181–190 of 216 posts
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Apple has always put their priorities in this order aroun iOS: Apple > users > developers. As of now, it's working out quite well.
Uhh, have you been watching their stock at all for the past 6 months?
The stock market is irrational and driven by fear and greed. While revenues and profits are objective performance indicators.
I hate the idea of AppGratis and I'm glad its been removed. Who really benefits? The cheap user who will not normally pay for a high quality app? The app developer who spends $$ to get featured in AppGratis to then artificially climb the app store ranking? Dls are one of the worst vanity metrics out there. Devs should focus on building high quality products, monetize, then acquire quality users in a sustainable manne…
The problem is low quality software and no trials. I can't tell you how many times I've seen an app, paid $2.99 for it and then found out it was garbage.
This whole situation highlights another problem, you should never base a business around a third party API or service. Remember when Twitter changed their guidelines and API usage rules basically destroying companies that had built a product based around Twitter only for it to be deemed in violation of the new rules? This situation should be a warning to others thinking of putting their eggs in one basket, because if…
Never? There are many cases of highly successful businesses being based upon a 3rd party API. E.g.: every successful software company that sold CP/M, DOS, Windows or UNIX software. Perhaps a better statement would be: understand that there are risks inherent to building for any given API, study those risks, and mitigate them. CP/M seems to be dying off? Hope you've started your DOS port already :)
Apple needs to fix this process or they WILL lose developers. I have no problem with simple humans making a decision to list an app in the App Store according to subjective guidelines. It helps get through a lot of submissions fast. But delisting an app should involve a serious review process involving several levels of people on both sides. And the depth of the review process should directly correlate to the number…
To who exactly?
Exactly.
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Exactly why a lot of devs are finding a freemium model with in-app purchases to be a winning strategy.
Devs that actually use a freemium model in this way (for games, at least) are very few and far between. Any time I see a free game with IAP I always say to myself "ah, here's where they charge for gold/xp/coins/whatever". Even more outrageous are the ones that provide a pay app, then transition to freemium+IAP. Nothing says "Hey, thanks for being an early adopter" better than that.
However I changed my point of view as fremium+IAP does solve the problem of being able to try the real app.
From a developer point of view it's only one app to maintain. If further features are added, you have to pay to unlock them. Also developing a new version of an app always been a headache for a developer : without IAP, the only way is to create a new bundle so you're back to square one when you have to maintain several versions of the same app (which Apple forbid anyways in their TOS).
On any case we never really owned any software anyway. E.g. our copy of Microsoft Office always been a licence from Microsoft allowing us to use their software.
So "App as a service" doesn't seems a bad model and in-app-purchase fit that model nicely.
Now the real problem is the security and as my iPad is used by the whole family, I deactivate the IAP on the settings and only reactivate when I need it.
If somebody want a purchase, s/he need to ask me first. It's not ideal but does one thing I love : it kills the "instant gratification" process. And that only save a lot of money to the whole family!
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good luck with the play store then: http://unleashthephones.com/2013/04/09/google-removed-60000-... "Google removed 60,000 Low-Quality Apps from Play Store in February" how does Google define low-quality again?
i wouldn't need to trust google; there would always be a way to get my app to users who want it whether or not google wants it in their official play store. that is the huge difference between apple and google - google says "if we think your app is good quality we'll carry it in our store, otherwise find some other way to promote and sell it"; apple says "if we think your app is good quality we'll allow it on the iph…
Detailed post, but it doesn't seem to address two things. 1. The WSJ report noted that Apple was concerned that " AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure." Simon hasn't addressed this point. Do they make paid recommendations ? If they do make app-recommendations based on payments, it makes a lot of sense for Apple to ban them. As an iOS (an…
+1 AppGratis is in violation of the TOS and are rightfully upset, but I think they were banned for good reasons. I care more about the health of the app store ecosystem than one company. They claim to promote great free apps but in reality is spamming all their users with paid promotions to the highest bidder.
Edit: sorry, mixed the thread
Detailed post, but it doesn't seem to address two things. 1. The WSJ report noted that Apple was concerned that " AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure." Simon hasn't addressed this point. Do they make paid recommendations ? If they do make app-recommendations based on payments, it makes a lot of sense for Apple to ban them. As an iOS (an…
Hi, I'm one of the developer of Meon https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/meon/id400274934?mt=8 . We have been promoted twice by App Gratis, each time we've never paid anything. The App Gratis campaign generated more than 400K downloads and push us in the first place in the French App Store (for a few days). Of course App Gratis use iTunes affiliation to get revenues, but they didn't charge us for anything.
Can you please elaborate on this? Do you mean that Apply is paying some kind of affiliate fee? And what happens if the app is free of charge (FOC)?
Although I do agree that this is nerve wracking, I think the situation will resolve itself. The one question I have is ... why did they use push notifications to send a daily message, when they could have just scheduled them locally? Clearly Apple notices anomalous traffic for non-transactional notifications, such as one that's sent once a day to everyone, and that's probably what alerted some unrelated guys in the a…
Also, I guess Apple only tried to reach the CEO because when you summit an iOS app, you have to give them the information a person to contact in case they need to. I guess they gave them the CEO information.
In addition being a user myself i have observed that many times if not all the time, apps they promote are not disclosed as advertising to their users and in addition many times are not deals at all when the company is promising one paid to free apps every day. For example today apps being promoted is Mobli, which was always free (Right?).
One more thing, they were also claiming "negotiating" those deals with developers. But here also I noticed that many times they were just taking the deals from others like Apple free app of the week. Is that wrong? no.... but they were presenting it in a way that makes a user believe the deal was brought by them and not by Apple or whoever.
I also never liked how the company is forcing me to tweet before getting a deal to download.
Probably the company was too "agressive" and this is what Apple did not like. They are referring to the rules the company violated but in my opinion and again as a simple ex user observer it looks that the company was very agressive in their business practices.