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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."
Simply add Top Apps categories for more price ranges...
$1-$5
$5-$10
$10-$50
$50- ??
I think a lot of these free and low-priced apps will eventually go up in price. With the exception of the ridiculously simple apps like all of the various flashlights, I have a feeling that companies are putting apps out for free to get a lot of great reviews, and then plan to eventually jack up the price. I have to admit, though, there are so many free apps out there, it's difficult to find a niche that is likely to have a reasonable pay-off. That's life, though, I guess.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
This is utter crap on behalf of any developer. If you make a decent software app and it sells to 100,000 people for $0.99 then how much have you actually made. Yes it is a competitive market, but you sell your app for 0.50c and let people go with it. 100,000 people buying an app for 50c each should more than pay for it. An idea could be as complex as you like and I still can't see spending more than $100 Grand on it for an iPhone app.
Unless you're a shitty developer or you're not writing a good app.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Isn't this advantage almost exclusively for those entirely new to each respective OS?
No. My company switched from all linux desktops to all Mac desktops and laptops about 3 years ago. We're all software developers and very experienced on linux desktops. Our productivity is way up because we spend so little time fussing with the Macs compared to how much time we spent maintaining the linux desktops.
I'm not saying the case will be identical in every situation. But sometimes linux just takes more time to maintain.
Developers: We can use your help.
While the iPhone may have a fraction of the marketshare as symbian, I would have a hard time arguing against Apple's strategy to reach that marketshare. The App store is on every iPhone, meaning any app you get into the App store is easy to access on every iPhone. If I have a symbian handset how do I know about your app? How do I get your app? How do I pay for your app? How do I read reviews for your app? When it comes to marketability of an app, I think the iPhone wins over the phones with bigger market share.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I think it would be far more interesting to list apps by highest price. If someone wants $1-$2 for a puzzle game, that's cheap. But not crazy, I suppose.
But if you were selling something more substantial, like many of the utility apps seen on Palm (databases, pdf viewers, word processors, spread sheets, electronic checkbooks, etc). I don't see why people wouldn't fork out $10 for it. Obviously in smaller numbers, because that $1 price barrier is soo easy.
Are people really buying 10 games/ringtones instead of 1 power app that offers something important? I find it hard to believe.
Apps that I would like to see, that could be worth something:
* Spending program, you can take a picture of your paper receipt and it logs the total(using simple OCR) and the time. And then lets you organize the data in powerful ways.
* Generic Inventory Database, store lists of any old thing. the obvious DVD library, CD library, etc has been done to death. Being able to track inventory of any widget with custom fields would be great. How many ming vases do I have with jade? I should be able to list them all immediately and include photos.
* Password keychain
* RSA SecurID softtoken - turn your iphone into a securid fob. get rid of that little keychain you need to log into your work's VPN. (this is indeed possible, I had them for other OSes)
(I'm tired of coming up with examples, but I think there are 20-30 solid utility apps that were done in one form or another for PalmOS that I haven't seen yet on iPhone)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There are lots of issues with making complex apps under this pricing universe, and it's definitely a deterrent to making more interesting complex apps. People seek technical support for complex apps. If the app costs $0.99, and they ask you a single question about a problem they caused themselves, they have burned enough time to tank a whole day's worth of sales.
Another issue is that Apple doesn't provide software vendors with contact information for our customers, but does allow (and with iPhone OS 2.2 actively encourages) them to complain in the app store, under essentially anonymous handles, about issues that they caused themselves. For example, an app we make is highly praised by most users, but a few complain vociferously that it's "unstable" or "crashes a lot". Yes, in fact our QA tells us this is definitely true -- but only if you run it on a Jail Broken iPhone. Doh! So sorry you didn't contact us for support. So sorry you don't understand you shot your foot off and we neither gave you the gun nor pulled the trigger.
iTunes App Store is basically an ongoing experiment. It's not clear that third party software developers can devise a business model on it which will make a profit.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
For crunching, yes, Linux tends to be used (in part because it makes the boxes doing the crunching cheaper). But the individual artists' workstations are extremely rarely Linux-based, sorry.
