5 ms·

Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go a

Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of any reviews for these apps, it's hard to imagine they spent much time on marketing, even just sending some free copies to bloggers to get their feedback and see if they might review it. I'm not saying it's easy to hit points 1-3 above; it's not. But I wonder if a lot of indie app developers threw together something crappy in a few weekends of work because of all the stories out there about the big money being made, and then when it failed to materialize for them, they just gave up. The App Store has gotten millions of people to collectively pay billions for software made by indie developers, which is amazing. But it's still a marketplace and the normal rules of any marketplace apply. I would love for an experienced iOS developer making money to tell me if I'm wrong, and why.

unoti 15y ago
I'm an indie developer on Android, just starting to make an iOS version of my first app. My app is very well polished (look here http://www.pillowfightgames.com/jargoneer/ http://www.pillowfightgames.com/jargoneer/) but it's still insanely hard to do marketing-- probably because I have no idea what I'm doing yet. Although the overall quality level of many apps isn't very good, good quality is still not enough to ensure good sales. Marketing is key, I think. I hope.
- davezatch 15y ago
  Ah, just searched the iOS store for Jargoneer after watching the video. Is there a mailing list or any way to find out when it's released? Looks awesome.
- mkilling 15y ago
  Hey, judging by the video I don't agree that your app is 'very well polished'. Check out Cut the Rope, that's the kind of polish that is expected from an App Store game. Suggestions: - Add a tweening for picking up and dropping letters - centering of the board should happen automatically - put the restart button somewhere else. It looks weird when you drop a letter on top of it and it appears behind it (e.g. the 'm' in 'seem') - can't really tell from the video whether you already did this, but implement iPhone-like scrolling w/ momentum and bouncy behavior
  - bmuon 15y ago
    I think the app is indeed polished. It looks really good. But you do have a point in that users, specially iOS users, expect a lot of feedback from the app in the form of animations. I remember reading the guys from @mikamobile talking about how they even added a little bounce animation to the characters of Battleheart (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battleheart/id394057299?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battleheart/id394057299?mt=8) when the user selects them with a tap. That's something you barely see because the character is under your finger, but it speaks for the amount of animation feedback necessary for a game to look "amazing" in the eyes of a current iOS user.
glimcat 15y ago
The market was highly profitable when it was small supply / big demand and you had good odds that Apple would hand you tons of visibility. Now it's big supply with a terrible signal to noise ratio. To succeed, it seems that you now either need a mountain of luck, or a killer marketing engine and a fair amount of luck. Mathematically, it seems unattractive compared to other ways of applying the same time and skills unless you have something you're obsessed with building and want to produce irrespective of the outcome probabilities. E.g. a $1.99 app pays at $1.393, so you need to move 34893.75 paid copies in order to clear a $50,000 gross. For SaaS and the same target, you only need 208.33 customers at $20/mo. The capture difficulty is not identical between cases - but if you have good marketing and are assuming serendipity on either side, it's quite feasible to hit 208 customers. Furthermore, it's often easier to grow once you get there, and it's quite possible to charge at much more than $20/mo/customer. Mobile apps are great, but not a "for profit" activity for me. I'm all for doing them for fun or ad hoc, and if that takes off - great. But it seems to be a very difficult business model compared to applying similar resources elsewhere.
- patio11 15y ago
  I mostly agree, but take it from voice of experience, having web application available does not magically lead to two hundred people giving you their CCs and sticking around for a year. You have to roll up your sleeves and market. This is often much, much harder than making the actual application. (I think the App Store gets a lot of ink because people have this notion that Apple does the marketing for devs like you. Which is true, in approximately the same sense that the MBA does marketing for basketball players like Shaq.)
  - glimcat 15y ago
    Magically, no. But given the same marketing resources behind either, the SaaS case seems to be more reliably attainable. Or stand-alone software. Or contract work. For SaaS, it's also important to model things like trial conversions, turnover, etc. which don't appear in a single-sale case. There are a lot of differences. But the odds still seem better there. And of course I am completely overlooking the "what about ads" question, mainly because you need a ton of installs before that starts being a significant amount of money. Better than not, helps feed conversions, but doesn't change the equation for me.
ranebo 15y ago
