le lab

I've changed my blog. As I am lazy (and I _hate_ encoding issues) I didn't move the posts from the old one, but I'll close it.

The URL of the new one is http://cyrilgodefroy.com/blog/. Please change your rss!

Cyril

January has been for me the month of a very bad idea regarding iPhone Apps : I decided to make a sale. Here's a report of how things have been doing before you decide to do the same stupid thing. Of course your mileage may vary, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.

How things were going before

Well December and beginning of January were reeeaaaallyyyy slow. November was a great month, as you can see from that graph estimating weekly income. I don't know why, but for me it was slow. Maybe the weak economy (but frankly I doubt, seeing the number of iPhones sold here in France), maybe the holiday season, maybe my attempt at making less updates.

I was quite unhappy wih two things : first of all the comments and ratings of my first and most important application, TrackMe. As I said before, the comments on some stores are from the very early days of the app, and although I admit I've been a bit too fast to release, the version that was on the AppStore end of september was good, working flawlessly and really comparable to other competing apps (some of which much more expensive). And the app is better than the free or low price apps it is compared to. Really better, like 2.49 euros better (that's 2.99 USD).

Second thing I was unhappy about : I had taken more time to polish and improve another app, a Location Recorder, that was published on the AppStore on the 23rd of december. And sales on this new app were really slow, even nonexistent. Most of all, there were almost no comments on it. I didn't want the app to become a stone in the bottom of the app ocean.

What I did

It's been a strange decision making process. Absence of knowledge has led it, for the most part. To start, you must know that january is the month of sales in France. So on January, 7 the sale period was opened for all retail outlets. I decided to open the sale too.

My goal was as I said before to give a little bump to unit sales, and be better at estimating the good price : the price at which you make more money, despite selling for a lower price. My second goal was to get a better exposure. New comments. I hate the comments I see in some store, did I say that already? Then I wanted to reach higher and show people how much better I was than competitors : after all we're all chasing after glory and reconnaissance.

Of course, I didn't reach any of my goals. As I read there, there are lessons to be learned, just don't do it the hard way. Hard for your bottom line.

What happened

Well here is the chart you've been waiting for that dissects what happenend in the last 4 weeks :

The day I started the sale is on January, 7 2009. You can see a peak there, and you can see a really better number of unit sales for TrackMe for the end of the month. But hey, look at the money : I have been making much less money.

I've had an update on January 16, that also helped sales (you know you can have a little help and come back to the first page when updating, yes you know, the developer of pcalc told you how). That was, as usual the real helper in unit sales.

Then last week of january I had this crazy idea : let's try free, to see. See what? see if people like the app, if you can at last get some nice comments, etc. So I did, for TrackMe only.

Here's the story of updates and price changes of that app.

Free == Shit

Pardon my french, I am. I don't like 'free' stuff. I like nice stuff that people have spent some time on, I like real support where people spend time, I love indie developers : Coda, MarsEdit, Snapz Pro, Mate, BBEdit, Screenflow, Super Duper, Fission & Audio Hijack etc etc.

I wasn't sure I liked free apps downloaders on the iPhone. On my iPhone, I don't have crackulous, but apps such as fastlane, instaviz, burnball (great game), obama!, things, Dakslide (formerly know as Exposure) Premium. I have the occasional free app, but well, except for really useful NetNewswire happiness, I don't use them. So I buy apps.

Well, when my app became free, the unit sales rose in one day from 30ish to 1200. Still not the figures you'd get from a game app, but reasonable. But who are these guys? Where were they before? Were they people who couldn't afford to pay the app when it was 0.99 USD? Was a student who had trouble buying such an app because of the economic downturn (I read that from a fellow developer)?

So, here is the graph of that stupid week:

]

How to make no profit, kill sales and attract people that would anyway never buy your app....

Lessons learned, well..., the hard way

• Pricing is tough, and having a very low market makes it even tougher
• Free is evil : free 'buyers' don't want your app, they want free and that's a relationship where you're gonoing to loose.
• Going from paying to free and back is like shooting a bullet in your feet while tying a rope to hang yourself.
• Updates are nice, having a real marketing is better. Playing with price is worthless, except for the top 10 apps on the AppStore.

I am now looking for better strategies to reach the goals I had before, and better strategies for my next apps. I'm thinking about a low, short introductory price to try to makes sales take off, and then back to regular price. When I say short, I mean short. 1 or 2 days.

I'm thinking also about a new model for updates : the more you add in an update, the more expensive the app should get. It's a way to reward even more the user, it values more the work you've done, and it should increase the profits (even if sales are a bit lower).

Commetns are certainly welcome. If you want to continue the discussion more privately, use my email a gmail.com , cgodefroy, or come by on twitter

La semaine dernière, j'ai écrit un post assez long sur le système de commentaires de l'AppStore. Ce n'a pas été facile car il faut bien le dire, DotClear et son interface web, c'est un poil merdique pour rédiger les posts. Les publier, c'est OK. Mais les rédiger, maman.

