Tagged: iOS

Palliative Symptoms Survey Hits the Apple App Store →

I have been working diligently on a project for some time now and it’s finally available.  My company, Still River Software, received approval from Apple last week for Palliateive Symptoms Survey to help doctors and caregivers provide better and faster care to their patients.

Palliative Symptoms Survey is an application based on the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Survey (ESAS-r) which was developed to assist in the assessment of nine symptoms that are common in palliative care patients: pain, tiredness, drowsiness, nausea, lack of appetite, depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, and wellbeing There is also a blank scale for patient-specific symptoms.

The application is a native iPad application written in Objective-C with a back-end using Ruby on Rails.   Please read a little bit about the project on my company web site.

Marco’s Love of Android

I have been following an interesting discussion between the Shifty Jelly folks and Marco Arment of Instapaper regarding the merits of developing for iOS versus Android and whether it’s worth the developer’s time (read money) creating for the platform.

Eric Schmidt spoke recently at Le Web where he said developers, like it or not, will target Android.  As someone who writes iOS applications, it seemed like an arrogant statement and Marco had his thoughts, which seem reasonable to me:

Android devices have been selling in large quantities for a long time. That’s not new. Yet today, compared to iOS, Android is much less profitable for developers (especially for paid apps), its users are less influential for expanding new services, and its app development is much more painful and expensive. And in the rapidly growing and increasingly influential tablet market, Android has an extremely low marketshare.

Shify Jelly creators of applications for both iOS and Android took offense to Marco statements and wrote some elegant dialog as to the contrary:

First some background. We’ve been in the iOS app store since August of 2008, which for those that are counting is only a month or so after it first launched. We’ve been on Android now for about a year. We make serious apps like Pocket Casts and Pocket Weather AU, things that take a lot of development effort and involve serious server back-ends. We’ve made enough money since then to support 2 full time staff, and 2 part time designers. Yes we’re the guys who had the run in with Amazon, the email from Steve Jobs, and we’re not millionaires.

Finally, since neither of these developers allow comments on their blog, Marco’s rebuttal to the challenge by Shifty Jelly:

If you make the first great Android Instapaper client that:

  • uses the official API
  • contains a significant portion of the iOS app’s features, the details of which we’d work out privately
  • runs on a wide variety of Android devices and OS versions including modern smartphones, the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, and whichever 10” tablet matters at the time of completion
  • is priced at $2.99 or higher in the U.S. with approximately equivalent pricing elsewhere, and satisfies requirements to be sold in the Google Marketplace, Amazon Appstore, and whatever B&N uses for the Nook Tablet

I’ll call it the official Instapaper app for Android, I’ll promote it on the Instapaper site, I’ll drop the subscription requirement for its API access, you’ll answer all support email that comes from it, and we’ll split the net revenue 50/50.

As you may know, I write iOS applications but have not given Android much thought primarily for Marco’s reasons.  I like to keep an open mind and would target Android if there was money to be made in any of the apps stores.  I just don’t see it.  Certainly there are tons of Android phones flying out of the stores but are those people spending the money like the users in Apple’s App Store?  I fear not, at least not today.  If users aren’t spending their hard earned dollars on applications how can we be expected to spend our hours on developing for a platform with almost no return.

Who is making money selling their Android applications today?  Please leave a comment.

The dialog is worth the read and is food for thought.  It’s interesting how, since neither allows comments on their blogs, they are forced to trade shots in this way.

 

Attending Voices That Matter : iOS Developers Conference

VTMiPhone225x225

I am very excited to be attending the Voices That Matter: iOS Developers Conference in Boston, November 12-13, 2011.  It is put on by the folks of Addison-Wesley Professional, one of my favorite publishers.

The speaker line-up looks fantastics, from the VTM site:

Learn all about developing applications for the iPhone and iPad at the Voices That Matter: iOS Developers Conference. You can learn from leading authors like Erica Sadun, Chris Adamson, Erik Buck and Aaron Hillegass and meet industry leaders such as Graeme Devine, Rod Strougo, Jeff LaMarche and Mike Ash. Join us in Boston, November 12-13, 2011 and learn how you can leverage Apple’s commitment to the iOS platform.

This will be the first Voices That Matter conference I have attended and will be doing so on behalf of InfoQ.  I hope to meet and talk with some speakers and attendees looking to chat about what they’re up to.  If you are reading this and plan on attending, send me an email.

As my company is taking on more projects in the mobile space, particularly iOS applications, I find it increasingly important to get out and meet others who are also creating mobile applications.

Anyone interested in attending, registration is still open and early bird ends September 30, 2011.  They have active Twitter and Facebook accounts where updates about the conference and authors are posted.  I hope to see you there.

