I was having a discussion via Twitter this morning with Manton Reece and Danny Greg about our plans for the Mac App Store when it launches in 90 days. My customary rule is to not tweet more than 2 or 3 times about a single subject and instead convert it into a blog post that won’t be lost in Twitter’s data silos.
My first reaction to the Mac App Store was that of frustration and confusion. I haven’t exactly been the biggest cheerleader for the App Store platform, but I’ve come to accept it as a requirement to do business with Apple on the iOS platform. That said, I concede that the App Store puts my software in front of a lot more eyeballs than trying to manage the sales of mobile software on my own Web site and store.
It’s so successful in fact that for the first time ever, I am making more money off of iOS software sales than my Mac products. I never expected that to happen!
Mac App Store Day 1
I’ve been thinking about how I want to handle the Mac App Store with Check Off and Today for the past week and while I’m not 100% committed to this idea yet, it’s what I’m leaning towards.
Assuming both applications are accepted, both Today and Check Off will be in the App Store on day 1 as the exclusive distribution channel. At that point in time, I will shut down the existing Second Gear store and channel any sales traffic from my Web site to the Mac App Store.
Risky? Yeah. Insane? Maybe.
There are a few reasons for doing this:
- The Mac App Store requires Mac OS X Snow Leopard, so I can cut off supporting Leopard in both products for new sales. I don’t have too many Leopard users at this point, but taking the time to ensure that my products work on two desktop platforms is a pain and I’m incredibly lazy.
- I don’t have to duplicate work. If I were to keep both store presences alive it’d require maintaining two binaries: one for my site and one for the Mac App Store with Sparkle, in-app purchasing and a variety of other things stripped out.
- I’d also have to publish updates twice and at a staggered pace. Currently when a version of a Mac app is finished, I publish it to the Web and sparkle feed. No reviews. It’s great. With the Mac App Store in the equation, I’d have to delay the publishing anyway because I don’t want to deal with the inevitable “I bought on the Mac App Store. Where is my Today 2.7 build!?”
- I can focus on what I’m good at: building software. Maintaining my store, licensing information and the like isn’t a ton of work, but it is work that takes away from me improving my products.
The positives are great, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t negatives and unknowns at this point.
Existing Customers
I’v got an existing user base that has already purchased Today 2.0 and Check Off 4.0 licenses. How do I handle getting them on the App Store? In short, I don’t. My plan is that I will put Today 2.5.1 and Check Off 4.1.2 on the App Store as the exact same builds as the current releases. The only difference from the existing versions is that they don’t contain Sparkle, licensing code or an in-app store.
From that point, the next releases I do of either product will be major releases (Today 3, Check Off 5) that will be free updates to anyone that already purchased on the Mac App Store. At that point existing customers can upgrade to version 3 if they so desire. This does mess with my development schedule slightly, but it does still allow anyone who wants to purchase the products an outlet to do so while I work on the next major releases.
What about existing customers? How do I transition them to the Mac App Store? Other than sending off a copy of the Second Gear newsletter announcing the new versions and linking them to where to purchase it, there’s nothing else I can do in the current Mac App Store. I realize this is a bit of a growing pain and likely to irritate a subset of customers, but I’m willing to take the risk1.
The biggest complaint will undoubtedly be from the crowd who claims they have supported my products in the past and that they deserve upgrade pricing. I don’t deny that, but it’s not in the cards presently with the Mac App Store and I don’t know if it ever will be. Apple doesn’t offer upgrade pricing for iLife or iWork. If you want the new version, it’s $50 or $80. My application’s aren’t anywhere near those price points.
Demos
My biggest hangup with the Mac App Store “all-in” approach is the lack of demos. I am clueless as to how to handle this. There’s a part of me that says to just forego them since my products sell for $12 and $25 dollars, but I think they are a necessary element of the process if you want to sell software at a fair price.
I could put up a time-limited demo version that somehow ties to the user’s machine when they first launched it and then expires after 2 weeks or so. I could also use this as a way to gain customer information as I can prompt demo downloaders to sign up for the Second Gear mailing list.
The problem with the approach is that I’m worried about how to make it crack proof. The current trial limitations in Today and Check Off aren’t what I’d describe as ironclad. If I were to put a demo version of my application out that was without any sort of licensing code, I’d need to ensure that it couldn’t be cracked to run indefinitely by anyone but the greasiest of the greasy hackers who live in mom’s basement.
Pricing
As with anything involving Apple’s App Store platforms, pricing is an issue. At this point, I’m not planning to adjust my prices for the Mac App Store. I think this will be the trend for existing software moving to the App Store, because giving up a 30% cut to Apple for the privilege is enough of a sacrifice. Tacking on a price cut as well? I can’t see many full-time developers agreeing to that.
If you’ve selling a $40 piece of software on your own distribution platform for years, moving it to a new platform doesn’t make it any less worth of $40. I can see new products and iOS ports racing to the bottom, but for existing quality productivity applications like mine, Manton’s Clipstart or Danny’s Littlesnapper, the pricing should remain relatively stable…for now.
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I think↩