iPhone

iPhone Users Aren't Cheapskates

I keep hearing developers complain that "iPhone users are cheapskates who won't pay for a quality application."


Most iPhone users have spent over $200 and around $100/month for a telephone. Why can't you sell a high tech piece of software to someone with a $1,500/year gadget habit?

My guess: They're too distracted by all the cheap/free gadgets they can get. If what they want is the gadget, and not productivity, that may be very hard to break through.

At the same time, there are app users like me who are more than willing to shell out for a quality piece of software. I use Jaadu VNC almost every day, and was happy to pay $25 for trouble free VNC, even though there were cheap remote control and free VNC clients available. Likewise, I paid plenty for OmniFocus on the iPhone, and for the desktop as well. I get more than $100 worth of productivity from it.

In both cases, I had a recommendation from a trusted source. OmniFocus was built by one of my favorite software houses, and was recommended by many people I'd met while exploring Kinkless GTD. Jaadu was recommended by my geek-buddy, Aaron.

Again, it's marketing outside of the app store. What does it take for your app to get that precious recommendation?

Your iPhone App is a 99¢ Lawnmower

Vlasic, one of the world's top pickle producers, delivered a top selling item to Walmart — a gallon of pickles for about $3. It was huge, Walmart shoppers went pickle crazy, and bought them by, well, the gallon. The only problem was that the gallon jugs of brine were only minimally profitable — picklers make their real money on cut and prepared pickles. But Walmart and Vlasic were caught up in the pickle-fever, and Vlasic ignored the shrinking margins as their business shifted from premium gherkins to dime-a-dozen salted cucumbers. Finally, Walmart's continued pressure to lower the cost of a gallon of pickles, and the total loss of more profitable business, forced Vlasic into bankruptcy.

Simplicity Manufacturing, a premium lawnmower manufacturer, was offered the opportunity to become Walmart's house brand of lawnmowers, guaranteeing millions of sales. But that would have watered down Simplicity, forced them to lower their standards, and to reduce their profit margins. Ultimately, they said "no," and continue selling high priced and high quality lawnmowers today. They haven't filed for Chapter 11.

Your iPhone application is a shiny red lawnmower, and you're selling it for 99¢ a gallon.

It would be flattering to call the App Store Walmart on Black Friday. Sure, it generates a ton of traffic, but that traffic is a bunch of sweaty bargain hunters digging through endless shelves of games and applications, guided by $1 flashlight applications, haphazard search and vague and untrustworthy reviews. It's a great place to sell if you're willing to sell your app at the absolute lowest possible price (quality be damned!), and be in cutthroat competition with the next guy who can give the Walton family some pickles for half a cent less per gallon. Unless you're as good at the low price game as Walmart, you'll be in a race to the bottom.

Remember Simplicity and their shiny red lawnmowers? Not only are they unavailable at Walmart, they're also nowhere to be found on Amazon, or at Sears, or most anywhere else. They're sold exclusively through certified dealers, each of which is equipped to be a full service support shop for the mower. There are two such dealers within 100 miles of my house. But that's all right, because if I'm going to spend over three grand on a lawnmower, I'm happy to make the trip.

You've got this great application that's well worth a premium price. Why are you trying to draw people in who are window shopping at Walmart's app store? It's time to to quit bitching and build your dealer network.

Start with your own storefront — make it a killer website with the sort of depth and trustworthiness that makes people happy to shell out a thousand bucks to upgrade their copy ofAdobe Creative Suite. Heck, make ten killer websites, each targeted at a specific market segment or use for your app. Or give away a thousand copies of your app as coupons in MacHeist-like promotions to get the word out. Put a quarter of your money into advertising and search marketing. Get endorsements from the people in your very particular market niche telling other enthusiasts and professionals how critical your app is to their lives. And keep investing in quality, design, and support, the last thing you can afford is customers who feel cheated. 

Yes, this costs money, and time, and has huge risks. Welcome to the world of business. And seriously, what's the alternative…?

Pickles, that's what.

Sync Hole

Syncing the iPhone is a mess. Apple really dropped the ball by not providing a generalized sync framework to support third party apps.

Every time I want to take my iPhone out on the road with me, I need to go through and sync up every application individually: Here’s the song and dance for a full sync:

  1. Open up 1Password on my Mac and on my iPhone, choose Sync from the iPhone, and wait for it to complete. (Sometimes I need to click through some password errors, too.

  2. Open TextGuru on my iPhone and the TextGuru server application on my Mac and copy over any text files I’d like to share between the devices.

  3. Open up Stanza on both my Mac and my phone and then open each book I want to carry with me and send it to the phone; one-by-one.

