When was the last time you paid for something digital through a webpage?

I was reading some comments by an analyst talking about iPhones, iPads, the "Post-PC" era, etc. You can read it here if you are interested. One topic was talking about the idea of apps vs HTML5.

Anyway, I had a thought while reading the analyst's discussion. When was the last time I personally paid for something digital through a website?

There are lot of websites where I pay for physical goods. Amazon.com, eBay, etc.

NetFlix: that's a good one. You pay and get access to streaming movies.

World of Warcraft: another good example. I don't do play online, but a lot of people do.

How about paying for online access to news? Not many people do it. The dot com folks taught us that we didn't need to pay. Their "get marketshare first, make money later" model made sure of that.

Do you pay for your personal email service? Gmail, hotmail, ? Nope.

Pandora? Nope. What happened when they tried to get everyone to pay? We all left and found another service.

Hmm....

Here's the thing. As consumers, we pay for value. How do we decide what price to pay for that value? We do it relative to something else. We feel that our personal email has to be free because there are so many good options that are. We are usually willing to pay a bit more for a book that has more pages, or at least looks thicker.

Back to Pandora. They want to charge $36. It happens to be for a whole year's worth of listening, but that is a big mental jump in price. Why not charge $3/month? Give me the first month for $1 and get me hooked. If it is really that good, I'll buy right? Have you not heard of Cocaine marketing?

But I'm getting distracted.

Apps. Why do so many people pay a couple of dollars at a time for apps?
1. It is a different delivery mechanism. What do we compare it to? (remember price/value comparisons) Other apps. Yeah, yeah - you're smart enough to know that it isn't much different from a website. But because it packaged differently I'm not expecting it for free.
2. Yes, there are free apps with advertising. But often times I'm willing to pay just a bit more for quality and no nagging. They are cheap. If the apps were $30 (cheap boxed software at a store) then I would have to analyze, comparison shop, question if I need it, etc.
3. Visibility. I can find all this value easily at one location. The app store.
4. I don't give my credit card and person info to some random app developer that may or may not be trustworthy, I give it to Apple. I already trust them. I bought my phone from them. Android/Google is a bit more complicated, but similar. On a site note, note the difference in the trust model and that Android users don't pay for apps as much. Interesting!

A website trying to sell something usually isn't any of the above.

Will HTML webapps make a comeback and destroy the app store model? Nope.

Yes, it costs more money to develop apps for each app platform. Trust me, I know all about that. But I can make enough money to make up for that.

If I made my app as a webapp, would people pay me for the value? Nope.
1. They would expect it to be free. Remember your dot com training!
2. Without the high volume of purchases through an app store, I would have to charge more, which would keep potential sales away.
3. My value would have to compete with many other websites that are delivering other types of value. How many people do you know are in the internet marketing business? I know a lot.
4. Would you trust me with your credit card for a $5 purchase? Not unless I was a big enough company to have a reputable brand.

The HTML side of the argument seems to usually land on the idea that HTML, being a standard, will win because it is ubiquitous. They say that it is to expensive to develop nonstandard apps for each app store.

Other than maybe Apple talking about their app store, you don't hear anyone arguing back on the side of the apps. Maybe they are to busy writing apps? If apps don't make money for them, they will come back to other kinds of software development in a couple of years.

Moving from NSLog to better logging

I've wanted to improve the logging in my apps for quite a while. I've searched and found a number of websites that talk through different options. I found these to be quite helpful:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/969130/nslog-tips-and-tricks
http://cocoaheads.byu.edu/wiki/different-nslog

But I didn't see a "finished" solution that was polished like I wanted it to be. Here is what I wanted:
- Easily turned off; don't run in a distribution build
- Short to use; NSLog short. I don't want anything longer
- Show the method name and line number

The solution I came up with looks pretty good. To use my logger, all I have to do is use a GPLog() statement, just like NSLog(). The cool thing about that it is that it made for an easy find and replace to use it through mode code. Statements like GPLog(@"%d", numberVar); will work just like NSLog does. The statement GPLog(@""); will produce something like this in the log.

2010-12-08 16:19:07.537 GW Mail[8016:207] -[AppDelegate_Phone application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:] (33) ::


I put the following in my .pch file so that it would be globally available.

#define kDevMode

#ifdef kDevMode
#define GPLog( s, ... ) { \
NSLog( @"%s (%d) :: %@ \t", __PRETTY_FUNCTION__, __LINE__,\
[NSString stringWithFormat:(s), ##__VA_ARGS__] ); \
}
#warning kDevMode ON!
#endif
#ifndef kDevMode
#define GPLog( s, ... ) { }
#endif

A few things to notice. To turn logging off, all you have to do is put an x or something in front of the #define kDevMode statement.

When the logger is turned on, it throws a warning. This helps you to remember to turn it off before you do your distribution builds.

It's pretty straight forward code. Hopefully this is helpful to someone!

iPhone Analytics

Pretty early on when I started developing iPhone applications, I added analytics to my apps. Specifically Pinch Media's package. Until recently I have been pretty happy with the analytics I've gotten from their system. Not that long ago, Pinch Media was absorbed into Flurry. That's when things went bad. Specifically:

1. Flurry reports session based analytics. Interesting if you are a free/add based developer. Not so much for a paid app developer. Pinch was much better in that it reported based on device.
2. They don't answer their email. The automated response email doesn't count. The Pinch folks were really responsive.

