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In hindsight, I am now convinced this plan was fundamentally flawed. The market for paid productivity apps for iOS is simply too difficult. When even a stalwa

In hindsight, I am now convinced this plan was fundamentally flawed. The market for paid productivity apps for iOS is simply too difficult. When even a stalwart Apple partisan like Gruber will concede this you know things have gone horribly wrong in the iOS app market. The bulk of the blame here lies with Apple and their stewardship of the app store. They can push the iPad as real productivity device all they want but until they do something to make selling anything but games on the appstore worthwhile they're wasting their time.

reitoei 10y ago
> The bulk of the blame here lies with Apple and their stewardship of the app store. Uh, maybe the app just wasn't that good, or someone made a better/cheaper one. The only reason this is even being talked about is because of who the author is.
- jbigelow76 10y ago
  >The only reason this is even being talked about is because of who the author is. It seems to me that post mortems of shutdowns and discontinuations of apps, be they web or mobile, show up quite regularly on HN despite the relative fame of the author. People love to armchair quarterback this kind of stuff.
perishabledave 10y ago
Is it really just the iOS App Store though? People expect everything to be free nowadays: news, email, productivity apps like Google Docs, games. Don't think you can pin this problem on Apple.
- tesseract 10y ago
  I think it would be entirely reasonable to suggest that the App Store dynamics contributed to that expectation. Along with the rise of browser based apps and services (also a cause here, granted) the App Store has been one of the biggest factors shaping the market for end-user software over the past decade.
  - skrebbel 10y ago
    Fully agree. Before the App Store was launched, people were used to pay an order of magnitude more for software. The App Store didn't have a time-limited free trial option, which meant that every purchase was a gamble. You don't take a $20 gamble, but maybe a $2 gamble here and there won't hurt so much. So the only way to make money on the App Store was to be priced so low that people dared click "buy". If you ask me, this is completely nuts. Apple could've easily quintupled their App Store earnings if they'd just have a "try" button next to the "buy" button from the start. People would've owned fewer, better apps that they'd use more intensively. (for all its faults, the Windows Store does this right. but hey, too little too late)
    - bobsil1 10y ago
      Apple wants apps to be free/cheap complements to expensive hardware.
      - skrebbel 10y ago
        I'm not convinced. If you invested $200 into apps over the course of a few years, you're not going to switch to Android.
        canuckintime 10y ago
        You could just as easily 'invest' $150 in freemium apps over the course of a few years...
- Noseshine 10y ago
  > People expect everything to be free nowadays It's less that I expect things to be free, au contraire. It's more that it's exasperating to have all these many, many minor services that most of the time are not vital to me each ask for money individually. Imagine you were sold a car not as one, but piece by piece. Need a steering wheel with that? A seat belt? Another seat belt? Oh you need a rear bench too? Another tire, maybe? A few more screws? Brake light too? Or the OS: Would you pay for calc.exe? For the file explorer? The desktop manager? To me the main problem is that there are way too many minor pieces instead of a whole. How about - and this is wishful thinking since it would require several big companies to work together, individually it would not help much - if there was ONE big service subscription, let's say $199 annually, and I can use everything (apart from enterprise stuff, that's more). Every piece of software - and also media! - out there. The system checks what I use and how much and distributes the money to the people who made the software and the media. What those people who think "capitalism!" forget is that the whole process of purchasing is heavily loaded, psychologically. The more individual purchasing decisions, the more you cut it into pieces, the less people buy. The paradox of choice. Decisions decisions! So many more options to make the wrong one! You cannot make the decisions more and more numerous and expect humans to follow into the "perfect market society". "Buying" has a price in addition to the money. The current system favors those who can offer larger packages. If we had a system and organization who could organize for everyone getting paid from a lump sum