I mean--are you seriously going to try to say that Linux beats either platform capable of running Adobe's software when it comes to actually doing the graphics design part of the job? (And if you say GIMP, I'm just going to laugh at you. It's nice if you haven't got anything better, and that's about it. Cinelerra is okay for what it does, but unfortunately for your argument it runs on OS X, too. I'm not enough of a video editing guy to say whether I prefer it over Premiere/After Effects, though. And I will call the men in white coats to take you to be fitted for a very long-sleeved jacket if you try to compare Inkscape with Illustrator.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
My company, illumineX, makes a blogging client for the iPhone, iBlogger. There are a dozen competitors, most of them are free. We charge $9.99. We are told that it's one of the most expensive apps on the store. We're also told that it's one of the most complex (blogging client apps are surprising complex, if they support more than one blog type). Many of our customers used most or all of the other applications, first, and were happy to pay for iBlogger, because they feel it's worth the price. Are we making enough money to justify the work that it took to make the app? Not even close. Are we going to lower the price? Well, one of our few competitors who charged money lowered their price for a month. It went back up. Why? I'm gonna guess that sales didn't go up much, and tech support costs went way, way up.
Apple's long term success may not depend on complex apps being available. If it does, however, then there are serious problems with the iTunes App Store market.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I have 4 programs for the iPhone on the App Store. They are $1.99 for all but one which is $0.99. I paid a graphics artist $1000 (actually a split of the first $5000 of sales, little did either of us guess) and I spent an average of about 3 weeks per app. The two word oriented games have huge dictionaries in Spanish, Russian and English. So far my net payments from Apple are no stellar, well under $1000. The reasons... 10,000 other apps. The jockeying for the current release spots. (we have had issues on 2 of the four that buried them 4 pages in on current releases so no great buzz...) and a whole bunch of imitators that follow on with limited functionality knock-offs for free or 99 cents. Not to mention the competitors who on day one would give a bad review which just kills sales. Even though they didn't buy a copy. That is corrected now. My competitors will at least have to pay all of $2 to say my app crashes on startup. (It won't get through Apple screening if it does that, well, anymore)...
So professional developers will just not be able, as the co-sympathizer over at Icon Factory notes, be able to put the effort into really feature-full apps. And they at least have a decent marketing engine behind them. They can get sales over 100,000 for each app. I am hoping to get something like 3-5000 in sales for each app.
Apple just makes it hard for me to have an independent sales effort as well. I had a major chain store's buyer interested in having my App(s) for sale in their store. I wrote Apple a nice letter pointing out the issues. And they acted on the portion suggesting a promo code so I could get reviews but have so far rejected things like selling me a code for the app at their cut of the purchase price, so I can do things like sell it myself to brick and mortar stores. Create my own storefront online to increase the sales of my App(s) without Apple recommending my competitors products at checkout, and so on. And on. And on.
So yes. Great for the iPhone user. There are a lot of applications that are free or well under $5 most hovering at either 99 cents or $1.99. And before you say anything derogatory about paid software will sell if its good and so on, people buying games will take a free version if it is just for minor diversions and live with the limitations instead of a paid version, and for some of us programming is not an avocation, its the way we pay rent and put food on the table.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
You are just digging yourself deeper with every ignorant post you make.
Who the hell cares what a demo artist or your friend uses. The "bigtime" (your word) studios have clear separations of software and personnel for modelling, animation, and rendering (etc). Some of these steps, especially rendering of late, is done on Linux-based server farms, but a LOT of work is still done on Macs with both commercial and proprietary software.
To your Pixar example... DUUH! Steve Jobs is Chairman of both Apple and Pixar, and trust me, he makes sure Macs do and always will have a significant presence there.
There are lots of things linux is great for, and depending on your usage it might even be a decent desktop OS. But that's certainly not the case for every desktop user, even with releases from the "last X years" (though I agree they are getting better).
