16 ms·

Releasing Outside The App Store

97 points by joao 14y ago

CJefferson 14y ago
I found this a very helpful article. In particular the thing which scares me the most is always the thought of Having to deal with people's money, and so it is really nice to see someone talk about how they did it, and and how easy it was.
- pmjordan 14y ago
  I've had FastSpring recommended by others as well and I am planning to use that service. Having dealt with accepting payment via PayPal I can only say: never again - they still owe me money, but I eventually gave up after I spent days trying to chase it down.
  - markchristian 14y ago
    For what it's worth, I really recommend Stripe. It took me about two hours to write my home-built store using it, and I plan on using it on a new project soon.
    - pmjordan 14y ago
      I'm already signed up to be notified when it becomes available to use in Europe. Until it does, FastSpring certainly seems good enough (and defers the effort of setting up a non-static website to handle purchases, which is worth a fair bit to me as well).
jamesjguthrie 14y ago
To release on iOS (which is not the major market any more btw) outside of the App Store consider Cydia. There's millions of jailbroken devices now and the Cydia store app is included in the process.
- daeken 14y ago
  I just moved into a new house and the lawn needed to be mowed and all that, so one of my roommates made a deal with the neighbor and his kids came over to do the lawn. I went out to see if they needed anything, and I got talking with one of them. He asked me what I did and I told him I'm a programmer, and he asked me if I knew anything about jailbreaking iPods. I was completely and utterly flabergasted; I'd worked on jailbreaks back with the original iPhone and simply couldn't believe that a kid of maybe 9 or 10 in the middle of CT with non-techie parents actually knew about such things. Really speaks to how big jailbreaks and the like are these days.
  - dazzawazza 14y ago
    Well it is the best thing if you want to play cracked games.
  - evilduck 14y ago
    Gaming. I had hacked my Sony PSP back when those were a new thing, and finding information on the process was tantamount to wading through half written forums posts from 10 year olds. Few people knew what they were talking about, it was often wrong or warned you about the wrong things, lots of people bricked their PSPs, but the prospect of free games lured in all the kids with no real income to try it. People who want jailbreaks for free games without knowing what it really entails. Since iOS has become a huge gaming platform, it's no surprise that same PSP/NDS piracy consumer demographic has made the leap as well.
- tomjakubowski 14y ago
  iOS users continue to purchase more apps, and pay for more expensive apps, than their Android counterparts, despite the gulf in overall sales and user figures: http://www.distimo.com/blog/2011_12_distimo-releases-full-year-2011-publication/ http://www.distimo.com/blog/2011_12_distimo-releases-full-ye... In 2011 iPad app revenues alone topped Android Market revenues by a significant margin. edit: some more recent sources: http://www.appannie.com/game-of-phones/ http://www.appannie.com/game-of-phones/ http://blog.flurry.com/bid/85911/App-Developers-Signal-Apple-Allegiance-Ahead-of-WWDC-and-Google-I-O http://blog.flurry.com/bid/85911/App-Developers-Signal-Apple... "Running a comparison of revenue generated by top apps on both iOS and Android, Flurry calculates that the difference in revenue generated per active user is still 4 times greater on iOS than Android. For every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android. These results mirror earlier findings from similar analysis Flurry conducted in Q4 of 2011 and Q1 of 2012."
pmjordan 14y ago
While we're on the subject of helpful deployment software, MarsEdit's Daniel Jalkut has an article about crash reporting for Mac apps on his blog: http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/860/crash-reporter-roundup http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/860/crash-reporter-roundup I haven't yet tried any of his suggestions, and since the article is from 2009, I don't know how much has changed. In any case, from experience on other platforms, I heartily recommend making crash reporting straightforward (1-click, or even opt-in to 0-click) for users. Once you have a few hundred people using your software, "rare" crashes happen all the time and tracking them down can be much easier than with just your internal testing. Note that OSX's built-in crash reports go to Apple, not the App developer, so they're not much use to those of us outside the Cupertino ivory tower.
- js2 14y ago
  An option for automatically uploading crash dumps is http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/ http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/ - it's what Chromium and Firefox use.