and remove the psychological obstacle), this would greatly reduce the disadvantages of smaller players and lead to a much more even playing field. So having a "government" and a "tax" would actually be good market capitalism. The decision would not be "do I buy this" but "do I use this" (but with payment!). This is especially for things that are not essential, when having to make the decision may (and does) prevent a sale. Since we do have a lot of free alternatives this is what most people turn to. When it comes to news there's an additional problem: Who reads just one news source? I read very few articles per newspaper, but a lot across many very different sources. There is no payment model for that even if I wanted to. . I first came up with the idea while thinking about how open source projects could be paid. An additional thought is that this increases "market activity" by lowering the entry requirements: No need for a full business organisation, pure developers don't need to become (as) business savvy. If they can assure there stuff gets used that automatically leads to income. Also an opportunity to ensure successful projects don't stop, because there is a stream of income associated with heavily used projects - and that without a sales and marketing department. Now this is really just a very rough thought, I saw no use in refining it since I can't make it happen anyway. Imagine github had a payment model. In this case it wouldn't be so much for "use" as for "support". Imagine people pay a lump sum for library support, and money gets distributed to people creating code and patches and answering support questions. Something that won't ever happen except on a tiny scale driven by very few people when people have to give voluntary contributions to individual projects, the threshold is just too high. This includes merely knowing that the threshold is high, it's self-reinforcing: You know that library doesn't make the developer any money, so you know unless it's a really big package picked up by industry and supported by thousands of people it will probably die within a year even if it looks good and is good quality. Now going wild (me and my ideas): I think if we want more capitalism we need to make the entrance easier. Selling something is HARD these days. I say "these days" because I don't think it was so hard 50 years ago when there was less stuff (and more optimism among the populace too?). If basic income is too controversial, how about starting small with such a project? It has the advantage that following this proposal you know that people receiving money actually did something useful, and it would get people paid who today go without, and it would benefit individuals much more than corporations. I think we need something big, keeping capitalism but tweaking some of the basics for the changed environment we live in. We need to keep incentives to "do something". I see more chances for this to both be accepted and to actually succeed compared to universal basic income.
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  Professional PC productivity software sells just fine Console games sell just fine It's only web and mobile where this becomes a problem, so why is that? The web I understand because it started out free, the App Store certainly didn't though.
  - apozem 10y ago
    Professionals actually buy based on features and what they need, not what looks entertaining. Ditto for console gamers. It's a more informed audience that's concentrated in a small group of people with far more disposable income than a regular smartphone user. Apps are a victim of regular people's expectations. They aren't used to paying hundreds for Photoshop. They're used to everything being free. Apple certainly hasn't helped developers in this regard, as it's encouraged commoditization of apps through its inaction against the proliferation of free-to-play and the race to the bottom.
    - TillE 10y ago
      > a small group of people We're talking about games that regularly sell 20+ million copies (65 million for GTA5) at $60 a pop. It's really not that small. Most people probably only buy one or two full-price games a year, but that's still way more than others spend on apps in the same time period.
      - apozem 10y ago
        It's large in absolute numbers but nothing compared to the mobile market.
matt4077 10y ago
I'm sure that the AppStore could be improved, but I doubt it could have the effect people imagine (i. e. doubling revenue or more). Most of the software people used to buy can now be replaced for free (i. e. google docs, and.. nope that's it). If you adjust for that, I'd guess the software market is actually larger than it has ever been.
shiny 10y ago