I've run and used daily both an OS X and an Ubuntu workstation for several years, and in that time I've essentially given up on trying to make A/V playback, browser plugins, or even multiple-screen use work on the linux box. 95% of the stuff works fine -- I can play back most codecs, use most browser plugins, and display video on both screens. But that last 5% takes hours to fix, if it can be fixed at all. There are still some codecs I just can't make work, some plugins that won't run, and my cursor is either displayed incorrectly or slightly mis-aligned on my second and third monitors, even after hours of tweaking.
I'm not saying my Mac never annoys me, but when it does the answer is almost always cut and dry -- "it can't be done". Compare that to the linux machine, where "it works for me", or "you just have to do to get it going, unless you have GPU X, then you need to do ". Now sometimes those extra 28 steps are worthwhile, because I can do things that aren't possible on my Mac. But sometimes those extra 28 steps just eat 30 minutes of my life, and if I was using my Mac I wouldn't have wasted the time.
If I were just doing basic computing tasks, and didn't care to muck with the configuration, a linux desktop would be perfectly acceptable and would require little maintenance. But as someone who wants to play with things, and who isn't willing to accept that it works for others but not for me, a linux desktop can be a huge distraction and time sink.
/ Would give my grandmother linux on the desktop
// Still has a linux desktop in daily use
/// Just also needs a unix-like computer that works well enough to keep me from getting distracted by administrative tasks
Precisely. The iPhone is *not* a productivity tool, it is a lifestyle device, and the apps that will show up on the phone will reflect the user base in the form of lifestyle applications that may be worth a few bucks each.
And for that very reason I don't think there will be much of a market for $20+ "productivity" tools.
And honestly, people are looking for "widgets" when it comes to iPhone apps - simple things that support their lifestyle like movie times, bus schedules, concert schedules, etc. That's not to say there aren't some very cool things being done in the iPhone sphere, but that developers looking to spend oodles upon oodles of money developing their apps and selling them for $25 a pop probably aren't going anywhere.
From the original article:
"Both developers and designers cost somewhere between $150-200 per hour."
Well gee, maybe that's the problem right there. I've been coding on the Mac for fifteen years, and I own my own Mac OS X software company. I've written apps that have been featured in MacWorld and on Apple.com, and I make about $28 a day. Yes, a day. I'm going broke, sure, but my yearly expenses are only about $18k a year tho. And I live quite comfortably at a $18k expense output. So if I can get a regular 9-5 at the grocery store next month to supplement my Cocoa programming I think I'll do fine...
My point though, is that maybe if these designers/developers spent more time actually writing code and less time planning their next snowboarding trip in Switzerland, some of these problems might resolve themselves.
$200 an hour for a couple thousand lines of Objective-C? Are these people out of their $#@ minds? Get a grip on reality."
CMYK is device-dependent - it's all device dependent
Yes and no. There are a few reasonable standards for RGB. CMYK lacks that.
You have to convert anyway. You might as well work in a colorspace with tolerable math properties. - You don't work in CMYK
I don't. Lots of people with aspirations of being "professional" expect to work in CMYK.
Conversion belongs in your printer driver or in the printer itself. - You really don't know what you're talking about
Direct editing of CMYK makes people feel special. They get to pretend they are all professional. - You don't know what I was talking about
It's pure idiocy. - and you're an asshole.
Sorry if you're one of the people I speak of!
I prefer to call that kind of crap "crippleware," "nagware," or "trials," or "demos."
Back in the good old days, when shareware was first thought up, it was typically used for games. These games--consisting of three or four episodes usually, and usually around 10-12 levels per episode, had shareware versions featuring an entire freakin' episode (often the first). You were able (and encouraged) to enjoy, have fun and share it with friends. Enjoy being a key word here; it felt like they really did want you to at least be able to try a nice section of the game, even if you're not able to whip out your wallet and pay 30-50 bucks just yet. It often showed in their wording. Very generous.
An episode was typically a lot of content, and surely plenty for a lot of people. It's practically a game all on its own. I admit, while I wasn't able to buy these games back then (no money), in most cases the shareware episodes were "complete" enough that it didn't really even matter.