nikoc 14y ago
Great article! I have a question for you guys. Just today, in the past few hours, we are now featured on the App Store. Since we have made the decision to put an emphasis on that release - how would you go about sustaining the momentum from that channel? http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/quilt-launch/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/quilt-launch/
- conradev 14y ago
  I don't believe this has anything to do with the article, which is discussing the Mac App Store.
  - nikoc 14y ago
    My apologies - conradev. My reason for posting was that people on this article are interested in app distribution. I have no experience in the Mac App Store, and was hoping to both learn something from the Mac discussion and piggyback off of anyone else's AppStore experience. Je m'excuse.
markchristian 14y ago
I wrote up my experiences on releasing outside of the App Store: http://writing.markchristian.org/2012/03/30/make-your-own-app-store.html http://writing.markchristian.org/2012/03/30/make-your-own-ap... I use Stripe for payment processing with a custom in-app UI for buying the app. Stripe has been great — they charge 50c+2.9%, so I lose about 44c per copy of DragonDrop sold (versus losing about $1.50 to Apple in the App Store). I suggest releasing in the App Store if possible, but selling independently, too. The whole thing took about a day to set up and has been totally automatic since then.
- Bill_Dimm 14y ago
  Stripe is $0.30 + 2.9%, not $0.50 + 2.9%.
  - markchristian 14y ago
    You're right; thanks for the correction. I was giving the figures from my faulty memory. :) My app is $4.99, so I net $4.55 from each copy sold independently, and $3.50 from each copy sold from Apple. That's a substantial bump.
- pkamb 14y ago
  Hey Mark, any chance you could break down your sales percentages for us? How many are coming via the Mac App Store vs. your website?
  - markchristian 14y ago
    As of August 21st, I've sold 5.9% of my copies through my independent store. This includes a few weeks at the beginning where the app wasn't available on the App Store at all. The App Store utterly dominates. However, I still think it's good to have your own release path as well, because it gives you a bit more courage to argue with Apple when you need to. :)
- hahainternet 14y ago
  Forgive me if I am wrong, but I am under the impression that by selling outside the app store, you revoke the contract you have with Apple. Without this contract, wouldn't simple use of any API involve infringement? Aren't you opening yourself up here to actual serious issues?
pessimism 14y ago
Here is a personal experience on what it can be like as a customer of a product available both in the MAS and outside it. A while ago, I tried the Fantastical trial, and when I used the purchase link, I was immediately prompted to a credit card payment screen. I paid and bought the software, and all was fine and well. But later on, I learn that the software was also available in the MAS - something Fantastical didn't really bother explaining to me. When I contacted them for any kind of refund (to be used to purchase the app in MAS), I was told that they couldn't accommodate that since a lot of other users have requested the same thing - which already seems like a weird way of thinking. They price the software in both places the same - meaning they earn more money, if people don't by it in the MAS, and I felt the entire experience to be very deceptive. All in all, a really bad experience that I can't recommend any developer to imitate, as it does nothing to inspire customer loyalty. Especially when the developer has a financial incentive to not addressing the issue. At least from my limited perception as a non-Mac developer. Again, this is the impression you get as a customer. I'm not saying this is the intent, but perception is reality in the real of customer experience. Consider this another con to double-dipping, if you intend to do something similar.
- mirsadm 14y ago
  What exactly is the issue? You paid the same price and gave developers more money. Sounds like a good deal to me.
  - frankydp 14y ago
    I assume the OP wanted the added value of MAS account association. Which is actually and interesting issue also, because he would gain that benefit on top of the software and the retailer would loose (30%-%otherpayementprogram) + service charge from previous vendor in revenue. That is an expensive customer service call. Not really an response just a comment.
- 0x0 14y ago
  While I have no clue whether it applies to the mac app store, the ios app store has rules that you can't sell subscriptions for a lower price outside the appstore compared to the prices inside (where apple takes 30% of a cut). So that might be a reason why they're not undercutting the mac app store? https://developer.apple.com/appstore/in-app-purchase/subscriptions.html https://developer.apple.com/appstore/in-app-purchase/subscri...
