Trials & tribulations
It made sense that iTunes albums and singles came at standard prices. But apps are all different, and the App Store’s preset price bands haven’t always suited developers, especially when complicated by arbitrary adjustments for exchange rate fluctuations.
For apps offering content rather than functionality, publishers wanted an ongoing subscription model, which was still missing at the launch of the magazine-friendly iPad but eventually arrived in 2011. This was later extended to all kinds of apps, with Apple’s compulsory 30% cut halved after the first year.
Apple has also resisted allowing trial versions and upgrade pricing, but vendors have worked around it. The Omni Group, which sells innovative business apps on both iOS and Mac App Stores, first used in-app purchasing to offer discounted upgrades when a previous version was detected, then switched entirely to using inapp purchases to offer both two-week time-out trials and discounted upgrades.
Apple is finally bringing timeout trials to macOS Mojave and iOS 12 this fall. About time, too.
Reviews let users leave verdicts, aggregated in ratings. But they were often based on personal bugbears or misunderstandings. Apple later allowed developers to reply – potentially satisfying, but even more work.
At first, apps brought about a golden age for indie developers. Steve Demeter wrote Trism, a puzzle game, in his spare time and sold 27,000 $4.99 downloads in the App Store’s first three weeks. After three months, his 70% cut came to an astonishing $250,000. There were many similar stories.
Good while it lasted
As the number of apps exploded, demand lagged behind supply. Premium games couldn’t sustain their sub-$10 prices, and the addition of bestseller charts exacerbated the tendency for cheaper apps to sell more. Soon the most popular price was free. In October 2009, Apple introduced in-app purchases, so users could buy unlocks or in-game assets after downloading an app, a model that became known as ‘freemium’. Though enormously profitable, freemium apps like Zynga’s FarmVille, designed to psych users into buying virtual goods with unlimited amounts of real money, felt at odds with Apple’s ethics. When Zynga founder Mark Pincus, who admitted he’d done “every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues,” was brought on stage by Jobs at WWDC 2010, he was booed. The ease of use of the iPhone, the iPod touch and now the iPad also resulted in stories of young children making in-app purchases
their parents only found out about later. Apple tightened up passcode protections and quietly refunded undisclosed amounts.
Another way to monetize apps was through advertising. Apple permitted networks like AdMob – later, awkwardly, acquired by Google – to sign up developers to display rotating banner ads, paying tiny amounts per view or click. It was ugly, but effective.
In 2013, Vietnamese student Dong Nguyen knocked up a free game called Flappy Bird, and eight months later it was making $50,000 a day. No Mark Pincus, he feared it was proving addictive and took it down.
Too big to fail?
As the number of apps climbed past a million, developers found it increasingly difficult to get noticed. A 2014 survey by Vision Mobile found less than 1% of big developers were making more than the rest combined. In June 2016, influential Silicon Valley blog Recode announced: ‘The app boom is over.’ That year, Apple introduced App Store Search Ads, enabling app makers to pay to target search keywords. In 2017, it redesigned the front end of the App Store ‘to help customers discover new favorites.’
Today, it’s remarkable that over two million apps are listed, but hard to see the simplicity and democracy of the early App Store returning. Meanwhile, although we spend about 90% of our mobile device time in apps, a rising proportion of those hours are devoted to the same few social networks.
Even so, app lovers have reasons to be cheerful. “When we launched Rolando, 10 million iPhones felt like a pretty significant audience, but it’s dwarfed by the billion devices out there today,” points out Simon Oliver. “That scale makes niches more viable.”
The App Store has grown beyond the iPhone and iPod touch to the iPad, the Mac and now Apple TV – a beachhead into living rooms and home automation that Apple has still to build on. Whatever technology the next decade brings, we can thank the App Store for the principle that it should be open enough to do whatever we can imagine, yet safe enough for us to use without thinking twice.