Realmac Blog – App Pricing and the Freemium Trend: “So what does this mean for us and the future of apps? Given the right product, a freemium model is something that we may have to consider. To throw in some business speak, the right product matched to the right target market is critically important here, and when done properly going freemium could be a massively successful strategy. That said, how it affects the perceived value of our craft remains to be seen.”

(Via. Realmac Blog)

While I agree with Rob that there’s a place for freemium, this disturbing trend of assuming that price is the major factor in a particular app’s success always gives me pause.

I think Letterpress would have done fine if it weren’t freemium. Why? Because it was made by Loren Brichter, and it’s an awesome game. You can’t just look at the pricing model and assume that’s the reason why something hit or didn’t. We have no way of knowing for sure how well Letterpress would have done at $2 or $5, but we can’t assume that it would have done worse. It could have made more money.

A couple of things to keep in mind if you’re getting into the App Store software business, especially if you want to make a productivity, or some other sort of “non-game” app:

• The vast majority of iPhone and iPad owners only buy games. Actually, to be more accurate, most of them don’t buy games; they download free games. And then a very small percentage of those folks actually pay the $1 or whatever for the “advanced” features. Those hundreds of millions of devices that Apple talks about at every keynote? Most of them are never going to run your app at any price. Not because these users are cheap. They paid for an iPhone or iPad. They have a few bucks to spare. Not because they hate you. They don’t know you. It’s just that paying for apps is not on the radar. They just like playing casual games once in a while, and that’s all they need from their phone. So forget them. They’re not your customers. There are hundreds of thousands of other iOS users who are interested in your product and do pay for software regularly. Don’t confuse those users with everyone else. They are two very different groups of people. You don’t need to get them all.
• The Top Grossing Apps list is a complete waste of your time. Repeat after me: You will never be on this list. Furthermore, the apps on this list have almost nothing to do with your success or failure. Everyone there has all sorts of advantages (connections, press, luck, VC backing, etc.) that you don’t have. Trying to emulate anything about any of these apps is an exercise in futility. You can make money just fine without ever paying attention to this list at all. In fact, you’re more likely to make money if you forget the list exists.
• You’re not Loren Brichter. You’re just not. Maybe you’re a genius, and you’ve made an app that’s even better than anything Loren has ever done. That’s nice, but you’re still not Loren Brichter. You didn’t work at Apple on the original iPhone. You didn’t have one of the early App Store successes with Tweetie. You haven’t guest lectured at Stanford. You didn’t earn the reputation he has for building the highest quality stuff, and you aren’t universally adored in the Apple community as an all-around nice guy. You may be all those things some day if you keep working at it like he did, but you’re not there yet, and you’re not getting there this week. If you want to emulate anything about Loren, emulate his commitment to quality, his ability to take advantage of the luck that comes his way, and his focus on the product rather than the profit motive. Don’t emulate his freemium game pricing model. That’s like donning a white suit and thinking you can dance like Travolta. Not going to happen.
• There are ten times more failed freemium apps than successful ones. The bottom grossing apps are mostly free or freemium, too. You know why? Because far too many devs embrace freemium as the “only way to make money.” Most devs are smart engineers but terrible business people. Don’t be that.
• The goal isn’t to get rich quick and retire young. That could happen on the App Store, but there are much easier ways to reach that goal. You haven’t heard many stories about the dev who makes an app in his spare time and hits it big a la Steve Detemer lately because we’re past that stage. Far richer and more connected people have descended on the App Store with well-known brands and armies of resources, and they get the bulk of the attention and the money. But that’s fine. There’s still plenty of room for you. Find a measure of success that’s both realistic and noble, and work towards it. Make something you’re proud of and figure out a way to make a living with it so you can make it better. Be ready for that to take years.
• Buy apps. And start encouraging everyone you know to pay for quality. If you balk at paying $1.99 for any app that genuinely interests you, get out of the business immediately. You’re part of the problem.
• If you’re in the apps business to get rich quick or to get into the Top Grossing list, you have to be prepared to play an entirely different game, with venture capital, millions in investment, teams of engineers, and an exit strategy. Just making your app free to play isn’t going to do you any good. That’s one piece of a much larger and very different business strategy.

John Siracusa is right about electronic voting. People have been trained for years to be skeptical about computers replacing our ancient paper ballot systems. It’s sad for me to hear otherwise intelligent people spew out all the various rote reasons why we could never vote via the Internet from our own laptops or phones.

“It’ll be the end of democracy!” “Hackers will steal elections with a single click!” “Paper systems are so much harder to manipulate!”

Nonsense, plain and simple. Like fears of Terminator style artificially intelligent machines taking over the human race and enslaving us, fears of electronic voting are just plain illogical.