I been a completely self sufficient iOS developer(i.e I make a living from selling my own apps) for the last 3 years and I can't disagree with you. When I initially started 3 years ago maybe you could get by with just meeting 2 of the 3 criteria you mentioned. My apps at the time were useful and easy to use, but not really beautiful. The free version of one of these apps was getting about 400-500 daily downloads. After a much needed UI update (and one to the corresponding paid version) daily downloads jumped to more than 3000 a day. No promos, no divine Apple intervention, just Polish Polish Polish.
- wallflower 15y ago
  My hat is off to you. 5 of the 6 really good iOS developers I know personally work for clients. The 6th works for a mobile startup and has turned more into a manager. However, most of them are getting into product as they have done enough consulting to see it is just like a normal job in many ways, no ownership. I will buy your app later, look forward to showing it to some friends who dabble in music.
CJefferson 15y ago
I would say my puzzle game ( http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/combination/id300288142?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/combination/id300288142?mt=8 ). It got good reviews from people who played it, a good review on ArsTechnia ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/04/minireview-combination-offers-challenging-iphone-puzzles.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/04/minireview-comb... ) and was 99 cents. I only sold a couple of hundred, and after months of trying to get more publicity and sales I gave up and made it free.
- dev_Gabriel 15y ago
  I just downloaded it. It's a "simple" but nice game. I'm playing it right now. Thank you (:
- zmj 15y ago
  Hey, I bought this after the Ars review. Thank you for your work on it! I got well more than 99 cents of entertainment value out of it. I'm curious: did you make the puzzles by hand or generate them algorithmically?
  - CJefferson 15y ago
    Thank you! Algorithmically. The game actually came out of a research project into generating and automatically ranking the difficulty of puzzle games. I have a long term plan to write a new game, with different puzzle games in it, using the same technique. The main slowness is a) Playing around with HTML5 and b) Figuring out how to make money off it (as with a webapp, you can actually lose a lot of money with hosting and servers, instead of the $100/year cap from Apple!)
    - diba 15y ago
      Do you have the results of that research project available somewhere?
      - CJefferson 15y ago
forrestthewoods 15y ago
I have $420 revenue from 285 sales (started $3, dropped to $1) in 6 months from my side project. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alcohology/id437180278?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alcohology/id437180278?mt=8. Getting attention is hard. Ridiculously hard. Insanely, impossibly hard. I couldn't get a review from a single website. I submitted the app to dozens of review sites, food/drink blogs, and tech blogs and didn't get a single response. Actually, that's not true. I got responses from app review sites that wanted me to give them money in exchange for a review. I made a trailer that has gotten 2,700 views (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctsk1QVs8OI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctsk1QVs8OI). Almost all hits came from a video a friend and minor internet celebrity made for me. His video has 14,000 views. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFn6eW2Kb0g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFn6eW2Kb0g I fully admit my app is a niche app, but I think it's worth more than $420. Sites like Gizmodo have run "Best Cocktail Apps" and Apple regularly lists "Martha Stewart Cocktails" in Staff Favorites for iPad. It has approximately 12 total recipes but lots of high quality, high res images.
- ovi256 15y ago
  This may sound harsh, but, from the screenshots, your app would fall in the fugly category. On the cocktail screen, you use a bunch of fonts and clashing colors. At first look, I thought the "Tall" text thingy is a slider for glass size. It isn't. Compare with the Martha Stewart app. It is extremely polished and the photos look gorgeous.
  - forrestthewoods 15y ago
    Harshness is fair and appreciated. It's not particularly beautiful and it has some usability issues. It's lack of success isn't a total shock, but it is certainly disappointing. The minimum bar for entry right now on iOS is pretty damned high.
- tsycho 15y ago
  Sorry to be harsh, but I have to agree with ovi256, I don't think your app looks beautiful. In particular, your fonts look boring (Arial?), there needs to be some small padding for the ingredients on the Random page, the neon-lighting on the borders looks a bit ugly, too many different colors seem to used on various pages.... I am not a designer, but you should get one to give you some suggestions. In any case, I just bought your app......happy to help out a fellow HN-er :) Hopefully this will help improve my cocktail-making skills. PS> Check out a book called Tapworthy.
ChaseB 15y ago
My iPhone app http://www.facemouth.com http://www.facemouth.com. Polished and went nowhere. Breaking the top 25 for an indie dev is hitting the lottery. It takes a big Ad budget and great PR.
- alex_c 15y ago
  That seems pretty novelty.
smackfu 15y ago
I think a lot of the newer "social" free apps fall into this category, like that Oink menu item review thing. It's polished, a good app, and theoretically useful, but I wouldn't be surprised if it just dies off.