What kind of changes would you like to see made to the app store?
- msh 10y ago
  Not op but I think the app store needs trials and paid upgrades.
  - sudhirj 10y ago
    It already has paid upgrades via in-app purchases. Upgrades, both one-time and subscription are explicitly supported. Trials are a bit of an issue, though, but it's quite possible for an app to offer the upgraded experience free for a limited time.
    - gnicholas 10y ago
      True, but conceiving and building the right IAP structure takes substantial time and money. If there were some sort of trial system that all customers could use to try out any app, then some app devs (not all) could ship apps much more quickly. I know we spent a ton of time figuring out what we should offer for free, what we should charge for, and how we should draw a line between the two. If there were a 15-min trial we would have just used that and not worried about it. (And if you're wondering why we didn't simply implement a 15-minute timer in our app, it's because people would have thought it was weird, since pretty much no other iOS app uses that. But if it were standard, this wouldn't be a problem.)
  - chubs 10y ago
    There's a lot of low-hanging fruit there. They could copy some Play Store features such as: * Auto-refunds if you delete the app within 15 mins (this de-risks the app purchase) * Suggestions for apps that your friends have used * Better search Other non-play store often-requested ideas: * Don't disincentivise upgrades by zeroing out your reviews when you upgrade. * More reasonable app reviews. * App subscriptions instead of up-front fees (eg pay $1/month for each month where you use my app more than N times). * Better curation of the app store (eg don't only feature games).
mikeryan 10y ago
The bulk of the blame here lies with Apple and their stewardship of the app store. I'm totally unclear how you made the leap from a difficult market for productivity apps on iOS to this being a app store problem.
- amazon_not 10y ago
  Well, the app store is a pretty big mess. Search does not work and Apple doesn't curate apps. It doesn't help that you make an app people want to use and pay for if they can't find it.
  - neap24 10y ago
    I don't disagree that the app store is a mess, but it doesn't seem any more of a mess than other markets for media. Think about trying to discover good indie films, video games, or music. It's not that easy. No central authority "curates" them and the main avenues of consumption barely recognize them. Basically, you have to subscribe to blogs, magazines, and independent reviewers that rate and rank them. This seems exactly the same for apps in the app store.
    - amazon_not 10y ago
      Sure, but Apple is that central authority that both provides the store and the search functionality. They could do better.
vecter 10y ago
You're incorrectly attributing the failure of paid productivity apps to the app store's structure, when in fact it is entirely unrelated. It just so turns out that the market for paid productivity apps on iOS is small, no matter what Apple does with the app store.
- chavesn 10y ago
  It sounds to me like the point is that the market could be much larger if the transaction value were clear to consumers. In the current app store, with the methods that consumers are used to spending money on their phones, for whatever reasons, it's not. It's like when you'll easily spend $30 on drinks on a Friday night, but suffer a shitty note-taking system for years when you could have many of your problems fixed for $5 one time just because you don't know the possible transaction exists.
  - Retra 10y ago
    Most anyone with something to sell will claim it is the cure for what ails you.
  - niftich 10y ago
    People often say 'the discoverability [in the App Store] is horrible', which, I believe is inexact wording, but largely results in the outcome you raise. It's not so much discoverability as in 'stumbling upon an arbitrary app', but more of learning about what that app does, and why it's something you want. Once you learn about a solution to a problem you may not even realize you had, you'll be a lot more likely to make a purchase. This is why app makers jump to be featured in compilations like 'top 5 note taking apps for iOS'; other options are word-of-mouth, bundling, or being promoted somehow out-of-band.
elicash 10y ago
Maybe if Gruber hadn't been such a huge voice for reform of the app store, I'd share in your glee that a "partisan" was proven wrong in some way. But he's been consistently on the side of developers while acknowledging that Apple will always put its interests first. I'm not sure if you actually read Gruber, but he's been critical of Apple when it comes to the app store on a number of fronts over the years.

