another iPod? I don't think so. Microsoft is working on OS 7, where Apple has gone far above that in much less time then Microsoft. Why? To allow them to feel superior by adding inconsequential new shiny features. Macs concentrate on unnecessary new appearance stuff. The only reason they are recognized as more secure is because Macs haven't attracted the market share that will allow the big time hackers to really go to work
I think most commenters are missing the primary focus of the author's rant. This is fair, because his letter is laden with subtext that is probably not obvious to people who aren't intimately familiar with the iPhone developer community. I believe that the primary thrust of his argument is not that he should be paid more, or that his apps can't stand on their merits, or that he is no longer in a position to play gatekeeper.
Rather, his primary complaints seem to be with the Apple-approved and required distribution mechanism for the iPhone, namely their App Store. The App Store severely limits how apps can be sold, promoted, and used. It does not allow for trial software, it does not allow for returns. There is no built-in help system or feedback mechanism. Ratings cannot be challenged. And the "top X apps" is segregated by "free" vs "pay" but not by different levels of pay. Therefore it is much easier to sell more copies of a $0.99 app and climb the charts, displacing potentially far better but more expensive apps that are naturally going to have fewer sales.
Hockenberry's letter seems aimed at encouraging or nudging in the direction of fixing many of these perceived App Store deficiencies. That is why it is addressed to Steve Jobs, and not to other developers. He isn't saying "stop selling your $0.99 apps," he's saying, give all app developers a fair playing field to encourage innovation and risk-taking.
The app store IS the killer app.
Those companies render the output on Linux. The creation takes place on a Mac.
Not strictly true. Mac hardware perhaps. If you just do a name check for the apps used, you will go away with the wrong impression. Many CGI companies used Unix based systems extensively from the start. The old SGI workstations were usually running Unux, and then Linux was brought in to run on cheaper commodity hardware, and reduce the rewrites needed to do the changeover. Basic good business case scenario. Linux was a smaller move and a cheaper option than the expensive workstation grade systems they were using. Which is why Nvidia has been supporting Linux for so long. Cinepaint was a fork of an early Gimp version that was heavily customised for the movie industry. ILM even created EXR, which was open sourced so other apps could use it. It is commonly used for retouching jobs instead of Photoshop. Practically a custom app for hteis very job. Massive, the crowd control software used in movies such as Lord of the Rings and others for animating large numbers of figures also works on Linux, and according to one article I read, works better on Linux than on Windows. Ever wonder why Maya is available on Linux? could it be that the top CGI studios who have been using Unix for years, and are Maya's main user base, and have been changing to Linux wanted it. And if you read up a bit, there are plenty of articles about Linux being used in the production side. Sometimes even on Apple hardware running Linux. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9951 An interview with the makers of the Spiderwick chronicles. Not a great movie, but some very nice effects. Linux software for content creation running in Apple hardware. http://digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/video_linux_hollywood/ Basically a rundown of Linux in the high end CGI field. Particularly interesting, and shows how wrong you are. There is way more than you think happening with Linux in the CGI world. Off the shelf apps are not enough by a long shot for the movie industry. They have the money and the technical resources to make custom apps that are strictly in house, and will likely never be released to the wider world. For them, Linux works, and works well. And allows them to use the millions of lines of old code from the Unix days that they still need. So basically.. the movie industry uses whatever works, and some of the really big studios have the resources to overcome any limitations of existing software where required. It is a pity they don't release more of their code, but such is life. They don't have to. And much of it would no doubt be useless without the other tools they use for various things. Although the thought of ILM contributing code to Blender and Gimp is quite a nice one.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
So a company owned by Steve Jobs for 20 years uses Macs? I'm shocked. Shocked.
iphone apps are pretty much stuck with $0.99 since Apple users are loyal followers such that a. it's the same paradigm as the itunes store (0.99 songs), it's all managed through itunes, and the current thousands of apps are less than $3 so the bar has been set.