Cabel Sasser, writing for the Panic blog, on the challenge of making money building (top notch) iOS apps:
I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart — well, an experimental change of heart — and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it didn’t have a meaningful impact on sales.
More and more I’m beginning to think we simply made the wrong type of apps for iOS — we made professional tools that aren’t really “in demand” on that platform — and that price isn’t our problem, but interest is.
So, once again, we will investigate raising our iOS app prices in 2016, with two hopes: that the awesome customers that love and need these apps understand the incredible amount of work that goes into them and that these people are also willing to pay more for a quality professional app (whereas, say, the casual gamer would not).
It’s a tough nut to crack. Tough to know the right apps to develop and tough to find the right pricing sweet spot at which to sell them.
A big part of Panic’s appeal was beautiful apps for your beautiful Apple OS. Now Panic apps and Apple operating systems look like wet cardboard and have the usability of Windows. Why not use a free FTP app in that case? You don’t spend money on accessories for a table you bought at IKEA. The table is ugly and temporary, like all computing devices today.