Development

iOS developer Genady Okrain writes about his experience making money (or not) developing an iMessage app. Cutting to the chase:

As you can see the iMessage App Store was very promising at the beginning but nowadays it is somehow abandoned. This led me to release the app as an iOS app with an iMessage extension, and it is much more successful than just the iMessage app.

Interesting read. Not easy to make a living as an indie app developer.

My 2 cents: Articles like this are good input for folks just getting started, trying to sort out the best direction to take.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Earlier this year, Apple promised it would clean up its iOS App Store by removing outdated, abandoned apps, including those that no longer meet current guidelines or don’t function as intended. That great App Store purge now appears to be underway, according to new data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The company found that app removals increased by 238 percent in October 2016, with mobile games seeing the most deletions.

Apple had originally stated that the deadline for developers who wanted their outdated apps spared was September 7, 2016. However, Apple didn’t take immediate action during the month in terms of large-scale removals.

That seems to have changed in October, when 47,300 apps were removed from the App Store, Sensor Tower discovered.

And while it’s true that Apple does delete apps on a regular basis, this figure is around 3.4 times higher than the monthly average of 14,000 for the months of January through September.

Apple sent out a letter to developers on September 1 hinting that this day was coming.

Two things to read:

• Ben Lovejoy does a nice job walking through the entire story.
• Rene Ritchie posts a response from the Dash developer.

Dash is an off-line documentation browser, popular with developers. This morning, it was gone.

From the Dash for macOS blog:

Earlier today, Apple cancelled my developer account and has removed Dash from the App Store.

What Happened? I don’t know.

Read the post for details. But in a nutshell, Apple pulled the app and canceled the Dash developer account, sending an email saying “the account was terminated due to fraudulent conduct”.

This is a story with two major paths: Either the developer did something to deserve the rug being pulled out from under, something worthy of their developer credentials being cancelled. Or there’s a colossal misunderstanding here. I suspect there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Either way, don’t think this is the way this should have played out.

David Smith, long time indie app developer:

I’ve been thinking this past week (as I often do) about the ever-changing landscape of the App Store. This year has seen some of the biggest changes in policy and structure that I can remember. We have new subscription pricing models , search ads, a substantial purge of older apps , new requirements for app names and a variety of little changes to the App Store app itself in iOS 10.

I won’t know how the sum of these changes will impact my business until probably later this fall, but it seemed like a good time to look back at the last several years and examine the path that brought me here.

And:

The App Store ecosystem today is wildly different from what it was back then. I launched my first app into a store of around 90k apps, today we have well over 2 million. Back then we didn’t have advertising networks, in-app purchases or subscriptions. You were free or paid, and if you wanted to make a living you pretty much had to be paid.

Today things are quite different. Paid apps now make up a vanishingly small proportion of my income, and nearly all of my recent successes have come on the back of free apps. The transition between the two ends has not always be straightforward but I’ve focused hard on being adaptable and open-minded during the transition.

This is not a post about how difficult it is to make a living as an indie app developer. Rather, it is a recognition of the current reality facing developers and the shift that one seasoned developer has made to keep on doing what he loves.

To me, the core of this post is the Combined Revenue chart embedded in the middle of the post. If you look at that chart, you’ll see how David’s revenues shift over time from paid (about 4 years ago) to almost all ad-based (current).

Great post.

John Gruber:

In December 2012, I started a company with my friends Brent Simmons and Dave Wiskus. We named it Q Branch. In June 2013, we launched our first and only product: an iPhone notes app called Vesper.

Yesterday, we announced that development was ceasing, and we’ll soon be shutting down our sync server. I am terribly sad about this. I love Vesper. I use it every day. I mean that in the present tense. I still use it. When we pull the plug on the sync server, I’ll stop, but until then it’s my go-to notes app. In my career, the only things I’ve done that I’m prouder of are writing Daring Fireball and the creation of Markdown.

What went wrong was very simple. We never made enough money. Why we didn’t make enough money, what we should have done differently to make more money — those are complex questions (which I’ll tackle below).

A transparent look at the business of selling an iOS app in modern times, one that anyone with even the slightest interest in app development should read with great interest. A cautionary tale.

Let developers use the subscription model as they see fit. If the pricing is poorly done, people will not buy in.

Still trying to wrap my head around the logic of waiting 12 months before the 85/15 split locks in.

John Gruber on subscription pricing for apps. Lots of good stuff to read here, but mostly, Apple needs to be a bit more specific on the rules for developers.

Peter Kafka, writing for Recode:

If you are an independent app developer or publisher, you have probably known this for a while, because you have found it very difficult to get people to download your app — the average American smartphone user downloads zero apps per month.

An echo-competitor and an evolving Siri. This is going to be a very interesting WWDC.

Apple is continuing their pattern of investing locally, both in iOS development accelerators, and in partnering with local businesses (see the accelerator announcements in Indonesia, Italy, Brazil, and the Didi investment in China).