First and foremost, it’s important to understand that computers are already involved in tabulating ballots. (You don’t think we add up all the votes from all the counties in all the states with an abacus, do you?) In fact, computers are involved with every part of the vote counting except the part where we actually vote. Eventually, all the numbers from all the little polling places everywhere get fed into a computer, which then is just as easy to “hack” as any other computer. So what we’re really talking about here is the one piece of the process that isn’t already electronic.

But what about those electronic voting machines? Another argument I often hear is “Every electronic voting machine we’ve ever deployed is a piece of crap and easily hackable.” True, but that doesn’t mean a good machine couldn’t be invented. It doesn’t mean that if we put the top computer scientists into a room for a week they couldn’t come up with something a billion times better.

We invented the Atom Bomb. I think we could figure this out.

I may not understand computer security nearly as well as John Siracusa, but I don’t need that knowledge to reason that if we wanted to, we could of course invent a system that was equal to or better than our current paper voting systems in security. A system that was fully transparent, verifiable by disinterested parties, and much harder to hack than the current system. A system where, as he said, individuals could actually log in and verify that their votes were indeed counted. The technology is there. We just need the will and some time.

But will the public ever trust what they don’t understand?

Let me ask you this: Do you understand the technology behind securing your credit card number on Amazon?

If we trust computers with our money, we can trust computers with our voting. We can cry “democracy” all we want, talk about our inalienable rights until we’re blue in the face, but at the end of the day, nothing is more sacred to people than their money. And we’re doing our banking online, with systems that are frankly subpar when it comes to security and modern standards of transparency. So getting people to trust an electronic voting system is not going to be an obstacle for long. People will distrust, then they’ll talk to friends who had great experiences with it, and then they’ll realize it’s just a hell of a lot more convenient to vote from home than to wait in line for seven hours. Game over. Give it four or five election cycles, and most of the country will come around.

Now, Siracusa rightfully wanted to avoid being political in his discussion, but there is one obvious side effect of a fully-electronic, cryptographically secure system, at least here in the United States: Increased participation. If voting were as easy as ordering something on Amazon, we’d have much higher voter turnout in this country. And much higher voter turnout is definitely not in the best interest of the people in power (and one political party in particular, though I suspect both major parties would fear it). Thus, keeping people scared of electronic voting is paramount to the continuation of the status quo.

Ironically, many of my smart friends who are most afraid that an electronic system would be “hacked” are in fact making it easier for those they want to keep out of office stay in office longer. Keeping computers out of our electoral process is the hack. It’s a clever form of voter suppression.

It’ll probably be a few more generations before we see any real reform in this area. That’s unfortunate, because increased convenience in voting, which would cause increased participation, would ultimately make our elected representatives more accountable. Contrary to popular belief, electronic voting would very likely boost our democratic freedoms, and thus ensure a better future for democracy. Because democracy only works when people show up. And with the current system, very few are showing up.

Apple’s Institutional Slingshot: Rational Explanation Of Irrational Stock Action – Seeking Alpha: “As this slingshot terminology has morphed into mainstream vernacular, we’ve noticed that some still fail to understand the underlying forces that produce the slingshot action. Let’s begin by explaining what the slingshot is not. The Apple slingshot is not a hedge fund conspiracy. It is not caused by any of the negative rationale that you may hear in the media, which includes the underwhelming launch of Apple Maps, the lack of innovation from Tim Cook, iPhone 5 supply constraints, iPad mini cannibalization, Samsung (SSNLF.PK) competitive threats, the earnings miss, and of course the absence of Steve Jobs. To the uninformed, these variables sound reasonable enough to support a selloff, but to those who understand Apple’s historical stock precedent, these reasons appear to be nothing more than noise. Seasoned Apple investors know there is more to it.”

(Via. seekingalpha.com)

Everyone crying about Apple’s stock drop over the past few weeks needs to read this. It’s cyclical, and it’s temporary. And, as I’ve told many people lately, it’s a good time to buy.

The first big challenge in designing the iPad version of x2y was the placement of the controls. Looking at all that screen real estate, you are tempted to concentrate only on the visual aesthetic and forget that you want the design of the app to conform to the users’ hands as well his or her eyes.

This is why it’s essential when designing an app to mock it up and get it onto the device as early in the process as possible. Tap around and see how comfortable (or uncomfortable) all the controls are. (I use Bjango’s excellent Skala for this purpose.)

People hold the iPad very differently than the iPhone. It’s a two-handed device, for the most part. (Even the new iPad mini, while comfortable to hold in one hand while reading or viewing a video, is not very easy to operate with one hand. You tend to go two-handed when you need to start tapping things.) Placing the controls where they are easiest to get to, then, is essential.