Then came this other crap (usually not games, often some random utility software of vastly varying quality) that cheap bastards put out which they *also* called shareware, which would:
-greatly limit the features you could use
-nag you to buy it (often every time you launch it, requiring a conscious point and click)
-switch around the buttons to force you to actively seek the correct one each time
-limit the amount of time you can run it at any given time
-limit the time you can use it, at all, to a certain number of days
-allow you to "see" what it will do but not actually do it unless you pay (partition editors, disk defragmenters)
-a seemingly unlimited number of disgusting
Sure, you could "share" this crap with your friends too, but would you want to? It's usually so damn butchered in functionality, even I wouldn't want to have the crap on my machine--I can't imagine anyone else would. Honestly, it's disturbing that today's "shareware" gets its name from something which originally was so much better and far less crippled.
It's even more disturbing that shareware as it once was no longer even exists in PC gaming; it's all crap demos that are so short they're not even good for demoing what the "full" game is like. Sorry, but one random level or (gasp!) a fraction of a level is not good enough to determine the quality of a game. Not at all. But that's the shit that's getting passed as demos of PC and video games these days.
*sigh* I miss the good old days...
A good work around for this is already being done. So developers offer a free version and a paid version. IM+ for example. They have a free version with a few key features removed. If you like it you can buy the paid version.
I didn't like it so I didn't buy it. A few games do the same thing. For example spore.
I still don't understand the argument however. Are they saying that apple should ban cheap software so they no longer need to compete? Or that people will not consider higher priced software even if there is no cheaper competitor simply because everything else is cheaper? Seems to me they just need to suck it up and compete.
I'm days away from releasing my game on AppStore, and all the while during development, I watched prices plummet. Very disheartening and demotivating. This happens initially with any open market system, and the thing that needs to fundamentally change is not the system, but expectations. Too many iPhone developers go into this thinking they'll be the next Trism and Ocarina. That's fine, but you'll probably also dive deep into disappointment, which turns to anger, and then to finger pointing. Get your expectations straight, and you'll do yourself less emotional damage. Something developers are also missing is how many people out there actually have the right expectations. A lot of devs do their apps because it's cool and they are fascinated with making software, beyond the money aspect. That's where the $.99 toys come from. They are the stones that devs with dollar signs in their eyes are cast upon. Forget trying to make your living on AppStore alone. You'll always hear about the few who made it huge, and the rest of us who are satisfied that we made something cool and where the income is all extra. It sucks, but if you want a higher chance of making it rich, either join a startup with stock options, or be the best. In other words, from here on in, you'll only make your living on AppStore if you are absolutely phenomenal, or phenomenally lucky. Otherwise, be in it for the fun of it.
People pay for good software. People pirate good software, too. Some people pirate good software in order to see if it's worth paying for good software. The iPhone is relatively pirate-free, due to it's DRM system, ensuring that more people are paying for apps than ever before. Unfortunately, without a trial-ware market, developers are forced to make lite versions of products, rather than demo-products that retain full functionality for a limited time, or whatnot. I think this actually creates a worse market for the iPhone, since many aren't willing to pay $20 for something that may or may not be decent. Mobile software, in general, is less complex than desktop version, and therefore, I think it's difficult to price any app higher than $20-30. Additionally, legal or not, many people in families buy one copy of a software program at home, and install several copies. Since this is not possible with the iPhone (at least out of the box), people aren't willing to buy an app for $30-50, and go around and buy another copy for the wife. This is really one of the first devices to feature such as large, DRM-hardware platform for developing software, so what we're really seeing is free-market economics and creative solutions for what will and won't sell. I paid $10 for spore, and it was a waste. I paid $10 for monkey ball, and it was a waste. I paid $15 for a voice dialer that was a waste. And then, a free one from Melodis just came out that was superior and free. It's not that I'm not willing to pay for apps. I've bought plenty of "high dollar" apps, and would have gladly paid more for them. But, the model of buy, even though you can't try, is what bugs me. But, more developers have been doing limited versions of apps, which has put me at ease. EA has a trial version of spore, and had I played that, I'd have gotten bored quickly, and not paid for the full version. But, pacman's one level demo rocked, so I bought it. Same thing with Reign of Swords. My point is, people are a lot more willing than you think to pay for apps; but you have to be willing to give away free demos in order to convince people to pony up for more spendy apps.