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The 2014 Panic Report

panic.com

21–30 of 47 posts

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#21
Obviously "Panic" is a well-known company for developing IOs applications and for at least 145 people on HN this is common knowledge.

Is there anything special about this company?

EDIT: Although the people downvoting (currently -1) this won't read this edit anymore, the question was (and is) meant serious.

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#22
post #6

I wince a little when I read the section titled "Low iOS revenue." The iOS App Store's race to the bottom on pricing (and the parallel problem in Androidville) are very hard on developers. Panic reports that their unit sales are nearly even on iOS and OS X - but that the revenue is on the far side of an 80-20 split, that they make more than four times the revenue from a desktop sale than from an iOS sale! Even if you…

Maybe it's a stupid question but what stops devs to charge say 20$ for an app ?

Has it ever been tried, if yes, what were the results ?

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#23

Obviously "Panic" is a well-known company for developing IOs applications and for at least 145 people on HN this is common knowledge. Is there anything special about this company? EDIT: Although the people downvoting (currently -1) this won't read this edit anymore, the question was (and is) meant serious.

Agreed. I felt a bit like I'd accidentally clicked on an ad. Came here to see if I'd missed something.

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#24
post #6

I wince a little when I read the section titled "Low iOS revenue." The iOS App Store's race to the bottom on pricing (and the parallel problem in Androidville) are very hard on developers. Panic reports that their unit sales are nearly even on iOS and OS X - but that the revenue is on the far side of an 80-20 split, that they make more than four times the revenue from a desktop sale than from an iOS sale! Even if you…

Actually Apple and Google are doing something to dev houses, they're commoditizing their products. When an app costs 0.99 it's easily replaced with another one and nearly worthless.

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#25
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they price Coda Lite 1/5th the price of OSX version. So they get roughly 1/5h of the revenue. Math works out. They could try and price Coda iOS at $99, but Cabel is right — it's just not that important platform for dev tools, and I don't see people paying that much. Now if those two were incredibly (and equally) valuable products on both platforms AND priced the same AND there was much less revenue from iOS, th…

What this analysis is missing, is that there are multiple times more iOS users (and therefore potential customers) than there are Mac Users. They set a lower price on iOS with a hope for making it up in unit volume. However, they're realizing now that unit volume being similar to Mac, prices must go up. I agree it's not as valuable a platform as the Mac, but it's also probably not 1/5 as valuable.

Is this the entire story? It's true that there are many times more iOS users than OSX users, but what percentage of each are their target market (who I would call 'power users')? Panic make great apps (I use them on both iOS and OSX), but I expect not everyone using iOS is a potential customer for a (great) ssh client, while a much higher percentage of OSX users use it because they want a Unix that has $Mac_Feature.

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#26

Obviously "Panic" is a well-known company for developing IOs applications and for at least 145 people on HN this is common knowledge. Is there anything special about this company? EDIT: Although the people downvoting (currently -1) this won't read this edit anymore, the question was (and is) meant serious.

Panic is actually more well known as a company that makes Mac apps. Many would call them the preeminent developers for the Mac platform (along with Omni). So think of it like this...

A hugely popular (for its market), established, independent, and profitable software company gives clear and transparent insight into how the past year has gone for them and their products.

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#27
post #6

I wince a little when I read the section titled "Low iOS revenue." The iOS App Store's race to the bottom on pricing (and the parallel problem in Androidville) are very hard on developers. Panic reports that their unit sales are nearly even on iOS and OS X - but that the revenue is on the far side of an 80-20 split, that they make more than four times the revenue from a desktop sale than from an iOS sale! Even if you…

Maybe. But I also feel that Panic's apps are not particularly well suited for the iOS App Store. They're a bit too "power user" for a platform that's almost never used at home, with the comfort of a keyboard.

In contrast, some of the most popular games this year (Monument Valley, Wayward Souls) have come out with premium pricing, which is a refreshing change.

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#28

Obviously "Panic" is a well-known company for developing IOs applications and for at least 145 people on HN this is common knowledge. Is there anything special about this company? EDIT: Although the people downvoting (currently -1) this won't read this edit anymore, the question was (and is) meant serious.

They're considered a design darling in terms of their OSX and now iOS apps. Really high quality software.

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#29

Obviously "Panic" is a well-known company for developing IOs applications and for at least 145 people on HN this is common knowledge. Is there anything special about this company? EDIT: Although the people downvoting (currently -1) this won't read this edit anymore, the question was (and is) meant serious.

Panic are one of the longest standing developers of Mac Apps. They used to make one of the earliest Mac MP3 playing apps (called Audion) which very nearly got purchased by Apple as the foundation for iTunes.

https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

Re: The 2014 Panic Report

#30

Obviously "Panic" is a well-known company for developing IOs applications and for at least 145 people on HN this is common knowledge. Is there anything special about this company? EDIT: Although the people downvoting (currently -1) this won't read this edit anymore, the question was (and is) meant serious.

Panic is one of the best-known Mac-only software developing companies that are out there, well connected in the blogosphere, been around for quite some time and their products generally loved by their users.

It is a matter of opinion if that makes them special or not.

I guess their Panic report hasn't been upvoted just for being from Panic but also because we have here another critical voice of Apple and the Appstore processes from a company that for sure doesn't just like doing Apple-bashing.

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