I Want My Content and Consume it Too

When Apple announced the ability of content providers to offer in-app purchases of their goods, newspapers and magazines breathed a small sigh of relief.  The Internet age has left traditional print a bit in the dust.

Over the recent weeks I have noticed several old-school publishers, The Economist in particular, offering their magazine to subscribers as iOS application.  A user grabs the app from the Apple App Store and when running it they can purchase a single issue or become a subscriber right while in the app.  How convenient is this?  I love it.

The issue is downloaded to the iOS device for later consumption.   Here is the kicker, it appears to be downloaded and probably most of the content is,  but the cord is not cut back to the mothership.  I received this email today:

TheEconomistOffline

Interesting..I may be unable to access The Economist on iPhone and iPad.  Why should this be?  If I downloaded the issue to my iPad I should be able to read the purchased content regardless of their backend.

Maybe they embed some analytics, make calls to a server or display ads served from their servers, but that should not render my reading experience useless.  I should be able to be in the most remote part of the world, or on a plane for that matter, devoid of WiFi or cell service and be able to read my copy of The Economist without issue on my iPad.

If mobile applications offering content to me aren’t going to be able to function without Internet connectivity, they are going to fail.  I would not buy a subscription or a single issue if I can’t acquire the content and have no further obligation from the publisher.

I see no legitimate reason I should be required to have a connection to view my purchased content, from any application, any time or place.

The Android Hubbub

Images

I wrote a few months back about dumping the iPhone in favor of an Android phone running on Verizon, not because I didn’t like the iPhone but because I despised AT&T.

We hear a lot about how fast the adoption of Android is and how it is taking over as the #1 mobile operating system.  Sure, when carriers are signing up to sell as many Android handsets as possible it’s no wonder Google claims the adoption rate is so high.  One thing the numbers don’t take into account is quality, we need to remember that quantity does not equate to quality.

Since October 2010 I have been using a Droid X and having come from an iPhone 3GS, I think I have a fair amount of experience using both platforms.  Comparing the experience of using both, I arrive at the following conclusions:

  • The Droid X is nice hardware, very comparable to the iPhone
  • The Droid X running Android is quite a bit slower than the 3GS.  Remember, the 3GS hardware is pretty old.  Applications are not nearly as responsive as the iPhone.
  • The Android applications I used crash quite often.  I don’t want to name any but suffice to say, very similar applications with some being from the same company, crash more often than is acceptable.
  • The aesthetics of the iOS applications are far and above any Android application.  I struggle to find an acceptable beauty in any, with the slight exception of the official Twitter application.
  • Applications on Android have an inconsistent user interface, maybe because of the lack of quality control going into the process of putting something in the app store.

After using the Droid X for these months I can safely say it was a suffering experience.  I grew to a real dislike for the device and often times hoped I would lose the phone or have it fall to an untimely death just so I had an excuse to replace it.

I am happy to report that I have come to my last ounce of patients with Android and am returning to the iPhone.  Oh how I have missed you.  I had hoped to wait until the iPhone 5 was available but resolved that life is too short to have to have a sub-par mobile experience.

I ran into an article recently titled, “Android Isn’t About Building a Mobile Platform“, which really explains a lot about Google’s drive behind creating Android:

Google is building Android not so they can make great mobile devices and sell them to consumers. Rather, they are making them for these two simple reasons: (1) to disrupt Apple’s growing dominance of mobile devices, both so Google doesn’t have to rely on Apple for access to their users and to eliminate their paid-for application model; and (2) so Google can control the mobile industry and thus secure advertising from it.

It makes a lot of sense and is brilliantly clear but a shame.  I believe if the goal is not to create a great mobile platform but rather just a conduit for advertising then it will always be sub-par.

So to my readers, I am not writing this post to complain, but to warn.  I write this from the standpoint of someone who has given two popular mobile platforms a fair shake and come to the realization how different they are.  Different can be good but it can also be a step backwards, Android is certainly a step in the backwards direction.  The grass is not greener on the other side of this fence, there are just seeds on this other side.  It’s young and will likely evolve but it has a long way to go.  Appreciate your iPhone as I will, which is out for delivery and will arrive today.

Making Money on Mobile Applications

Tim Bray had an interesting and timely post recently regarding his view on a developer’s ability to make money creating mobile applications.

As a developer who is in the process of publishing my first application to the App Store, I have spent some time examining the various mobile platforms and looking at paid vs. ad supported applications.  I am in no-way suggesting Tim is wrong nor am I supporting his view.  He brings up great points and I wanted to give a bit of my own feedback from the perspective of a developer who did a bit of research to choose a platform to support.