  4. Load any files I want to take with me into FileMagnet uploader, open the app on my iPhone, and send them over. (Or, if I’m using Briefcase, turn on remote login on my Mac and browse it — I’ll cover file viewers/transfer apps in a later post.)

  5. Open up SpeakEasy Connect to grab any recordings I want on my Mac from my phone.

  6. Sync OmniFocus to .me (and then when I open it on the iPhone, it syncs up, so that’s something at least!)

  7. Open up ByLine to pick up my Google Reader RSS feeds.

  8. Likewise with Instapaper.

  9. Did I mention I don’t use Safari as my main browser? So that’s a trip to BookDog to sync up my bookmarks from OmniWeb to Safari so that I’ll have ‘em on the phone.

  10. Finally I’m ready to sync with iTunes, but to be sure I get the most out of this sync, I’ll check for new podcasts and application updates.

  11. Dangit! I’m out of space for all my new files on my iPhone. Time to trim playlists, swap out movies, etc. I sure wish I could autofill the thing like I could on a shuffle!

And that’s if I happen to be on an available wifi network. Otherwise I also have to deal with Internet Sharing on my Mac!

Yeah, this is a worst-case scenario, of course. I don’t necessarily need to pick up new files or books, and I don’t always need to grab recordings. But if I intend to spend some time on an airplane or otherwise need to keep everything updated, this whole rigamarole can take as much as half an hour of fidding.

But because this is so time consuming, it’s not uncommon for my iPhone to be out of date, so I don’t have my latest passwords from 1Password, or I don’t have the movie I just rented from iTunes or eBook I’ve downloaded. (since I have to transfer it to the one device it lives on — grr!) Likewise, my Mac’s out of date from files I have on my phone. What a drag!

Some of these applications use Mobile Me or some other online service as an intermediary, so that I can sync asynchronously from my Mac or iPhone to a central server. Or ByLine syncs directly with Google Reader, so it acts like a normal RSS reader that way. But if I intend to be outside of wifi range, I have to remember to sync.

Compare this to my Palm handheld (recently retired in favor of my iPhone). I put it in the cradle and pressed the “sync” button. Any e-books or files waiting for transfer would transfer, passwords would be updated, content on the device would push back to my Mac. One click, and I was done. Palm provided a standard framework that developers could use to sync their applications’ data with my Mac and its programs.

Apple has done the same thing in the past, through iSync and Mobile Me/.Mac. However, they failed to extend this to the iPhone. Instead, every developer needs to build their own synchronization solution, with no standards whatsoever. Additionally, since there’s no background processing, there’s no method to keep the desktop and the phone in sync without forcing a manual process of opening every syncing program and doing your business, one program at a time.

Obviously there’s an underlying sync framework in iTunes, which can handle multiple content types (music, photos, email, contacts and calendars) from multiple data sources (Outlook on the PC; iPhoto, Mail, Address Book and iCal on the Mac; Google and Yahoo hosted services; and, of course, video and music through iTunes). And that’s all in addition to the built-in Mobile Me and IMAP services!

Apple dropped the ball on syncing with the iPhone. They need to build a synchronization API for developers, and they need to build it quickly before more programming time goes down the drain building half-assed custom sync solutions.

Use those fancy iPhone web apps on your desktop

Are you tired of seeing news about special iPhone-only websites, when you don’t have an iPhone to try them out with?

Well now you can enjoy the world of really tiny rectangular web pages along with all those iPhonies out there! Either use Firefox and follow this excellent guide or use your browser of choice to change your browser’s user agent to:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419

10.5 delayed on account of iPhone

[Appleinsider reports that Leopard won’t ship until October.]((http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/04/12/apple_delays_leopard_release_until_october.html) The reason? The iPhone stole the time of too many developers.

Those of us who were concerned that Apple might be devoting more time to iPods that Macs appear to have some further justification for these concerns…

A Disappointing MacWorld Keynote

Ahh, MacWorld Keynote Day! It’s like a second X-Mas, except at this one Santa sends me an invoice for all the toys he left under the tree. Bittersweet, to be sure, but a wonderful and exciting time to see the latest in Mac Goodness.

Except this year, I didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone looks fantastic (I was literally quivering with delight as I read Engadget’s play-by-play coverage), and the Apple TV, while not my cup of tea, also looks like a very slick product.

But come on, the whole keynote was spent talking about a product that we already knew existed (and pretty much what it would do — HD and iTunes support was a given, all that was left was a bit of confusion over the connection with the Mac and its support for other formats, as well as the nitty gritty of how it looks/acts), and a product that won’t ship until June.

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