Apple’s Favorite Strategy Game Is a Financial Disaster | Game|Life | Wired.com: “What Stewart doesn’t understand, he says, is why the game was only downloaded half a million times. Half a million people playing your game would be great news for any app developer. In the free-to-play world, it’s death. Stewart says he needs 3 million players to break even.”

(Via. wired)

Fascinating story about a freemium game that has been featured by Apple several times and is still a financial flop.

As I said in my 360iDev talk last month, I don’t understand why people think the freemium model is “the only way to make money” on the App Store. To me, it’s the most high-risk option available. If prominent Apple features won’t get you enough users to make some money, you’re going to have to do massive amounts of marketing on your own, anyway. So you’re paying tons of money to get the word out, but then giving the product away to 97% of the audience you paid for. Why not pay for that marketing and charge a price to 100% of your newly acquired users?

The number one thing stopping users from buying your app is not money. It has never been money. It’s awareness. People simply don’t know who you are or what your product is. Giving an app away for free doesn’t change that. You’re still just one of hundreds of thousands of other free apps hoping to get a little attention. The only difference is that with freemium, when those few people do pick you out of that sea of other options, you have a 97% chance of not getting compensated.

If One Man Left had charged even $1 for Outwitters, there’s no doubt in my mind it would have made way more money than it did as a freemium app. Apple’s endorsement alone would have pushed the user level up to a sustainable number. Instead, what they got was 500,000 freeloaders who now expect to be supported indefinitely.

Why so many app developers want to work their asses off to produce great content for freeloaders is beyond my comprehension.

Dissecting the New AppStore – Adapt and Redesign your Shelf Space! | Mobile Evolution: “All said, the new AppStore design should be embraced as a big improvement and step in the right direction for both Discovery and an appealing Shelf Space design.”

(Via. creativealgorithms)

I’ve been highly critical of the changes in iOS 6’s App Store app. My friend Justine Pratt over at Creative Algorithms has written a comprehensive review of most of the changes and offers a much more positive perspective. Kudos to her for putting in the work and really spending the time looking at each of these tweaks and what it means to developers. She may have convinced me that it’s not all bad.

I still say, however, that an overall bugginess in the app is making most of this moot. Today, for instance, I can’t use the search at all. I get zero results for any inquiry. Others are reporting similar issues.

Until these crazy bugs get worked out, the new App Store design will remain a net negative, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe Apple will get its act together soon, and we’ll be able to better appreciate the benefits of some of these Shelf Space changes.

I’m sorry. I’m just not a fan of the headphone jack being on the bottom of the new iPhone. I’ve heard the positive arguments. The lack of a cable draping over your screen. Not having to “flip” the phone around when putting it into your pocket while headphones are plugged in. Whatever.

My issue is mainly with taking the phone out of my pocket.

I’m left-handed, but I generally put my iPhone in my right pants pocket. This makes sense, when you think about it. The side of your dominant hand is where you’d generally want to keep your keys, loose change, your wallet, etc. The phone has to live in its own pocket, with nothing else inside it. Thus, it gets moved to the opposite side. A lot of people do it this way.

With the 4S, and all the other iPhones before it, I would place the phone into my pocket, screen facing inside, of course, which put the headphone port on top left. I could accomplish this with the simplest of twist of my wrist. No real effort; one smooth movement into the pocket. Pants pockets don’t tend do be mid-way down your leg, where your hands would rest with elbows straightened; they are at waist height, where your elbows are still bent and thus the phone is still sitting right-side up. To place a phone with the top down into your pocket actually takes more effort than placing it face up, since it involves more elbow movement. You have to pull your elbows up higher to get your hand into your pocket in that manner.

When I’d take my 4S out of my pocket, I could easily grab the phone between two fingers and pull it up into my palm again, straight up with another simple wrist movement. Even though the phone itself didn’t twist at all, my fingers and wrist could easily make the move while avoiding the cable on the top left of the device.

With the iPhone 5, the cable is on the bottom left of the device. So first, to put the phone into my pocket, I have to twist my elbow more than I used to. Not the end of the world. But then the headphone cable is sitting on the top right of the device as it sits in my pocket. In order to get the phone out, I have to either dig in completely past the headphone cable and pull the entire phone out in a complete grip, which isn’t easy with jeans and again involves much more elbow elevation, or I have to somehow try and grab the phone with a few fingers, like I used to, only this time with this headphone cord directly in the way, since it’s now on the right. And then once I pull it out with a few fingers, the phone is upside down, so I have to “flip” it. (Nine times out of ten I end up hitting the “home” button while I’m attempting this, as well.) Try as I might over the past few days, I can’t figure out any way to get my iPhone 5 out of my pocket that is anywhere near as graceful and effortless as my old method.

Of course, your mileage may vary. And I love everything else about this phone. But the headphone port on the bottom? Not a good thing for me.

For those who have been asking, my slides from 360iDev this year can be found here.

Also, you can purchase the video of my presentation from 360iDev 2012 here.

Apple makes the left turn at Albuquerque:

What’s being ignored, no doubt to the frustration of Apple’s designers, is that the visual design of the new Maps application is amazing. Ask for your current location and just start zooming out slowly. Pay attention to when titles fade out and fade in, and how the typography changes: the way neighborhood names appear in faint grey in close range, then city names appear, then the cities become mixed case or small caps, then eventually state/province names appear—and if you keep zooming out from that, you end up with state abbreviations. At every level, the app keeps the appropriate aesthetics for a traditional print map at that scale. Notice when small streets fade away, and when eventually you just see a national highway system. State or province highways have the proper signage for the state or province. Now, when you’re zoomed into a high detail level, ask for information about a restaurant. Realize that not only is it pulling the review from Yelp, it’s pulling photos from Yelp, using them as a background and doing the Ken Burns effect with them. Find an Apple engineer to slap.

(Via Coyote Tracks)

This is my exact feeling about Maps in iOS 6. Sure, the data is sometimes wrong, and that trumps everything else when you’re trying to get somewhere. But the app itself, the level of detail that went into the actual experience of using the app, is a lot better than the old Google Maps app ever was or could be with Google’s back end.

So while the app feels like a step down now, as it’s making mistakes and while everyone is nitpicking it like mad trying to find errors, in the long run, when those data errors are corrected, this is going to be a far better experience than the old Maps on iOS.

And let’s remember, that old iOS Maps experience was Apple’s, not Google’s. Google provided the data, but Apple designed the look and feel of that app. Those of us who used mobile Google Maps before the first iPhone remember how piss poor it was before Apple came into that equation.

So while lots of people can’t wait for Google to release a new iOS Maps app of their own, I wouldn’t be so sure that anything Google designs will be anywhere near as good as the old iOS 5 Maps was. So you’ll still be stepping down, regardless. Plus, it’s bound to be chock full of ads. Yuck.

In other words, this war isn’t over quite yet. If Apple can fix the data errors faster than Google can come up with a useable user experience, the advantage will still be Apple’s. With all of iOS 6’s other numerous flaws (a small example of which I pointed out this morning), Maps is actually the app I’m worried least about.