diminish 14y ago
"...You can’t offer paid upgrades. The App Store model is “buy once, get free upgrades forever”, which is of course tantamount to encouraging disposable software (and support practices)..." And this is recently one of the culprits why mobile app developers are struggling financially; so it seems to be a big factor.
AndrewKemendo 14y ago
I was under the impression that you couldn't install onto a non jailbroken iPhone/iPad without going through apple ( either App Store/AdHoc/Enterprise). This gives me hope that I am significantly wrong on that which would make my life much easier. Can someone confirm that?
- pkamb 14y ago
  This article is about the Mac App Store. On iOS you must use the App Store to distribute apps (without jailbreak).
  - AndrewKemendo 14y ago
    Thanks, that makes better sense.
yalogin 14y ago
How do I install apps from out side the app store? Doesn't it require the phone to be in developer mode or something like that? So why is it even worth investigating if its possible or worth the effort? What am I missing?
- throwawayCPH 14y ago
  He's talking about Mac OSX apps, not iOS apps.
- fbuilesv 14y ago
  It's a Mac app., not an iOS one.
princetontiger 14y ago
so.. is the app store more profitable or is selling software yourself better?
SwellJoe 14y ago
Do you want to be a sharecropper? Or do you want to own your own business? I've had vaguely uncomfortable feelings about the app store concept on phones from the very beginning (and I've commented on those misgivings here on several occasions over the years, to mixed response), and I think all of the concerns I aired back then are coming to be proven to be real problems. When you sell an app via these stores, you don't have a customer...you have a sale. A customer is more valuable to a software developer than a sale by a vast amount. A few thousand customers can sustain a business indefinitely. Customers can help you make your product better, and you can help your customer get more value out of the application (which means they'll be happy to pay you more). Customers can be rewarded for recommending your application to friends or coworkers. Customers can help support your product in your forums or support tracker. Customers can end up becoming your best employees (our first employee is someone who used our Open Source stuff for years, and was one of our first buyers when we created a commercial product; he's a true believer in what we do). A sale without that direct customer relationship is just a sale. I have hopes that this is a temporary anomaly in an evolution toward a more open web with more direct connection between developers and users, but I don't have a very high level confidence in that outcome. But, I can encourage folks to not become sharecroppers, I guess. About 15 years ago, there was a really common sentiment among tech industry titans that curating the web would be where money was made (which led to things like push content, and "portals", which mostly failed, or evolved), and this seems to be that same idea coming back in a new form. But, the curators are simply extracting value from developers and users without substantially improving the ecosystem...in fact, they're kinda bleeding the ecosystem dry, and enforcing a "software-as-commodity" model...it's Walmart applied to software. Which is a pretty dangerous situation, I think, for independent software developers, and probably only serves the largest corporations.
- schraeds 14y ago
  Would you rather open a burger joint or franchise a McDonalds? I'm not saying the analogy is perfect, but Apple brings a lot to the table when you work with them (brand recognition, 1 billion itunes accounts w/ linked credit cards and a propensity to use them).
- ken 14y ago
ken 14y ago
It's true you can't offer things called "paid upgrades" or "demo versions", but with In-App Purchases, you can mostly get around this. For example, make your app free, and make some key feature an IAP -- that's basically a demo version. Or when you make a big new version, make the key new feature of the upgrade an IAP, so new users have to pay base+feature, while existing users only have to pay for that feature. I happen to like these: I love being able to try something out before I buy, so "free + IAP" looks great to me. But there are a lot of people who must think that "free" means "everything free, for all time", and when they discover a core feature costs 99c, they go and leave a 1-star review. So you have to tread carefully. Another option is to make a free demo version, and just dump it on your own webpage. It's not as discoverable as the App Store, but if people learn about your app and go looking, it's not too hard to find. A demo probably has minimal needs for the things the App Store provides (like licensing, purchasing, and updating), anyway.