En plus j'affronte un problème assez grave : DotClear 1.2, c'est mort. Ca tressaute encore, mais bon, c'est pas la joie.

Il faudrait donc que je rejoigne la cohorte : WordPress ou MT? J'ai pas trop envie d'y perdre des heures, et je ne sais pas lequel correspondra le mieux à mes besoins:

• Markdown ou Wiki-Like syntax
• Minimum de commentaires (d'ailleurs je pense tout simplement à les abroger)
• Multilingue pour accepter mes dérives françaises aussi bien qu'anglaises.
• rapide, rapide, rapide. Genre Pages statiques -rapide
• je veux garder mon historique depuis 2005
• compatible iPhone (oui, c'est juste une question de css)

Vous pouvez me répondre à cyril chez cyrilgodefroy.com . Merci pour vos avis.

I have two apps on the AppStore : Trackme, sold since August, made 1300 euros and 1300 USD so far; Location recorder, didn't pay so far (published in december). I have sold 300 units of TrackMe in december, and thanks to a sale price in January, I'm moving towards a 400 mark for january.

This doesn't even pay the money spent on developing the apps (training, licence, iPhone), and I don't speak about the time spent on these apps, so please don't comment that I am an iPhone dev making thousands and should be happy with it. Anyway, sales are not the subject of this post, but reviews.

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I used to use the script provided by Erica Sadun in october on Ars' website and said so in another post (please dig if you want). Thanks to Mobile Orchard, I found a new site taking advantage of the same script. Here are the reviews for TrackMe and Location Recorder. I cannot comment on Location Recorder's reviews : there are two. But the comments on TrackMe are making me angry... That's the reason for this post. If it ain't broke, don't fix it : well, mothership, it needs fixing.

First thing that I dislike : the "review while you delete" system. Is it really a good idea to ask to someone to judge from an app they are deleting if they are happy with it? I guess that 9 out of 10 people don't review, and the last one gives a one star review. Great! I must be the only one who gave a 5 star review to an app he deleted (was Benjamin Button's story), but this was a book : read it, toss it.

Second, the reviews don't age well : if you take the reviews for TrackMe on the US AppStore , all of them are from september / october. Well there have been at least 4 updates since : added KML export, added map for reviews, added average speed, a cleaner way to export really big tracks etc. 'Altitude' has been replaced with 'Elevation'. If people continued to post reviews, they'd age. Or not? If I read other reviews from apps with many reviews, I don't know if the reviews are ordered by age, country, stars, or the color of the trousers of the reviewer. No way to know, really. But sometimes, worst reviews are at the top, sometimes best reviews are.

Third point is the quality of the review. I am sorry to say so but reviewers are sometimes bad. '"I am sure it is altitude not elevation". What's the point? "Can this app track while in the background of the iPhone (or must it's screen being showing all the time)?" Is that a review? No it's a support question. A comment. Not a review of an app.

Fourth issue is the old review system, and how it worked. See, at the beginning, anyone could review any app. You didn't have to actually buy nor test the app to give a review. Of the 5 reviews on the US AppStore, 2 admit they didn't buy the app, one is a question, so we don't know if the guy bought the app. Then, some day, Apple changed its mind and closed the review system to only the people who had bought the app. But the reviews before that were not cleaned (as you can see).

Fifth point is the nature of the iTunes/AppStore international fck?/% system. As a french citizen living in France with a a french visa card, I cannot use the US Appstore, the UK appstore, the canadian appstore : my registration is refused. So I cannot answer to reviewers or comment myself. No interaction, and I look like someone not interested by reviewers and reviews.

I asked to have all old reviews or reviews from people who said they had not bought the application deleted. Twice. The answer from Apple non-person was that as the review wasn't offensive, it wouldn't be deleted. Well, it offends my intelligence.

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Some propositions to fix the system

• put the date the comment was posted. Of course it's another info (one too much?), but it helps to know that comments talking about a missing feature are old comments when the developer says the feature is there. Who's right? Having the date helps the reader to have an opinion.

• better fields for reviews. An empty text field is definitely not the way to provide an accurate review. A star is better, but worse. I'd personally add two checkboxes. Does the app behave like advertised (Yes/No)? Is the app working well, or did it crash too often (works well / Crashes a lot)? And no default checked box please. These are two criteria to judge the objective quality of an app and help other reviewers. Furthermore, if an app crashes too often, Apple can ask the developer to correct the issue, and take the app out of the AppStore in the meantime : the quality of the iPhone is also the quality of the apps.

• a communication system back from developers to reviewers, protecting anonimity inside itunesconnect.apple.com. Being unable to address the issues reported by reviewers is an issue in itself. If they don't contact support and use the review system to get support, they're unhappy, and as a developer I am unhappy too.

