Show 0.8
00:00:00
◼
►
Hello, and welcome to Developing Perspective.
00:00:03
◼
►
Developing Perspective is a near-daily podcast discussing what's new and interesting in iOS,
00:00:09
◼
►
Apple, and related technologies.
00:00:11
◼
►
I'm your host, David Smith.
00:00:12
◼
►
I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.
00:00:16
◼
►
This is show 0.8, and today is Friday, July 22nd.
00:00:22
◼
►
The format of Developing Perspective is pretty straightforward.
00:00:25
◼
►
I'll cover a handful of links and articles that I found interesting in roughly the last
00:00:29
◼
►
24 hours, and then I'll have a more general discussion towards the end.
00:00:34
◼
►
The show will never be more than 15 minutes and never include third-party advertising.
00:00:38
◼
►
So let's get started.
00:00:40
◼
►
All right, first, a little update on the Vodsis patent dispute.
00:00:46
◼
►
Vodsis has now demonstrated that they are perfectly happy to go after anybody.
00:00:53
◼
►
they filed suit against a whole laundry list of additional people, including such famous
00:01:01
◼
►
as Rovio of Angry Birds fame, Atari, EA, Square Enix, Take-Two Interactive.
00:01:10
◼
►
So basically they're saying, "Anybody's fair game.
00:01:14
◼
►
We'll go after the big guys, we'll go after the little guys, we'll go after everybody."
00:01:18
◼
►
So, not really great news except for it's probably good that people with bigger pockets
00:01:24
◼
►
than independent iOS developers are now in the fray.
00:01:28
◼
►
So that definitely seems like overall a good thing, though there's not really that much
00:01:33
◼
►
good news when someone sues a developer.
00:01:36
◼
►
All right, next, there's an article over on the Daring Firewall talking about the iPad's
00:01:43
◼
►
dominance in the tablet market.
00:01:46
◼
►
And specifically it's kind of just walking through how soundly the iPad is beating every
00:01:52
◼
►
single one of its competitors.
00:01:55
◼
►
From top to bottom, left to right, basically at this point they've sold roughly 28.7 million
00:02:04
◼
►
A generous estimate, for example, of Android tablets is 1.3 million.
00:02:11
◼
►
So it's about 21 times the sales.
00:02:15
◼
►
So if you're a tablet developer thinking about running an Android app, it may not be worth
00:02:22
◼
►
Next, and slightly related, an interesting thing that Google announced over on the Android
00:02:28
◼
►
developers blog is as part of a way to address some of the device fragmentation issues, they're
00:02:36
◼
►
now allowing developers, or will be soon allowing developers to submit multiple app packages
00:02:43
◼
►
in Android terminology.
00:02:45
◼
►
are called APKs for a particular product, and then you can use that to differentiate
00:02:51
◼
►
between different platforms, different types of platforms, etc.
00:02:56
◼
►
Such sounds like it's good in theory for a way to address it.
00:03:01
◼
►
However, as a developer, that just sounds like a huge pain.
00:03:07
◼
►
Next is over on the TextMate wiki on the Macromate site, they posted an article about some of
00:03:20
◼
►
the compatibility issues and challenges using TextMate on Lion, which is just good to take
00:03:26
◼
►
a look through.
00:03:27
◼
►
And they say at some point they'll fix them, but definitely challenging in the way that
00:03:34
◼
►
I feel about that right now.
00:03:36
◼
►
I've been using BB Edit all of yesterday, but this morning I broke down and installed
00:03:41
◼
►
TextMake again.
00:03:43
◼
►
There's something about it that's just so ingrained into my workflow now that it's hard
00:03:48
◼
►
to change to something else.
00:03:51
◼
►
And so I really hope that eventually they will update that and adjust it.
00:03:56
◼
►
And lastly, there's a great couple of links over from iFixit, where basically they finish
00:04:03
◼
►
their teardown of the two latest pieces of Apple hardware.
00:04:07
◼
►
This includes the MacBook Air 13", as it was just released, as well as the new Mac Mini.
00:04:15
◼
►
If you're a geek at all, you'll probably enjoy watching this.
00:04:20
◼
►
I just love looking through.
00:04:21
◼
►
You see just some of the engineering and the polish that went into both the creation of
00:04:26
◼
►
the device and sort of from its inside out, which is really impressive given that most
00:04:31
◼
►
Most users will never see it, so it's just always sort of shows such an attention to
00:04:36
◼
►
detail in the creation of this hardware.
00:04:39
◼
►
So I definitely recommend looking at that.
00:04:41
◼
►
As always, it's got a lot of depth and is very, very thorough.
00:04:47
◼
►
And especially I was intrigued by some of the things they talked about.
00:04:52
◼
►
On the Mac Mini it looks like that is a follow-up to yesterday when I said that may be the best
00:04:58
◼
►
developer machine out there right now, that story continues because it seems as though
00:05:04
◼
►
it's incredibly easy to upgrade, change, and tweak and work with, which is something that
00:05:09
◼
►
you would definitely want in your machine if you're going to use it for a while.
