Congratulations to Jamie Montgomerie for finally getting his beautiful book reader Eucalyptus finally accepted on the AppStore. The rejections from Apple based on searchable content were laughable at best and I’m glad to see that (once again) after a bit of bad PR, Apple relents on a bad practice.
Early reviews of the user experience of Eucalyptus have been mostly positive, but Alan Quatermain noticed that many of the early reviews also chided Montgomerie’s app for its $9.99 price tag. How dare a developer charge a fair price for their hard work!
Eucalyptus is a beautiful app, but as we’ve seen, selling an application for a fair price like $9.99 is hard to do on a platform where 99 cents is the norm. I came out of the gate with FitnessTrack at $3.99, which is twice the price of my biggest paid competitor. I begrudgingly decided to drop the price to $2.99 after a few weeks to try to bring it closer to the competition because quality is not the dominating comparison metric on AppStore.
The sad truth is that price is king. Not attention to detail. Not great usability. Just price.
What many developers coming from the Mac platform fail to see is that these iPhone users aren’t all Mac users who care about the attention to deal and obsession we put into our products. Instead, they seem to be willing to settle for a subpar user experience so long as its free or a dollar cheaper. This is far more frustrating to me than any Apple-induced frustrations I’ve had in the past 3 months.
Quatermain sums up my thoughts on why the current AppStore pricing trend is detrimental fairly succinctly:
Remember: the price you pay for an app isn’t just providing remuneration for having assembled it to this point (that’s largely moot–it’s already available & therefore ‘paid for’ by the author after all). You’re paying so that the author can continue to work on the application and can support it if/when things go wrong; therefore the end price is based upon the complexity of maintaining that application.
Software development is a costly and time consuming aspect of our practice, and after-purchase support can be just as costly long term. Users expect that if they run into issues with the product, you’ll be there to help. If you have a marginally successful application, this can eat up 1-2 hours a day that you can’t invest in future development. With a $3 price point, it’s hard to say that the cost of support and future development is built in.
The low costs may seem great to consumers right now, but the overwhelming majority of developers are not making enough money to afford to maintain and improve their software in the future. Unlike software on the Desktop, mobile software will have a finite development life. The 1.0’s and 2.0’s you currently use and enjoy most likely won’t make it to 3.0 or even 9.0 because there’s not enough money coming in to support the development. If there is not much financial incentive to continue developing and improving a quality application, why bother?
When you tack on the current lack of upgrade pricing in the AppStore, it makes the prospect of long-term enhancements of iPhone products even more bleak. Free upgrades for life is not a sustainable income method for most developers and paid upgrades are a way to help further future development and keep the lights on. With AppStore, your customer gives you $3 up front and is entitled to every major or minor update forever. Using the same logic, I should look forward to Apple sending me iLife and iWork ‘10 and beyond for free since I have boxed copies of the current iterations.
I love affordable software, and saving money is great, but I can’t help but constantly feel that developers (myself included) have been quick to sell themselves short in hopes of reaching that holy grail of the Top 25 on the AppStore. I’m not sure what the solution is, or even if there is one, but it is a long-term problem.
Like most developers, I want to give my customers a 2.0, 3.0 and beyond, but the current iPhone economy makes it harder than it should be to build software with a long-term development cycle. That’s a shame.