• scratch all reviews from before the system was working. Seriously! "Can I put shitty comments on PathTracker reviews? Yes, great I'll ask my friends to do too and direct users to my app, and to put raves for my app". This seems to have occured once too much, and no appropriate action was taken against it.

• toss the "review when you delete" system. Final. This was a bad idea.

• a way to ask buyers to review the app after some time, say one week, by code, and a HIG directive on how to add it to the application.

Apple's AppStore is wonderful. I'd like for the store to become even better, and putting all this effort and time to see bad sales because of inappropriate comments and reviews which I'm unable to address is really making me mad. I'd prefer not review system at all, or just a star review system (so I don't know all the bad reasons the review was bad for).

Just a code Snippet and three files to improve the (broken/too small/impossible to catch) UISlider from Apple.

CGRect rect = CGRectMake (16.0, 262.0, 284.0, 35.0); //last size of cgrect is important : thumb is 34 pixels high
accuracySlider.frame = rect;
UIImage* thumbImage = UIImage imageNamed:@"thumb.png";
accuracySlider setThumbImage:thumbImage forState:UIControlStateNormal;
UIImage* leftImage = UIImage imageNamed:@"left.png";
leftImage stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:5 topCapHeight:0;
accuracySlider setMinimumTrackImage:leftImage forState:UIControlStateNormal;
UIImage* rightImage = UIImage imageNamed:@"right.png";
rightImage stretchableImageWithLeftCapWidth:5.0 topCapHeight:9.0;
accuracySlider setMaximumTrackImage:rightImage forState:UIControlStateNormal;

And the images:

Bigger ah?

A great app for all iPhone developers / editors. Don't use it too often though, it gets updated only once a day.

http://code.google.com/p/appsales-mobile/

Merci Bertrand pour cette chaîne... Cela fait très plaisir en effet de se remémorer les moments qui ont fait le plus plaisir en entraînement ou en course. Je n'ai pas encore fait de course, mon état physique ne me le permet pas encore, mais j'en caresse l'espoir pour l'année prochaine : semi marathon de Paris, Paris Versailles sont mes deux objectifs.

Mais assez pensé à demain, souvenons nous d'hier et du chemin accompli.

Date indéterminée en mai/juin : cela faisait un certain temps que j'avais complètement arrêté de courir. Une hernie discale très douloureuse et longue à calmer en 2007 a mis un frein à toutes mes velléités sportives, mais l'excès pondéral commençait à être vraiment trop important (j'étais trop gros), alors j'ai tenté de m'y remettre. La première course a été pénible : 4 arrêts marche, essoufflé rapidement etc. Deux semaines plus tard, la vraie première course plaisir de l'année est arrivée. Dans la vallée de Chevreuse, à côté de mon ancienne maison, j'ai parcouru le trajet de Villebon à Gif et le tour des étangs dans les frondaisons, à l'ombre. Il faisait bon, et j'ai vraiment pris beaucoup de plaisir à courir. Et là j'en ai vraiment eu envie. Quelques jours plus tard (le 12 juillet) Danielito m'entraine dans la course des entrepreneurs 1.0.

3 août 2008 : je suis en pleine course des entreprenautes, mais aussi en vacances, donc j'ai bien le temps de courir. Les onditions sont parfois un peu dures : le mois d'août en Drôme, c'est un peu chaud... Mais ce jour là il fait juste frais : 25-26, un petit voile nuageux bien agréable et je ne m'arrête pas. Je suis parti dans une nouvelle direction (j'ai choisi un chemin différent presque tous les jours), et là je suis vraiment vraiment loin de Grignan. Mais tout va bien, je me sens inépuisable. Résultat final : 12 km en 1h20, et un grand souvenir de plaisir.

11 octobre 2008 : Mon profil a bien changé en quelques mois : plus d'essouflements, des courses plus longues, plus toniques, et j'ai presque des ailes... Aujourd'hui ma femme m'accompagne, mais à vélo. Elle fait un peu le lièvre. J'en suis à 45 minutes de course, et mon rythme moyen est toujours de 6min/km, un peu moins. Et si je tentais une performance personnelle? Allez, on y va, on continue... Tiens une route à traverser, ils ne vont pas me ralentir, et je les force à s'arrêter. Allez encore quelques centaines de mètres. Oui! J'ai réussi à faire 10 km en une heure.

Il y a encore du chemin à faire : j'avais fait les 20km de Tours en 1h40 à l'armée. Mais je faisais facilement 10 kilos de moins à l'époque, moins de problèmes de dos (refait une lombalgie depuis novembre), et un corps plus résistant. Mais les objectifs sont posés le plaisir est là et bien là. Faut juste que je sois un peu moins pressé. Alors je suis revenu à une course par semaine, et moins d'une heure. La jambe tire et grogne, mais le plaisir revient. J'ai arrêté la clope il y a 4 ans ou 5 je sais plus, je vais la remplacer par des drogues plus naturelles, type endorphine.

A vous Cognac-Jay!