Tim does bring up some good points and his view is probably reflective of many mobile application developers.  Keep in mind, Tim works for Google so his Google Goggles may be on and he is not seeing very many developers making money selling Android applications.

One point which keeps sticking in my mind is, at least in the Apple App Store is when selling an application, you get the sale once and that’s it:

…I deeply believe that the app-sales business sucks. Selling anything on a one-time basis at a price below $10 is historically the kind of business that’s been owned by companies like Walmart. I acknowledge that it’s working for some people, but it’s just not where I’d want to be.

So, which platform makes the most sense to start with?  I really don’t know but can make a best guess and say Apple.

iOS vs. Android

The intent is not to start a flame war here but just calling it like I see it from a very high level as well as from a user level, owning both an iPhone and a Motorola Droid X:

Android has a ton of handsets out there so the market is very attractive for developers.  The barrier to entry is also extremely low and the process of submitting applications virtually non-existant.  This leads to a lot of really low-quality apps, which people are not interested in paying for.

iOS whose barrier is considerably higher here, with a $99 annual fee and fairly stringent review process before an application can see the light of day in the App Store, this leads at least to a lower number of bad apps getting to market.   The early days of the fart app are gone and now we are seeing good quality.

Ad Sales

I think it would be interesting to be able to have two identical apps, one is paid and the other is ad-supported, in order to find out which is better.  The question could become, do I charge $0.99 for my app or give it away and put ads in the application.  It seems many Android developers are going down the ad-supported path.

Tim says:

I work for Google, and this is obviously one of our strengths. I don’t have the strong positive vibe about ads that I get about the relationship selling, as in upgrades and in-app. Having said that, I know for a fact from talking to developers that ads are starting to work pretty well for some of them.

Since he is employed by Google so I will therefore assume he has been speaking to Android developers, I have to think ads are what works best for them.

Upgrades and In-App Purchase

I think there are folks who are very successful with in-app purchases but I’m not sure to what extent.  Do developers turn on features in applications based on a purchase?  I can see this being very effective way for additional revenue beyond the initial $4.99 sale.

Looking at the history of the Apple App Store paid upgrades seem to be non-existant.  I have bought a lot of apps for either the iPhone and iPad and have never once been asked to pay for an upgrade from version to version.  This seems like something developers have secretly agreed on and nobody does it.  I can’t say it happens on Android, since I have never paid for an Android app, all the ones on my Droid X were free.

I wonder what would happen if charging for an upgrade was attempted?  In the Apple App Store it would have to be a totally new version and it would not be an upgrade at all but totally new.  Didn’t Tweetie try this?  I bet it doesn’t work.

In-app purchases does seem like an attractive option.  Produce new versions of the application which can only be accessed by spending more money.  I like it from a developer perspective, but probably not from a consumer one.  If the features were big then may they would be worthy of paying a fee but a clear distinction would have to be made between an upgrade and something considered a new purchased feature.

Rich Client on a Web Service

My intention is simply this; create a headless (no UI) web applications, all web service, where I can create any client I want to access and consume the web service(s).  This way the client could be an iOS device, Android tablet or maybe even a Windows Mobile Phone 7.

The web service would be a SaaS model which charges monthly for the privilege.  The client application would be given away and with recurring monthly revenue the problem of making money on mobile solved.  Another variation worth considering is selling the application for a small amount which is fully functional standalone but adds functionality when used in conjunction with the web service.

One aspect of this model which bothers me is what happens when the user doesn’t have good service or the web service was down for maintenance?  I think the ability for applications to store data locally to later be synced back to the cloud gives the user the best of both worlds.

Conclusion

I am interested in learning more.  I know very little about being a successful mobile developer but I have been marketing software for a long time.

How can one make a living differently from what I am suggesting?  Are app sales dead and only limited a few developers?  I don’t think so but these are hard numbers to acquire.

 

Understanding the Apple App Store Subscriptions

Apple announced yesterday they launched subscriptions in the App Store.  It’s not entirely a surprise to most developers ever since the release of The Daily by News Corp which offers in-app purchasing.

Interpretation

This announcement from Apple seems to have caused quite a stir on the interwebs.  The press release from Apple is pretty clear from a high level:

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.

Steve goes on to say:

“All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.”

This is the part that seems to confuse people a bit.  It says, if you offer subscriptions out side of the app store that you need to also need to provide an offer in the app store as good as the one outside.  When a user decides to buy from within the application, Apple keeps 30%.