reitoei 10y ago

> The bulk of the blame here lies with Apple and their stewardship of the app store. Uh, maybe the app just wasn't that good, or someone made a better/cheaper one. The only reason this is even being talked about is because of who the author is.

jbigelow76 10y ago
>The only reason this is even being talked about is because of who the author is. It seems to me that post mortems of shutdowns and discontinuations of apps, be they web or mobile, show up quite regularly on HN despite the relative fame of the author. People love to armchair quarterback this kind of stuff.

perishabledave 10y ago

Is it really just the iOS App Store though? People expect everything to be free nowadays: news, email, productivity apps like Google Docs, games. Don't think you can pin this problem on Apple.

tesseract 10y ago
I think it would be entirely reasonable to suggest that the App Store dynamics contributed to that expectation. Along with the rise of browser based apps and services (also a cause here, granted) the App Store has been one of the biggest factors shaping the market for end-user software over the past decade.
- skrebbel 10y ago
  Fully agree. Before the App Store was launched, people were used to pay an order of magnitude more for software. The App Store didn't have a time-limited free trial option, which meant that every purchase was a gamble. You don't take a $20 gamble, but maybe a $2 gamble here and there won't hurt so much. So the only way to make money on the App Store was to be priced so low that people dared click "buy". If you ask me, this is completely nuts. Apple could've easily quintupled their App Store earnings if they'd just have a "try" button next to the "buy" button from the start. People would've owned fewer, better apps that they'd use more intensively. (for all its faults, the Windows Store does this right. but hey, too little too late)
  - bobsil1 10y ago
    Apple wants apps to be free/cheap complements to expensive hardware.
    - skrebbel 10y ago
      I'm not convinced. If you invested $200 into apps over the course of a few years, you're not going to switch to Android.
      - canuckintime 10y ago
        You could just as easily 'invest' $150 in freemium apps over the course of a few years...
Noseshine 10y ago
> People expect everything to be free nowadays It's less that I expect things to be free, au contraire. It's more that it's exasperating to have all these many, many minor services that most of the time are not vital to me each ask for money individually. Imagine you were sold a car not as one, but piece by piece. Need a steering wheel with that? A seat belt? Another seat belt? Oh you need a rear bench too? Another tire, maybe? A few more screws? Brake light too? Or the OS: Would you pay for calc.exe? For the file explorer? The desktop manager? To me the main problem is that there are way too many minor pieces instead of a whole. How about - and this is wishful thinking since it would require several big companies to work together, individually it would not help much - if there was ONE big service subscription, let's say $199 annually, and I can use everything (apart from enterprise stuff, that's more). Every piece of software - and also media! - out there. The system checks what I use and how much and distributes the money to the people who made the software and the media. What those people who think "capitalism!" forget is that the whole process of purchasing is heavily loaded, psychologically. The more individual purchasing decisions, the more you cut it into pieces, the less people buy. The paradox of choice. Decisions decisions! So many more options to make the wrong one! You cannot make the decisions more and more numerous and expect humans to follow into the "perfect market society". "Buying" has a price in addition to the money. The current system favors those who can offer larger packages. If we had a system and organization who could organize for everyone getting paid from a lump sum and remove the psychological obstacle), this would greatly reduce the disadvantages of smaller players and lead to a much more even playing field. So having a "government" and a "tax" would actually be good market capitalism. The decision would not be "do I buy this" but "do I use this" (but with payment!). This is especially for things that are not essential, when having to make the decision may (and does) prevent a sale. Since we do have a lot of free alternatives this is what most people turn to. When it comes to news there's an additional problem: Who reads just one news source? I read very few articles per newspaper, but a lot across many very different sources. There is no payment model for that even if I wanted to. . I first came up with the idea while thinking about how open source projects could be paid. An additional thought is that this increases "market activity" by lowering the entry requirements: No need for a full business organisation, pure developers don't need to become (as) business savvy. If they can assure there stuff gets used that automatically leads to income. Also an opportunity to ensure successful projects don't stop, because there is a stream of income associated with heavily used projects - and that without a sales and marketing department. Now this is really just a very rough thought, I saw no use in refining it since I can't make it happen anyway. Imagine github had a payment model. In this case it wouldn't be so much for "use" as for "support". Imagine people pay a lump sum for library support, and money gets distributed to people creating code and patches and answering support questions. Something that won't ever happen except on a tiny scale driven by very few people when people have to give voluntary contributions to individual projects, the threshold is just too high. This includes merely knowing that the threshold is high, it's self-reinforcing: You know that library doesn't make the developer any money, so you know unless it's a really big package picked up by industry and supported by thousands of people it will probably die within a year even if it looks good and is good quality. Now going wild (me and my ideas): I think if we want more capitalism we need to make the entrance easier. Selling something is HARD these days. I say "these days" because I don't think it was so hard 50 years ago when there was less stuff (and more optimism among the populace too?). If basic income is too controversial, how about starting small with such a project? It has the advantage that following this proposal you know that people receiving money actually did something useful, and it would get people paid who today go without, and it would benefit individuals much more than corporations. I think we need something big, keeping capitalism but tweaking some of the basics for the changed environment we live in. We need to keep incentives to "do something". I see more chances for this to both be accepted and to actually succeed compared to universal basic income.
intoverflow2 10y ago
Professional PC productivity software sells just fine Console games sell just fine It's only web and mobile where this becomes a problem, so why is that? The web I understand because it started out free, the App Store certainly didn't though.
- apozem 10y ago
  Professionals actually buy based on features and what they need, not what looks entertaining. Ditto for console gamers. It's a more informed audience that's concentrated in a small group of people with far more disposable income than a regular smartphone user. Apps are a victim of regular people's expectations. They aren't used to paying hundreds for Photoshop. They're used to everything being free. Apple certainly hasn't helped developers in this regard, as it's encouraged commoditization of apps through its inaction against the proliferation of free-to-play and the race to the bottom.
  - TillE 10y ago
    > a small group of people We're talking about games that regularly sell 20+ million copies (65 million for GTA5) at $60 a pop. It's really not that small. Most people probably only buy one or two full-price games a year, but that's still way more than others spend on apps in the same time period.
    - apozem 10y ago
      It's large in absolute numbers but nothing compared to the mobile market.

