I've had vaguely uncomfortable feelings about the app store concept on phones from the very beginning (and I've commented on those misgivings here on several occasions over the years, to mixed response), and I think all of the concerns I aired back then are coming to be proven to be real problems. When you sell an app via these stores, you don't have a customer...you have a sale. A customer is more valuable to a software developer than a sale by a vast amount. A few thousand customers can sustain a business indefinitely.
Customers can help you make your product better, and you can help your customer get more value out of the application (which means they'll be happy to pay you more). Customers can be rewarded for recommending your application to friends or coworkers. Customers can help support your product in your forums or support tracker. Customers can end up becoming your best employees (our first employee is someone who used our Open Source stuff for years, and was one of our first buyers when we created a commercial product; he's a true believer in what we do). A sale without that direct customer relationship is just a sale.
I have hopes that this is a temporary anomaly in an evolution toward a more open web with more direct connection between developers and users, but I don't have a very high level confidence in that outcome. But, I can encourage folks to not become sharecroppers, I guess.
About 15 years ago, there was a really common sentiment among tech industry titans that curating the web would be where money was made (which led to things like push content, and "portals", which mostly failed, or evolved), and this seems to be that same idea coming back in a new form. But, the curators are simply extracting value from developers and users without substantially improving the ecosystem...in fact, they're kinda bleeding the ecosystem dry, and enforcing a "software-as-commodity" model...it's Walmart applied to software. Which is a pretty dangerous situation, I think, for independent software developers, and probably only serves the largest corporations.
All else being equal, I wouldn't like working so that I can be shut down by another company at their whim. Nobody would.
But at the same time, I can get "customers" from App Store sales. Whether you develop your sales into customers is entirely independent of whether your work is hosted (and veto-able) by someone else.
For example, I bought an app on the App Store, and found a nasty bug in it, and so I sent an email to them. I got a personalized response, and started a dialog with the programmer. I've reported many issues and requested some features, was given a pre-release beta to test, and after a few weeks, the next release had my bug fixed. A "sharecropper" under Apple, perhaps, but earned my trust, and I'll buy from them again if I have the chance.
On the other hand, I have in the past bought software in a cardboard box from a store. The publisher wasn't under anybody's thumb, and I'm sure they were happy about this fact. But it was nearly impossible to give any feedback to them, and when I did, I never saw any of it included in any future release. Owned their own business, but made a one-time sale and definitely not a repeat customer.
Given your example:
'A "sharecropper" under Apple, perhaps, but earned my trust, and I'll buy from them again if I have the chance.'
That's the problem. You won't have another chance, unless the developer makes a new product. The store doesn't allow for purchase of upgrades or renewals of service. It is a one-time purchase and the purchase price has been driven down to insanely low levels; which is fine for one-off games, but unsustainable for large applications that need ongoing maintenance, bugfixes, enhancements, etc. to provide a great customer experience.
The ideal experience for both customer and developer for complex software is often one of constantly increasing value, in exchange for fair payment. It doesn't have to be a traditional "upgrade every year" model...it can be a subscription style service, where you pay a fixed, fair, amount, and get updates every couple of months.
And, I'm definitely not campaigning for a return to boxed software in stores, as it has all the problems of the app store, plus many more. That was a tradition imposed by technical limitations. There was no good way to deliver software without boxing it up and shipping it out. That hasn't been the case for well over a decade. Nobody should be delivering software in boxes, today, as far as I'm concerned.
Beautifully put.
Look at this way. Apple is not the first and last company to make a device that will function as a "phone". Or as an MP3 player.
How are they going to stop people from 3D printing their own cool casings? And from using free open source code that is the same or better as what Apple uses? With lawyers? It's not going to work.
For now Apple is riding high. But it won't last forever. Apple needs developers, as in the ones who do not work for Apple and can speak freely. Just like Microsoft needed developers in the 90's. They hired as many as they could and flooded the developer ecosystem with a gazillion closed API's and an easy peasy IDE. Strange as it may seem, these companies need you in order to stay competitive.
http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/860/crash-reporter-roundup
I haven't yet tried any of his suggestions, and since the article is from 2009, I don't know how much has changed.