It’s About the Customer

In my opinion, the bottom line is about customers and the user experience for them.  I have to admit that I would rather pay for a subscription from within the application as opposed to going outside to a web site and enter my payment details there.  If I use iTunes, Apple has all my information and like buying an app, it is very easy.

The Bright Side

This gives developers a call to action in a sense, for one, make your subscription service super-easy so people don’t mind coming to your site to manage subscriptions.

One thing to keep in mind, users may be more willing to subscribe *if* they can do it on the app store, therefore giving the developer/publisher sales they may not have gotten otherwise.

Just as the Mac App Store opens more opportunities, this seems too as well.

Is there a Dark Side?

Maybe. There are still questions that are not clearly answered.  What about applications which offer subscriptions today, like Netflix?  Will NetFlix need to start paying Apple 30%?  It seems that way if NetFlix allows a user to pay in-app, but that’s not how I pay them.  I have a subscription I maintain on their web site.

I think this holds true with Kindle book purchases too where I buy on the Amazon website and the books comes to the Kindle app on my iPad.

Conclusion

It seems when Apple comes out with something new or makes a change to rules, people initially think they are onerous and contain ulterior motives.  If one reads what Steve Jobs has said, this is yet another way for a publisher to get paid for content.

If I am missing something obvious, I would love to hear about it.  As an iOS developer I really want to understand as much as I can.

I will keep an open mind until proven I shouldn’t.

2010 Year in Review and Looking Ahead

I don’t always do these types of posts and I almost didn’t this year but I figured it would help keep my thoughts together to reflect on later.

2010 was a really busy year and there was very little rest.

Expens’d

It has been just over a year since I acquired Expens’d from Atlantic Dominion Solutions.  The past year has really been about understanding the application, how people are using it and fixing some obvious bugs that plagued my users.  We added several new features requested by users but did not add the features I am dying to tell you about.  Unfortunately, I can’t say just yet what is being added but it will be great for our users.

Subscribers are continuing to increase, both paid and free accounts.  Advertising consisted of Bing, Google Ads and Facebook Ads.  I was surprised to find Bing brought in the most new users.  I don’t have exact numbers just yet.

Running a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) project is interesting and exciting, I have learned a lot in the past year and plan to share the details as we move forward.

Ruby on Rails

My complete move to Ruby on Rails and especially Rails 3 is almost complete.  I have one client remaining who I still provide consulting services to who is a .NET shop.  Once this project completes in 2011, my .NET career will come to a final end.

Rails 3 has really been a joy to work with, not in a single aspect but in the areas the team improved.  The areas which annoyed me in Rails 2.x are mostly rewritten and the pleasure continues.

I think Rails 3 is going to be a huge turning point for the Rails community.  This version could lead to better adoption in the enterprise and other organizations unsure of the platform.

An Epiphany

I would say about halfway through the year I came to realization that no matter how great it was to work with Ruby on Rails or any programming language and framework is, client work is not the joy it once was to me.

Since that time in the summer, I have been diligently working toward becoming 100% reliant on products.  These products include both web applications and mobile applications mainly targeting small businesses.  I continue to look for products to acquire which fit in with my plans.  If you know someone looking to sell, send them my way.

The transitions to 100% products is not as simple as flipping a switch, it takes time and planning.  My goal is transition complete by the end of the year.

All of my current products and projects are now Rails, future products will also Rails.  As consulting work winds down I will set some time aside to work on selected consulting projects that are particularly interesting.

Mobile Exploration

After purchasing a Motorola Droid X earlier this year and hearing how Android is gaining such market share I had to see what the hype was about.  I rejoined the Apple iPhone developer program and the Android Marketplace to make sure I had the latest information and tools.

Spending several weeks with both platforms to expose myself to iOS 4 and Android development I came back with an initial gut feel where my tolerance for risk versus the state of each platform and determined Android was not ready for prime time yet.  It is not as polished, tools are weak and making a reasonable living is a lot harder than with iOS.

This set my course from a mobile standpoint that I would focus on Objective-C on iOS and leave Android for another time, a more mature time.

The Year Ahead

I attended only one conference in 2010, which was RailsConf in the first half of the year.  I hope to change that in 2011.  I will be attending RailsConf again but want to take in some smaller, regional technical conferences as well as some business-related ones as well.  Maybe the Business of Software Conference this year.

2011 will be a year of transition from consulting to a products company.  I plan to blog more here about running a software company, some technical stuff but mainly about the factors behind technical decisions.  Some will be code, some will be me blathering on.

I have some ideas for other products to develop this year and some significant plans for Expens’d.  The journey will likely not be taken alone as one person cannot do it all, cannot know it all.

I am looking forward to this journey, things will certainly get exciting.