unoti 15y ago

I'm an indie developer on Android, just starting to make an iOS version of my first app. My app is very well polished (look here http://www.pillowfightgames.com/jargoneer/ http://www.pillowfightgames.com/jargoneer/) but it's still insanely hard to do marketing-- probably because I have no idea what I'm doing yet. Although the overall quality level of many apps isn't very good, good quality is still not enough to ensure good sales. Marketing is key, I think. I hope.

davezatch 15y ago
Ah, just searched the iOS store for Jargoneer after watching the video. Is there a mailing list or any way to find out when it's released? Looks awesome.
mkilling 15y ago
Hey, judging by the video I don't agree that your app is 'very well polished'. Check out Cut the Rope, that's the kind of polish that is expected from an App Store game. Suggestions: - Add a tweening for picking up and dropping letters - centering of the board should happen automatically - put the restart button somewhere else. It looks weird when you drop a letter on top of it and it appears behind it (e.g. the 'm' in 'seem') - can't really tell from the video whether you already did this, but implement iPhone-like scrolling w/ momentum and bouncy behavior
- bmuon 15y ago
  I think the app is indeed polished. It looks really good. But you do have a point in that users, specially iOS users, expect a lot of feedback from the app in the form of animations. I remember reading the guys from @mikamobile talking about how they even added a little bounce animation to the characters of Battleheart (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battleheart/id394057299?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/battleheart/id394057299?mt=8) when the user selects them with a tap. That's something you barely see because the character is under your finger, but it speaks for the amount of animation feedback necessary for a game to look "amazing" in the eyes of a current iOS user.

glimcat 15y ago

The market was highly profitable when it was small supply / big demand and you had good odds that Apple would hand you tons of visibility. Now it's big supply with a terrible signal to noise ratio. To succeed, it seems that you now either need a mountain of luck, or a killer marketing engine and a fair amount of luck. Mathematically, it seems unattractive compared to other ways of applying the same time and skills unless you have something you're obsessed with building and want to produce irrespective of the outcome probabilities. E.g. a $1.99 app pays at $1.393, so you need to move 34893.75 paid copies in order to clear a $50,000 gross. For SaaS and the same target, you only need 208.33 customers at $20/mo. The capture difficulty is not identical between cases - but if you have good marketing and are assuming serendipity on either side, it's quite feasible to hit 208 customers. Furthermore, it's often easier to grow once you get there, and it's quite possible to charge at much more than $20/mo/customer. Mobile apps are great, but not a "for profit" activity for me. I'm all for doing them for fun or ad hoc, and if that takes off - great. But it seems to be a very difficult business model compared to applying similar resources elsewhere.

patio11 15y ago
I mostly agree, but take it from voice of experience, having web application available does not magically lead to two hundred people giving you their CCs and sticking around for a year. You have to roll up your sleeves and market. This is often much, much harder than making the actual application. (I think the App Store gets a lot of ink because people have this notion that Apple does the marketing for devs like you. Which is true, in approximately the same sense that the MBA does marketing for basketball players like Shaq.)
- glimcat 15y ago
  Magically, no. But given the same marketing resources behind either, the SaaS case seems to be more reliably attainable. Or stand-alone software. Or contract work. For SaaS, it's also important to model things like trial conversions, turnover, etc. which don't appear in a single-sale case. There are a lot of differences. But the odds still seem better there. And of course I am completely overlooking the "what about ads" question, mainly because you need a ton of installs before that starts being a significant amount of money. Better than not, helps feed conversions, but doesn't change the equation for me.

ranebo 15y ago

I been a completely self sufficient iOS developer(i.e I make a living from selling my own apps) for the last 3 years and I can't disagree with you. When I initially started 3 years ago maybe you could get by with just meeting 2 of the 3 criteria you mentioned. My apps at the time were useful and easy to use, but not really beautiful. The free version of one of these apps was getting about 400-500 daily downloads. After a much needed UI update (and one to the corresponding paid version) daily downloads jumped to more than 3000 a day. No promos, no divine Apple intervention, just Polish Polish Polish.

wallflower 15y ago
My hat is off to you. 5 of the 6 really good iOS developers I know personally work for clients. The 6th works for a mobile startup and has turned more into a manager. However, most of them are getting into product as they have done enough consulting to see it is just like a normal job in many ways, no ownership. I will buy your app later, look forward to showing it to some friends who dabble in music.