97 points by joao 14y ago

I found this a very helpful article. In particular the thing which scares me the most is always the thought of Having to deal with people's money, and so it is really nice to see someone talk about how they did it, and and how easy it was.

pmjordan 14y ago
I've had FastSpring recommended by others as well and I am planning to use that service. Having dealt with accepting payment via PayPal I can only say: never again - they still owe me money, but I eventually gave up after I spent days trying to chase it down.
- markchristian 14y ago
  For what it's worth, I really recommend Stripe. It took me about two hours to write my home-built store using it, and I plan on using it on a new project soon.
  - pmjordan 14y ago
    I'm already signed up to be notified when it becomes available to use in Europe. Until it does, FastSpring certainly seems good enough (and defers the effort of setting up a non-static website to handle purchases, which is worth a fair bit to me as well).

jamesjguthrie 14y ago

To release on iOS (which is not the major market any more btw) outside of the App Store consider Cydia. There's millions of jailbroken devices now and the Cydia store app is included in the process.

daeken 14y ago
I just moved into a new house and the lawn needed to be mowed and all that, so one of my roommates made a deal with the neighbor and his kids came over to do the lawn. I went out to see if they needed anything, and I got talking with one of them. He asked me what I did and I told him I'm a programmer, and he asked me if I knew anything about jailbreaking iPods. I was completely and utterly flabergasted; I'd worked on jailbreaks back with the original iPhone and simply couldn't believe that a kid of maybe 9 or 10 in the middle of CT with non-techie parents actually knew about such things. Really speaks to how big jailbreaks and the like are these days.
- dazzawazza 14y ago
  Well it is the best thing if you want to play cracked games.
- evilduck 14y ago
  Gaming. I had hacked my Sony PSP back when those were a new thing, and finding information on the process was tantamount to wading through half written forums posts from 10 year olds. Few people knew what they were talking about, it was often wrong or warned you about the wrong things, lots of people bricked their PSPs, but the prospect of free games lured in all the kids with no real income to try it. People who want jailbreaks for free games without knowing what it really entails. Since iOS has become a huge gaming platform, it's no surprise that same PSP/NDS piracy consumer demographic has made the leap as well.
tomjakubowski 14y ago
iOS users continue to purchase more apps, and pay for more expensive apps, than their Android counterparts, despite the gulf in overall sales and user figures: http://www.distimo.com/blog/2011_12_distimo-releases-full-year-2011-publication/ http://www.distimo.com/blog/2011_12_distimo-releases-full-ye... In 2011 iPad app revenues alone topped Android Market revenues by a significant margin. edit: some more recent sources: http://www.appannie.com/game-of-phones/ http://www.appannie.com/game-of-phones/ http://blog.flurry.com/bid/85911/App-Developers-Signal-Apple-Allegiance-Ahead-of-WWDC-and-Google-I-O http://blog.flurry.com/bid/85911/App-Developers-Signal-Apple... "Running a comparison of revenue generated by top apps on both iOS and Android, Flurry calculates that the difference in revenue generated per active user is still 4 times greater on iOS than Android. For every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android. These results mirror earlier findings from similar analysis Flurry conducted in Q4 of 2011 and Q1 of 2012."

pmjordan 14y ago

While we're on the subject of helpful deployment software, MarsEdit's Daniel Jalkut has an article about crash reporting for Mac apps on his blog: http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/860/crash-reporter-roundup http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/860/crash-reporter-roundup I haven't yet tried any of his suggestions, and since the article is from 2009, I don't know how much has changed. In any case, from experience on other platforms, I heartily recommend making crash reporting straightforward (1-click, or even opt-in to 0-click) for users. Once you have a few hundred people using your software, "rare" crashes happen all the time and tracking them down can be much easier than with just your internal testing. Note that OSX's built-in crash reports go to Apple, not the App developer, so they're not much use to those of us outside the Cupertino ivory tower.