Interesting MobileMe Find My iPhone Behavior on iPhone 3GS

Today Apple released iOS 4.2.1 for all their mobile devices including iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad.  One of the last-minute features announced was the Fine My iPhone features which allows users to track down a stolen or misplaced iPhone.  Until today you had to have a MobileMe account costing $99 per year.  Today’s release gave iOS users a free MobileMe account which they can use for Find My iPhone.

I downloaded and installed iOS 4.2.1 for both my iPad and iPhone 3GS through iTunes.  Installation went without a hitch.

Find My iPhone

The Apple press release describes the feature:

The Find My iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch) feature is now free to use without a MobileMe℠ subscription and helps you locate your missing device.* The Find My iPhone app is a free download on the App Store℠ and lets users easily locate a missing device on a map and have it display a message or play a sound. Users can even remotely lock or wipe data from a lost device to protect privacy.

After installing the iOS update on the iPhone I decided to try the Find My iPhone feature.  On the iPhone this feature is enabled by going to Settings->Mail, Contacts, Calenders->Add Account…MobileMe.  I just used my existing Apple ID and password but encountered the following error message:

iPhone3GS-MobileMe

Hmm…so maybe pre-iPhone 4 devices aren’t supported.  I decided to give it a try on the iPad to see if maybe the service was just overwhelmed, following the same process the account was added and verified with ease.

I then decided to give it shot on the iPhone 3GS one last time and viola..worked fine.  So it appears Apple either has a bug in setting up an iOS device that is not current generation first or something got fixed.  I have heard from another user who experienced the same behavior.

Easiest fix if you experience the same problem, add your iPad or other device first.  If no other device exists..well, then I’m not sure. 

UPDATE: A reader here and confirmed on Twitter points out this behavior is by-design and you must have a current generation device to setup the free MobileMe account and then register your older devices.  The very fine print on the Apple web site states:

3. You can create a free Find My iPhone account on any iPhone 4, iPad, or iPod touch (4th generation) running iOS 4.2. Once you create an account on a qualifying device, use your Apple ID and password to enable Find My iPhone on your other devices running iOS 4.2. Find My iPhone is not available in all countries.

I guess if you have only an older device, like the iPhone 3GS, you are out of luck.  I would not have found this information by casually reading any information when setting up iOS 4.2.1 on my 3GS.  Had I setup the 3GS second, I would not have run into this either.

Apple : Please Fix the App Store Search

It’s a great time to be a developer today and the innovation Apple is putting forth with iOS gives developers a great platform for which to create applications.

I have been quietly putting small applications together for iOS but have had reservations about the end result.  How does a developer succeed in the App Store?  There are a lot of applications in the store and more popping up every day.  Once an application appears in the store, how do people find out about it?

App  Store Search Opportunity

The App Store search is abysmal at best.  I have tried to find applications that I know exist and can’t seem to locate them, except by name.   It’s pretty clear there is a problem when sites such as uquery pop-up which try to solve the problem.  From their own About page:

uquery.com is a new search engine focused on the emerging market of iPhone & iPod Touch applications. We have listened to many requests of the community and the frustration of being able to search and find applications on the iTunes AppStore. With 263,999 applications available on the AppStore, it has become tremendously difficult to find the right application.

My tests on uquery.com returned some really good results.  It seems the key to any of the searches on the site is how good the metadata is provided by the app publisher.

Google is also getting into the act of finding applications on the App Store with their Google Mobile app.

Apple is trying to make it easier for developers to enter the iOS ecosystem by lifting prior restrictions put on developers using tools beyond Objective-C and C++:

We are continually trying to make the App Store even better. We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

Now that developers can use tools like Monotouch to write in C# and deploy on iOS, this leads to that many more apps in the App Store, great for Apple but not so great for users.  At last count the App Store had close to 300,000 applications, but I am only aware of a small fraction.   If in a year the number of applications doubles, how is being able to find software going to be any easier if Apple does not improve its search?  I think the answer is, it won’t.

Enter the Mac App Store

Apple recently announced they would be opening the Mac App Store where Mac OS X developers could have a place to offer their applications.

This will add another large number of applications for users not be able to find.  So Apple, could you please fix your app store search.

Maybe the answer is to rely on third-party sites like uquery.com or apps like Google Mobile but I don’t think so.  I think Apple needs to lead publishers better so they can position apps to be found by search, the right metadata. 

As a developer and someone who writes applications for iOS and would take part in the Mac app store, I am concerned about getting lost in the abyss, to not be found by a potential customer.  It is my responsibility to give enough information about my products to customers but if Apple fails to guide users to the products…we both lose.

The right metadata and a great search UI = found apps.