Slashdot Mirror
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."
Visicalc was an app for the Apple II, not the Mac.
Simply add Top Apps categories for more price ranges...
$1-$5
$5-$10
$10-$50
$50- ??
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.
What the Hell? spreedsheets were the killer app for PC's period.
it was not mac-specific-- it was a much earlier dawn of the PC age.
"VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It may well be the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool.[1] VisiCalc sold over 700,000 copies in six years.[2]"
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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!
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...
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.
Code something that is 'insanely great' and you will survive to charge $4.99 for your app. Otherwise, perish in flame.
Sig this!
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
I'm an iPhone developer. My company have been in the top sellers in US and Canada. And I agree, with some reserve, to what is being written.
If you look at the games that are produced on the iPhone, they are very good, frankly, many of them have many hours of replay value, many of the apps are top notch, and compared to other phones, they are of insane quality. And for a game that we sell more than $20 on any PC, and even more on consoles, we can only barely nudge a $5 on the iPhone, for nearly the same production quality. That's thousands and thousands of man-hour of work, sold at $5. Think about that. Even then, we got average results: either the comments were raving on our game, either people were giving one star and saying it was way too expensive. That's total bull. And that's what's pissing off people creating solid applications.
When the iPhone started, some games (like Monkey Ball) were $10. Some productivity apps were $10 to $15. I paid for a few $10 software, and they were with ample merit. Omnifocus is such a tool, real great, well made, even the v1 was excellent. Then, the top sellers became $5 software. Now it's mostly $1 software.
And that's where I put my grumpy developer shell on the shelf. Frankly, I congratulate $1 games and free games and $1 leisure and productivity tools. They make sure we are not paying $5 like on other phones to get a total piece of crap snorted out by a subcontract firm in 2 weeks. They make sure if we want to pay $5, it's for a good reason. That a software becomes a meme and gets sold by the thousands for 2 weeks and then get replaced by the following meme, I congratulate them. The only reason we are noticing these is because the way the ITMS works "free" and "pay" tops, and nothing else.
Many good applications cost much more, and hopefully they are getting their own crowd and their own push, with their own publicity. Like on PC with freewares and sharewares and commercial software, you pay mostly by merit.
[citation needed]. Truth is, Symbian still dominates the mobile platform market, with RiM in second (though Apple is closing in on Rim).
Apple's market share is about 1/4 that of Symbian.
Please, don't talk out your ass about market share without doing your homework.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Is this "Please give me a bail out because I can't figure out how to compete" week on slashdot?
No, he made a bunch of money because he was there on day one with a ton of press lined up and ready to go and managed (against all odds, IMO) to actually be one of the more decent games at launch. (The prices were a lot higher back then, too, since no one knew how the market would evolve.) He either got lucky or was a marketing genius... The app doesn't sell for $4.99 anymore, either. I'm leaning towards luck.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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
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 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.
I'm sorry, what? Are they complaining that it's hard to make money because there is competition? Hahahahaha. HAHAHAhahahahaha.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.