js2 14y ago
An option for automatically uploading crash dumps is http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/ http://code.google.com/p/google-breakpad/ - it's what Chromium and Firefox use.

nikoc 14y ago

Great article! I have a question for you guys. Just today, in the past few hours, we are now featured on the App Store. Since we have made the decision to put an emphasis on that release - how would you go about sustaining the momentum from that channel? http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/quilt-launch/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/quilt-launch/

conradev 14y ago
I don't believe this has anything to do with the article, which is discussing the Mac App Store.
- nikoc 14y ago
  My apologies - conradev. My reason for posting was that people on this article are interested in app distribution. I have no experience in the Mac App Store, and was hoping to both learn something from the Mac discussion and piggyback off of anyone else's AppStore experience. Je m'excuse.

markchristian 14y ago

I wrote up my experiences on releasing outside of the App Store: http://writing.markchristian.org/2012/03/30/make-your-own-app-store.html http://writing.markchristian.org/2012/03/30/make-your-own-ap... I use Stripe for payment processing with a custom in-app UI for buying the app. Stripe has been great — they charge 50c+2.9%, so I lose about 44c per copy of DragonDrop sold (versus losing about $1.50 to Apple in the App Store). I suggest releasing in the App Store if possible, but selling independently, too. The whole thing took about a day to set up and has been totally automatic since then.

Bill_Dimm 14y ago
Stripe is $0.30 + 2.9%, not $0.50 + 2.9%.
- markchristian 14y ago
  You're right; thanks for the correction. I was giving the figures from my faulty memory. :) My app is $4.99, so I net $4.55 from each copy sold independently, and $3.50 from each copy sold from Apple. That's a substantial bump.
pkamb 14y ago
Hey Mark, any chance you could break down your sales percentages for us? How many are coming via the Mac App Store vs. your website?
- markchristian 14y ago
  As of August 21st, I've sold 5.9% of my copies through my independent store. This includes a few weeks at the beginning where the app wasn't available on the App Store at all. The App Store utterly dominates. However, I still think it's good to have your own release path as well, because it gives you a bit more courage to argue with Apple when you need to. :)
hahainternet 14y ago
Forgive me if I am wrong, but I am under the impression that by selling outside the app store, you revoke the contract you have with Apple. Without this contract, wouldn't simple use of any API involve infringement? Aren't you opening yourself up here to actual serious issues?

pessimism 14y ago

Here is a personal experience on what it can be like as a customer of a product available both in the MAS and outside it. A while ago, I tried the Fantastical trial, and when I used the purchase link, I was immediately prompted to a credit card payment screen. I paid and bought the software, and all was fine and well. But later on, I learn that the software was also available in the MAS - something Fantastical didn't really bother explaining to me. When I contacted them for any kind of refund (to be used to purchase the app in MAS), I was told that they couldn't accommodate that since a lot of other users have requested the same thing - which already seems like a weird way of thinking. They price the software in both places the same - meaning they earn more money, if people don't by it in the MAS, and I felt the entire experience to be very deceptive. All in all, a really bad experience that I can't recommend any developer to imitate, as it does nothing to inspire customer loyalty. Especially when the developer has a financial incentive to not addressing the issue. At least from my limited perception as a non-Mac developer. Again, this is the impression you get as a customer. I'm not saying this is the intent, but perception is reality in the real of customer experience. Consider this another con to double-dipping, if you intend to do something similar.

mirsadm 14y ago
What exactly is the issue? You paid the same price and gave developers more money. Sounds like a good deal to me.
- frankydp 14y ago
  I assume the OP wanted the added value of MAS account association. Which is actually and interesting issue also, because he would gain that benefit on top of the software and the retailer would loose (30%-%otherpayementprogram) + service charge from previous vendor in revenue. That is an expensive customer service call. Not really an response just a comment.
0x0 14y ago
While I have no clue whether it applies to the mac app store, the ios app store has rules that you can't sell subscriptions for a lower price outside the appstore compared to the prices inside (where apple takes 30% of a cut). So that might be a reason why they're not undercutting the mac app store? https://developer.apple.com/appstore/in-app-purchase/subscriptions.html https://developer.apple.com/appstore/in-app-purchase/subscri...

diminish 14y ago

"...You can’t offer paid upgrades. The App Store model is “buy once, get free upgrades forever”, which is of course tantamount to encouraging disposable software (and support practices)..." And this is recently one of the culprits why mobile app developers are struggling financially; so it seems to be a big factor.

