iPhone developer : think about the present
As you might know already, the next version of my application is available on the appstore, and the pricing changed. In a day and a half over a total of about 14 weeks in the appstore, I had 50% more users (about 8,500 by now). Being free and listed on freeappalert.com does helps. However the amount of paying users remains the same for now, no more money, no less. You might be surprised but I’m happy with that as my goal is not to make more money, but going to a better application (more informations later). This is a transition version good enough to my beliefs to be released to the public, but I now work hard on the next one.
Why did the pricing change? I described its reason in this previous blog already, but it seems most users don’t give a sh*t about the developer, they care about apps being free. They don’t care you spent months to develop it and have to pay for servers, hosting and maintain those. This French forum even complains about the app now not being flagged as ‘lite’ instead of free, they used to complain you could not test the application (I gave a link to appulous to anyone asking). Now you do but that does not apparently matter much. Those user complaining do not, in general, read this blog (even if some of you are against the pricing change and I understand that but I see no other options for now).
What does going free means for a developer? More 1 star review and angry users, most people who downloaded an app for free hit the 1 star instead of the 5 star when removing the application. It did not change the amount of paying users for me, but I have way more load on the server (well not really for now as I optimized a lot, but let’s pretend it will happen with 0.4% only of new users unlocking the app). You might think the reason is the app sucks.
I tried to make the application sustainable. Of course I could have chosen going to another path, not thinking sustainable but thinking about the present. What does that mean? A very low one time fee, and not think about the future. What happens if, in the future, the server fail or cost are too high, just shutdown the app, go away with the money. Few apps on the French top25 appstore are doing this, and they keep being listed in the top25 even after a year with lots of reviews saying not to buy them.
Being honest apparently is not the way to go on the appstore, it does not work this way. What’s your thoughts about this ? Please be nice in the comments, this is an open discussion.