CJefferson 15y ago

I would say my puzzle game ( http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/combination/id300288142?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/combination/id300288142?mt=8 ). It got good reviews from people who played it, a good review on ArsTechnia ( http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/04/minireview-combination-offers-challenging-iphone-puzzles.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/04/minireview-comb... ) and was 99 cents. I only sold a couple of hundred, and after months of trying to get more publicity and sales I gave up and made it free.

dev_Gabriel 15y ago
I just downloaded it. It's a "simple" but nice game. I'm playing it right now. Thank you (:
zmj 15y ago
Hey, I bought this after the Ars review. Thank you for your work on it! I got well more than 99 cents of entertainment value out of it. I'm curious: did you make the puzzles by hand or generate them algorithmically?
- CJefferson 15y ago
  Thank you! Algorithmically. The game actually came out of a research project into generating and automatically ranking the difficulty of puzzle games. I have a long term plan to write a new game, with different puzzle games in it, using the same technique. The main slowness is a) Playing around with HTML5 and b) Figuring out how to make money off it (as with a webapp, you can actually lose a lot of money with hosting and servers, instead of the $100/year cap from Apple!)
  - diba 15y ago
    Do you have the results of that research project available somewhere?
    - CJefferson 15y ago

forrestthewoods 15y ago

I have $420 revenue from 285 sales (started $3, dropped to $1) in 6 months from my side project. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alcohology/id437180278?mt=8 http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/alcohology/id437180278?mt=8. Getting attention is hard. Ridiculously hard. Insanely, impossibly hard. I couldn't get a review from a single website. I submitted the app to dozens of review sites, food/drink blogs, and tech blogs and didn't get a single response. Actually, that's not true. I got responses from app review sites that wanted me to give them money in exchange for a review. I made a trailer that has gotten 2,700 views (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctsk1QVs8OI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctsk1QVs8OI). Almost all hits came from a video a friend and minor internet celebrity made for me. His video has 14,000 views. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFn6eW2Kb0g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFn6eW2Kb0g I fully admit my app is a niche app, but I think it's worth more than $420. Sites like Gizmodo have run "Best Cocktail Apps" and Apple regularly lists "Martha Stewart Cocktails" in Staff Favorites for iPad. It has approximately 12 total recipes but lots of high quality, high res images.

ovi256 15y ago
This may sound harsh, but, from the screenshots, your app would fall in the fugly category. On the cocktail screen, you use a bunch of fonts and clashing colors. At first look, I thought the "Tall" text thingy is a slider for glass size. It isn't. Compare with the Martha Stewart app. It is extremely polished and the photos look gorgeous.
- forrestthewoods 15y ago
  Harshness is fair and appreciated. It's not particularly beautiful and it has some usability issues. It's lack of success isn't a total shock, but it is certainly disappointing. The minimum bar for entry right now on iOS is pretty damned high.
tsycho 15y ago
Sorry to be harsh, but I have to agree with ovi256, I don't think your app looks beautiful. In particular, your fonts look boring (Arial?), there needs to be some small padding for the ingredients on the Random page, the neon-lighting on the borders looks a bit ugly, too many different colors seem to used on various pages.... I am not a designer, but you should get one to give you some suggestions. In any case, I just bought your app......happy to help out a fellow HN-er :) Hopefully this will help improve my cocktail-making skills. PS> Check out a book called Tapworthy.

ChaseB 15y ago

My iPhone app http://www.facemouth.com http://www.facemouth.com. Polished and went nowhere. Breaking the top 25 for an indie dev is hitting the lottery. It takes a big Ad budget and great PR.

alex_c 15y ago
That seems pretty novelty.

smackfu 15y ago

I think a lot of the newer "social" free apps fall into this category, like that Oink menu item review thing. It's polished, a good app, and theoretically useful, but I wouldn't be surprised if it just dies off.