In any case, from experience on other platforms, I heartily recommend making crash reporting straightforward (1-click, or even opt-in to 0-click) for users. Once you have a few hundred people using your software, "rare" crashes happen all the time and tracking them down can be much easier than with just your internal testing.
Note that OSX's built-in crash reports go to Apple, not the App developer, so they're not much use to those of us outside the Cupertino ivory tower.
I use Stripe for payment processing with a custom in-app UI for buying the app. Stripe has been great — they charge 50c+2.9%, so I lose about 44c per copy of DragonDrop sold (versus losing about $1.50 to Apple in the App Store).
I suggest releasing in the App Store if possible, but selling independently, too. The whole thing took about a day to set up and has been totally automatic since then.
The App Store utterly dominates.
However, I still think it's good to have your own release path as well, because it gives you a bit more courage to argue with Apple when you need to. :)
Without this contract, wouldn't simple use of any API involve infringement? Aren't you opening yourself up here to actual serious issues?
My app is $4.99, so I net $4.55 from each copy sold independently, and $3.50 from each copy sold from Apple. That's a substantial bump.
And this is recently one of the culprits why mobile app developers are struggling financially; so it seems to be a big factor.
I happen to like these: I love being able to try something out before I buy, so "free + IAP" looks great to me. But there are a lot of people who must think that "free" means "everything free, for all time", and when they discover a core feature costs 99c, they go and leave a 1-star review. So you have to tread carefully.
Another option is to make a free demo version, and just dump it on your own webpage. It's not as discoverable as the App Store, but if people learn about your app and go looking, it's not too hard to find. A demo probably has minimal needs for the things the App Store provides (like licensing, purchasing, and updating), anyway.
A while ago, I tried the Fantastical trial, and when I used the purchase link, I was immediately prompted to a credit card payment screen. I paid and bought the software, and all was fine and well.
But later on, I learn that the software was also available in the MAS - something Fantastical didn't really bother explaining to me. When I contacted them for any kind of refund (to be used to purchase the app in MAS), I was told that they couldn't accommodate that since a lot of other users have requested the same thing - which already seems like a weird way of thinking.
They price the software in both places the same - meaning they earn more money, if people don't by it in the MAS, and I felt the entire experience to be very deceptive.
All in all, a really bad experience that I can't recommend any developer to imitate, as it does nothing to inspire customer loyalty. Especially when the developer has a financial incentive to not addressing the issue. At least from my limited perception as a non-Mac developer.
Again, this is the impression you get as a customer. I'm not saying this is the intent, but perception is reality in the real of customer experience.
Consider this another con to double-dipping, if you intend to do something similar.
You still get the same software, you paid the same amount, and they probably have an update mechanism (the only real difference between the versions is keeping your license key).
I can't see how you can be annoyed about this. If you really cared you could have spent a few minutes extra on the site to check if they supported the Mac App Store.
Not really an response just a comment.
https://developer.apple.com/appstore/in-app-purchase/subscri...
Can someone confirm that?
Since iOS has become a huge gaming platform, it's no surprise that same PSP/NDS piracy consumer demographic has made the leap as well.
The piracy rates are high, just as with anywhere, but you can still make very good money on the Cydia Store, from personal experience (http://kramerapps.com/cydia/).
http://www.distimo.com/blog/2011_12_distimo-releases-full-ye...
In 2011 iPad app revenues alone topped Android Market revenues by a significant margin.
edit: some more recent sources: http://www.appannie.com/game-of-phones/
http://blog.flurry.com/bid/85911/App-Developers-Signal-Apple... "Running a comparison of revenue generated by top apps on both iOS and Android, Flurry calculates that the difference in revenue generated per active user is still 4 times greater on iOS than Android. For every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android. These results mirror earlier findings from similar analysis Flurry conducted in Q4 of 2011 and Q1 of 2012."