AndrewKemendo 14y ago

I was under the impression that you couldn't install onto a non jailbroken iPhone/iPad without going through apple ( either App Store/AdHoc/Enterprise). This gives me hope that I am significantly wrong on that which would make my life much easier. Can someone confirm that?

pkamb 14y ago
This article is about the Mac App Store. On iOS you must use the App Store to distribute apps (without jailbreak).
- AndrewKemendo 14y ago
  Thanks, that makes better sense.

yalogin 14y ago

How do I install apps from out side the app store? Doesn't it require the phone to be in developer mode or something like that? So why is it even worth investigating if its possible or worth the effort? What am I missing?

throwawayCPH 14y ago
He's talking about Mac OSX apps, not iOS apps.
fbuilesv 14y ago
It's a Mac app., not an iOS one.

princetontiger 14y ago

so.. is the app store more profitable or is selling software yourself better?

SwellJoe 14y ago

Do you want to be a sharecropper? Or do you want to own your own business? I've had vaguely uncomfortable feelings about the app store concept on phones from the very beginning (and I've commented on those misgivings here on several occasions over the years, to mixed response), and I think all of the concerns I aired back then are coming to be proven to be real problems. When you sell an app via these stores, you don't have a customer...you have a sale. A customer is more valuable to a software developer than a sale by a vast amount. A few thousand customers can sustain a business indefinitely. Customers can help you make your product better, and you can help your customer get more value out of the application (which means they'll be happy to pay you more). Customers can be rewarded for recommending your application to friends or coworkers. Customers can help support your product in your forums or support tracker. Customers can end up becoming your best employees (our first employee is someone who used our Open Source stuff for years, and was one of our first buyers when we created a commercial product; he's a true believer in what we do). A sale without that direct customer relationship is just a sale. I have hopes that this is a temporary anomaly in an evolution toward a more open web with more direct connection between developers and users, but I don't have a very high level confidence in that outcome. But, I can encourage folks to not become sharecroppers, I guess. About 15 years ago, there was a really common sentiment among tech industry titans that curating the web would be where money was made (which led to things like push content, and "portals", which mostly failed, or evolved), and this seems to be that same idea coming back in a new form. But, the curators are simply extracting value from developers and users without substantially improving the ecosystem...in fact, they're kinda bleeding the ecosystem dry, and enforcing a "software-as-commodity" model...it's Walmart applied to software. Which is a pretty dangerous situation, I think, for independent software developers, and probably only serves the largest corporations.

schraeds 14y ago
Would you rather open a burger joint or franchise a McDonalds? I'm not saying the analogy is perfect, but Apple brings a lot to the table when you work with them (brand recognition, 1 billion itunes accounts w/ linked credit cards and a propensity to use them).
ken 14y ago

ken 14y ago

It's true you can't offer things called "paid upgrades" or "demo versions", but with In-App Purchases, you can mostly get around this. For example, make your app free, and make some key feature an IAP -- that's basically a demo version. Or when you make a big new version, make the key new feature of the upgrade an IAP, so new users have to pay base+feature, while existing users only have to pay for that feature. I happen to like these: I love being able to try something out before I buy, so "free + IAP" looks great to me. But there are a lot of people who must think that "free" means "everything free, for all time", and when they discover a core feature costs 99c, they go and leave a 1-star review. So you have to tread carefully. Another option is to make a free demo version, and just dump it on your own webpage. It's not as discoverable as the App Store, but if people learn about your app and go looking, it's not too hard to find. A demo probably has minimal needs for the things the App Store provides (like licensing, purchasing, and updating), anyway.