I started with the number pad. The common solution to the number pad on the iPad is to place it at the center bottom, so that it’s equally reachable by either hand. Makes sense, after all, as this works perfectly for the keyboard. But since the number pad, unlike the keyboard, only takes up part of the width of the screen, I thought this placement would waste space and ultimately make it slightly uncomfortable for both hands, rather than perfectly comfortable for either one, as you have to reach out to get to the center of the screen. Considering that the main thing you need to do with x2y is change the values with this number pad, I wanted it to be as effortless as possible. This wasn’t working for me.

What if I place the number pad directly under the thumb? That way, you can type on the number pad without lifting your hands from the device at all. I mocked up the pad on the far bottom right, and immediately it felt perfect to use with the right hand. I knew this was a far better choice.

But what about those who prefer using their left thumbs? Being a southpaw myself, I’ve always been hyper sensitive to designs that don’t conform well to my preferences.

So I decided to add an orientation toggle. A simple button tap, and the entire layout of the app switches to an alternate, left-handed layout. The number pad moves to the left bottom corner, and the settings sidebar moves over to the right.

On first launch, the app assumes you favor your right thumb (a sensible default, as 90% of the world is right-handed), but once you set the orientation to your preferred side, the app will remember your preferred layout on future launches.

And this orientation preference works in landscape as well as portrait mode, of course.

This simple little change added more complexity for me on the backend. I ended up rewriting a lot of code to get two alternate views working properly. (Lots of AutoLayout debugging, too.) All for a switch that most users will press once and then forget. But every time I tap out a new value with my thumb, I’m reminded that it was totally worth it.

Meanwhile, adding the infrastructure to save that orientation preference made it trivial to save current field values between launches as well. So now, even if you haven’t launched the app in weeks, it’ll open up exactly where you left off, on both the iPad and the iPhone. A nice added benefit.

x2y is now a universal app for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch. You can get it here on the App Store. Or visit the web site for more details.

I think John Siracusa is exactly right: just about all of Apple’s products are in transition right now, and thus none of them feels spot on.

We can look at a product like the iPad mini and immediately fall in love with its smaller form factor and easier-to-hold light weight. But then we wince at the non-Retina display. We can easily picture a future where this awesome new iPad has that perfect screen, but we know we have to wait another year or more for that to happen.

All great design is compromise. What to put in, what to take out. But in this age of Retina screens vs. battery life, Apple is being forced to leave out a little more than we’d like. Or, in the case with the iPads 3 and 4, they leave in something we don’t want: bulk and weight, in order to get that crisper display.

We can see the trade offs far more clearly this time.

This didn’t seem to be an issue when Apple released its first Retina display on the iPhone 4. That device felt like most Apple devices; a nice improvement over the previous generation in all respects. Because Retina was new, we never expected it on previous devices. Apple had the luxury of releasing it when battery and weight specs were ready.

But Retina is a technology that doesn’t scale so easily.

Take a look at the laptop line. The laptop everyone wants is the MacBook Air with Retina display. Instead, we get the 15-inch and 13-inch MacBook Pros, much heavier machines that cost more and can barely handle the extra graphics overload from that quadruple dose of pixels. A laptop line that a year ago was dominated by the super-thin, wedge-shaped Air has now taken a step backwards, in terms of size and weight, in order to move forward with the screen.

Owning a Mac with a Retina screen at this point is definitely a mixed bag. Between the graphics card struggling to keep up with simple tasks like scrolling, and web pages and apps that are not yet fully optimized for Retina, having either the 15-inch or 13-inch Retina laptops at this point feels like you’ve arrived 15-minutes early for a party. You know it’s going to be great eventually, but at the moment you just feel alone.

This leaves die-hard Apple lovers like myself in the strange position of not necessarily wanting the latest and greatest Apple products right now. I’m willing to wait for a Retina MacBook Air; I didn’t even consider the current Retina Macs. At the same time, I’m about to sell my 3rd Generation Retina iPad and get a non-Retina iPad mini with 4G, rather than getting a 4th Generation Retina iPad. And I’ll very likely replace my aging iMac with a new non-Retina model in another month. I’m not rejecting Retina as a technology. Far from it. I just think the trade offs are too great at the moment.

Apple is clearly aware of the current pubescent state of its lineup. That’s why products such as the non-Retina MacBook Pro and the iPad 2 are still around. They know that for some, the cost of Retina is still a little too high.

The need for this transition is obvious. Retina displays are simply better, and it’s only natural that all of Apple’s devices (save the iPod shuffle) go Retina eventually. Those of us with rational minds and a bit of knowledge about the current limitations of technology don’t fault Apple for putting these compromised products into the world. After all, they are the best machines that can currently be produced, and in most respects they do their jobs just fine. But in our hearts, we’re longing for the devices we can’t yet have. We’ve seen a brighter future, so the present no longer satisfies. That’s a serious challenge for Apple moving forward. The sooner Apple can get its products out of this weird adolescent stage, the better.