Anchored to the Bottom: Hypothesizing the Root Cause of Low App Store Pricing

There’s a race to the bottom for prices on the App Store, and many developers (myself included) don’t like it. Some developers wonder if Apple could have stopped it. Others think the free and paid apps are different markets. Despite my respect for Charles, Daniel and Joe (with whom I’ve been arguing about this on twitter) I don’t think so.

The cause (I believe) of the race to the bottom is the existence of so many popular, quality, free apps, built largely with VC money. When users are given, free of charge, quality apps that took hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars to develop, it skews their perceptions of what apps should cost, and that in turn pushes down the price the market will bear.

Just Because There Was a Bubble Doesn't Mean App Store Developers Are Doomed

Let’s just call it what it was, shall we? We had an App Store Bubble.

It’s deflating now, although (at least with games) there are still remnants.

Take a deep breath. It’s all going to be okay.

When I started working on mobile apps back in 2005 on Palm devices, we had horrible distribution by today’s standards. There were no integrated payments, no integrated stores. People had to buy your app, download it to their PC, and then copy it to their PDA via a serial cable. And yet, even back then, people made a living at it (although, I never managed to do so).

I don’t make my living from my own apps now, either. I’m not an iOS indie, I’m a consultant/freelancer. I’ve tried being an indie, and I’m not good at it (and I’m one of those weird people that actually likes consulting). But it is possible to make a living from iOS app revenue, because many people I know from my consulting practice have and do.

But let’s think for a minute about where we are before we call the App Store a disaster.

What I Learned During my Mac App Store Review

Two things happened on Thursday that made it obvious to me what I should write about this week. Mountain Lion was announced, and my first Mac App was approved for the Mac App Store.

Even though iDevBlogADay is about iOS programming, more and more of us are moving from iOS to the Mac. With the announcement that GameCenter will be coming to OS X, I’m guessing that more iOS developers might be thinking about coding for the Mac now than might have been last week.

So today I’m going to talk about my experience in getting my first App on the Mac App Store and specifically the differences in the approval process between the Mac App Store and the iOS App Store.

Hey, iOS Devs, Nice AppStore. Would be a shame if something were to happen to it…

So, breaking iOS AppStore news this afternoon:  Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers.

This sucks, and I’m pissed off, but not because my data is so precious, but because I’m scared of where this could end up.

Mobile Apps - Boom or Bust? Sherman, please set the Wayback Machine for 1994, and then 1853

In the last few days, I’ve seen reports that Mobile Apps are repeating the 1996 expansion, and reports that Mobile Apps don’t provide a viable business model. I think that there are elements of truth in both articles, but I don’t think either is an adequate depiction of what I’m seeing. Let me see if I can explain. Like others, I feel like I’ve been here before, but for me the year wasn’t 1996, but 1994.

People Seem to Prefer Videos and other things I learned from trying to advertise my iPhone app.

I have a couple of apps of my own in the AppStore. Most of the sales of the apps I have worked on have been the apps I did for other people, because, well, they are better than I am at marketing.So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do marketing with one of my apps, KidChart. It’s been out several months and sales have trailed way off. I like it (my wife and I use it every day), but I haven’t figured out how to market it.