matt4077 10y ago

I'm sure that the AppStore could be improved, but I doubt it could have the effect people imagine (i. e. doubling revenue or more). Most of the software people used to buy can now be replaced for free (i. e. google docs, and.. nope that's it). If you adjust for that, I'd guess the software market is actually larger than it has ever been.

shiny 10y ago

What kind of changes would you like to see made to the app store?

msh 10y ago
Not op but I think the app store needs trials and paid upgrades.
- sudhirj 10y ago
  It already has paid upgrades via in-app purchases. Upgrades, both one-time and subscription are explicitly supported. Trials are a bit of an issue, though, but it's quite possible for an app to offer the upgraded experience free for a limited time.
  - gnicholas 10y ago
    True, but conceiving and building the right IAP structure takes substantial time and money. If there were some sort of trial system that all customers could use to try out any app, then some app devs (not all) could ship apps much more quickly. I know we spent a ton of time figuring out what we should offer for free, what we should charge for, and how we should draw a line between the two. If there were a 15-min trial we would have just used that and not worried about it. (And if you're wondering why we didn't simply implement a 15-minute timer in our app, it's because people would have thought it was weird, since pretty much no other iOS app uses that. But if it were standard, this wouldn't be a problem.)
- chubs 10y ago
  There's a lot of low-hanging fruit there. They could copy some Play Store features such as: * Auto-refunds if you delete the app within 15 mins (this de-risks the app purchase) * Suggestions for apps that your friends have used * Better search Other non-play store often-requested ideas: * Don't disincentivise upgrades by zeroing out your reviews when you upgrade. * More reasonable app reviews. * App subscriptions instead of up-front fees (eg pay $1/month for each month where you use my app more than N times). * Better curation of the app store (eg don't only feature games).

mikeryan 10y ago

The bulk of the blame here lies with Apple and their stewardship of the app store. I'm totally unclear how you made the leap from a difficult market for productivity apps on iOS to this being a app store problem.

amazon_not 10y ago
Well, the app store is a pretty big mess. Search does not work and Apple doesn't curate apps. It doesn't help that you make an app people want to use and pay for if they can't find it.
- neap24 10y ago
  I don't disagree that the app store is a mess, but it doesn't seem any more of a mess than other markets for media. Think about trying to discover good indie films, video games, or music. It's not that easy. No central authority "curates" them and the main avenues of consumption barely recognize them. Basically, you have to subscribe to blogs, magazines, and independent reviewers that rate and rank them. This seems exactly the same for apps in the app store.
  - amazon_not 10y ago
    Sure, but Apple is that central authority that both provides the store and the search functionality. They could do better.

vecter 10y ago

You're incorrectly attributing the failure of paid productivity apps to the app store's structure, when in fact it is entirely unrelated. It just so turns out that the market for paid productivity apps on iOS is small, no matter what Apple does with the app store.

chavesn 10y ago
It sounds to me like the point is that the market could be much larger if the transaction value were clear to consumers. In the current app store, with the methods that consumers are used to spending money on their phones, for whatever reasons, it's not. It's like when you'll easily spend $30 on drinks on a Friday night, but suffer a shitty note-taking system for years when you could have many of your problems fixed for $5 one time just because you don't know the possible transaction exists.
- Retra 10y ago
  Most anyone with something to sell will claim it is the cure for what ails you.
- niftich 10y ago
  People often say 'the discoverability [in the App Store] is horrible', which, I believe is inexact wording, but largely results in the outcome you raise. It's not so much discoverability as in 'stumbling upon an arbitrary app', but more of learning about what that app does, and why it's something you want. Once you learn about a solution to a problem you may not even realize you had, you'll be a lot more likely to make a purchase. This is why app makers jump to be featured in compilations like 'top 5 note taking apps for iOS'; other options are word-of-mouth, bundling, or being promoted somehow out-of-band.

elicash 10y ago

Maybe if Gruber hadn't been such a huge voice for reform of the app store, I'd share in your glee that a "partisan" was proven wrong in some way. But he's been consistently on the side of developers while acknowledging that Apple will always put its interests first. I'm not sure if you actually read Gruber, but he's been critical of Apple when it comes to the app store on a number of fronts over the years.