So, I thought about this for a bit and came up with the criteria that I'm going to use as I go out and review different analytics companies. Basically, it comes down to the questions that I want to be able to answer from my analytics.

1. I want to localize my app. What languages do my customers speak? Country != language. Some of those nice Canadians prefer French. Flurry only reports sessions by region (Europe, NA, etc.) Not very useful for making a decision.

2. How many of my customers are trying to use an iPad? Are my customers primarily iPhone or iPod? What percentage are running new enough hardware that they will be able to take advantage of the new multi-tasking features in iPhone OS 4.0?

3a. What iPhone OS version are people running? If I need to move my app to 3.1, how many of my existing customers will I leave behind?

3b. Based on last week's stats, how many sales will I loose next week for moving to 3.1? As iPhone OS 4.0 is released, how quickly are my current customers and new customers moving to 4.0?

4. I realize that my apps are very small within the overall app store ecosystem. Do I get access to app store wide stats and trends towards the above questions?

5. Looking at the above metrics, compare user count to average session count. Is there a disparity somewhere? e.g. Do iPad users buy/install my app but not use it because they are frustrated with it for some reason? That would imply that I have a problem that I need to work on somewhere.

6. Does the event/action tracking system have an export function so that custom reports can be run on the events? I want to be aggregate the counts of some of my events and such.

7. Can I export my app's data and compare it to my Lite app's data? That would be very interesting.

Thoughts on the iPad

The iPad was released yesterday. I've had a day to play with one and I have a few thoughts.

What is the iPad and what do you do with it?

iPhone owners, iPod Touch owners, and perhaps other smartphone owners will understand quite quickly what the iPad is. It is a large iPod Touch.

But more importantly, what does one do with an iPad? If you are one of the group of people I just mentioned, this will be pretty obvious. You use the iPad for all of the things that you use a smartphone for when you are home and your computer is on the other side of the room. The activities fall into two categories; quickly done and cheaply done.

Quickly done
- You are sitting on the couch watching a movie and you wonder what other movies an actor is in? There is an IMDB app for that.
- You wonder what movies are playing at the local theater. I like the Flixster app for that.
- You want to post something quickly to Facebook. There is a Facebook app.
- You want to check the score for the latest game. There is an ESPN scorecenter app.
- You want to check how the stock market did today. There are many apps for that.
- You want to see if the weather will be nice tomorrow. There are apps for that.
- You want to check if you have received that email you were expecting. The Mail app can do that.
- You have a feeling that there is a 9am meeting tomorrow and want to check your calendar. There is a Calendar app for that.
- You remember something that needs to be done tomorrow and want to put it on your to do list. There are many ToDo apps for that.

All of these things are quickly and easily done on an iPad. What, you don't have an app for that yet? No problem. The app store app lets you find a good app in just a couple of minutes. And this leads me to my next point.

Easily done

Let's say that I want to play a quick game as a diversion. Nothing so time consuming as the latest entry in the Halo or Super Mario Brothers franchise, but something simple and fun. Think Tetris, Solitare, or just about any arcade game from the 80's. The App Store delivers that.

I can virtually browse the isles and find something fun to do for just a few dollars. Not a game person? The iPad has books. Lots of them. Some of them for free. Want to spend some time getting the news? There are a lot of good apps for that in a format that is even better than the iPhone.

This is what the iPad is all about. Quickly and easily done.

Developers leaving the iPhone? Not yet.

There have been a number of articles written lately about developers leaving the app store in frustration. ArsTechnica Facebook Developer The reality is that these folks leaving are very much a minority and will make very little difference in the short term. It is kind of like an employee that leaves a company because the employer is treating the workers like crap. The question is why do the other folks not leave? And will that change?

The reason is that there are over 50 million iPhones and iPod Touches. iPhone sales numbersOver 50 million potential customers. No other app store can match this right now. Trism

Fast forward 12 months. Because Android isn't locked to just one carrier or even one manufacturer, the number of Android devices will grow significantly over the next year. Apple is leaving money on the table by locking themselves into AT&T. Sure, they are more profitable per handset sold, but the cost of not having sold twice as many devices will catch up to them within a year.

Back to my employee/employer example... If an employer abuses its employees when the economy is down and workers can't leave, it will catch up with them as soon as the economy picks up. Apple will find themselves in this situation a year from now. A year from now the Android numbers will be high enough to make it every bit as appealing of a platform to business on as Apple's. At the end of the day it is all about the numbers.

Mockapp: quick iPhone app prototyping

I stumbled on to Mockapp the other day. It is a series of graphics wrapped up in ppt slides, designed to enable you to easily and quickly create visual mockups of an iPhone app.

I used it yesterday to put together a mockup for a customer. It was awesome! I used to do this the hard way using cut and paste with screenshots and other graphics. This is so much better to have all the standard widgets already sliced up for you.

Here is a link to their website. http://mockapp.com/

The two App Stores

Marco Arment wrote this great article on the app store. http://www.marco.org/208454730 It is highly recommended reading. It does a great job of summarizing the need for market analysis. But mostly I like it because he so eloquently summarized my thoughts when I read Ged Maheux of the Iconfactory whining http://gedblog.com/2009/09/28/losing-ireligion/ about his latest app not doing well. Sometimes people just over think things when they put their app together.