00:05:14
◼
►
The MacBook Air, there was only a few little interesting things to look at.
00:05:20
◼
►
Mostly the one that caught my eye is that the SSD hard drive is not soldered to the
00:05:26
◼
►
logic board in their teardown, which means that in theory someone could be able to make
00:05:32
◼
►
a third-party replacement for that, which could be nice, which could be a way to save
00:05:38
◼
►
Though something like that in a MacBook Air definitely would make me worried, because
00:05:43
◼
►
it's such a small, light, and highly-tuned piece of hardware that replacing a significant
00:05:50
◼
►
portion of it like that would definitely worry me a little bit.
00:05:54
◼
►
All right, that's the links for today.
00:05:57
◼
►
Today's general discussion, I'm going to talk about advertising for applications.
00:06:04
◼
►
And this is something that I have a fair bit of experience with from a lot of my different
00:06:10
◼
►
I've been doing app development now for well over two years.
00:06:14
◼
►
And I've tried just about every different way you can try and promote your application.
00:06:19
◼
►
I've tried the sort of click for install versions,
00:06:23
◼
►
the iAd for developers, advertising
00:06:28
◼
►
on podcasts and related things, using AdMob and all those.
00:06:33
◼
►
And mostly I want to discuss this in case it's something
00:06:36
◼
►
that you're thinking of doing for one of your applications.
00:06:40
◼
►
And if you are, I'm especially interested in trying to warn
00:06:45
◼
►
you that that's a bad decision.
00:06:48
◼
►
Generally speaking, at this point, you can't, in a cost effective manner, drive downloads
00:06:57
◼
►
of your applications from advertising.
00:07:00
◼
►
You can do it in, you can create drive downloads, but it's very rare that you'll make your money
00:07:06
◼
►
back from them.
00:07:07
◼
►
I think they're probably the only people for whom this works is for services or larger
00:07:15
◼
►
infrastructure where they're trying to make more money than just the initial purchase
00:07:21
◼
►
from the application.
00:07:23
◼
►
So an example of something like that would be a freemium game that has lots of in-app
00:07:28
◼
►
purchases or things.
00:07:30
◼
►
There you may be able to make it back, or another example would be a service where there's
00:07:36
◼
►
a free app but you need to pay a subscription, or there's a larger value to having lots and
00:07:43
◼
►
lots of users than just the initial purchase price.
00:07:48
◼
►
But if you're a developer and you're thinking about it, your experience, for example, if
00:07:52
◼
►
you go over to somewhere like AdMob and run a campaign, will be along these lines.
00:07:57
◼
►
You'll go, you'll say you give them $100, set up some nice ads, hit run.
00:08:04
◼
►
In a few hours, typically, sometimes even in just a few minutes, your $100 disappears,
00:08:10
◼
►
And they say, "Oh, 200 people clicked on your link and looked at it in the App Store.
00:08:15
◼
►
Next day you'll open up your sales and you'll see absolutely zero change."
00:08:19
◼
►
It seems as though the people who are clicking on those are not, by and large, people who
00:08:25
◼
►
are actually going to buy an app or even necessarily get a free app.
00:08:30
◼
►
So definitely that's been my experience when I've tried that.
00:08:34
◼
►
I tried iAd for developers, which is Apple's own platform for promoting applications.
00:08:42
◼
►
I did a whole blog post about that, but it is... even that still didn't convert in a
00:08:49
◼
►
way that was cost effective or productive.
00:08:53
◼
►
I did an advertising campaign over on the 5x5 network.
00:08:57
◼
►
It drove a lot of downloads, but even still, it was unable to really pay for itself.
00:09:06
◼
►
In that case, I didn't really mind as much because I really support what they do, and
00:09:10
◼
►
in many ways it was more of a contribution than necessarily buying ad space.
00:09:16
◼
►
But all the same, it's definitely, as a business, that's not necessarily a sustainable, viable
00:09:22
◼
►
thing, at least for sort of smaller applications.
00:09:25
◼
►
if you're selling a $50 piece of software, maybe you could make your money on that because
00:09:30
◼
►
you wouldn't need to convert nearly as many people. But I think the data for less than
00:09:36
◼
►
like a 5x5 campaign is you'd need 1% of people to buy your app and you don't see anywhere
00:09:42
◼
►
near that if your app was $2. So generally speaking, that's just something you probably
00:09:48
◼
►
want to stay away from. At this point, it's not something I really consider very much
00:09:52
◼
►
other than the occasional trials and experiments here and there, just to make sure nothing's
00:09:58
◼
►
changed if a new venue opens up. But at this point, that's just not really effective. So,
00:10:06
◼
►
just something I thought I'd share from my experience. Hopefully you can save a little
00:10:10
◼
►
money by avoiding that. But otherwise, that's it for today. I hope you have a good weekend
00:10:16
◼
►
and a good Friday, and I will see you on Monday. Bye.