Tweetie 2 for iPhone has showed up a failing of the Apple app store model (there is no way to do paid upgrades – Mark Damon Hughes summarises the issue nicely here) and also created a bit of a stir.
Now, Tweetie is a good app and I don’t actually mind paying for it. But then, I already have. Paying for it just once would be nice, yet I’ll probably upgrade to v2 anyway. Still, the feeling that Tweetie 1 users are just abandoned leaves a bad taste. And there are certainly a lot of bogus arguments flying around about it. Here’s a few:
In other words, Tweetie 2 is the technical debt edition.
As a developer myself, I hear ‘rewrite’ and internally translate: Tweetie 1 looked real purty on the outside, but on the inside it was an unmaintainable pig. So bad it needed a rewrite to do it right.
Well, why is that our problem? Many developers would be a bit apologetic about rushing it out and cutting corners the first time instead of boasting about it and passing out the upgrade begging bowl so soon.
If $3 is not a lot of money then why does Loren want it? It’s not a lot, so he won’t miss it, right, if we don’t pay it?
So, he could give us the app for $0. By your own argument, it’s not a lot of money for him to forgo, and it’s not like we haven’t paid for it already.
In fact, $3 is a hell of a lot of money when we ALL have to pay it – and some of us know this, because we’re not all stupid. How many users of Tweetie are there? 10,000? 100,000? 1,000,000? More? Is 6 months of anyone’s development time really worth anything from $200k to $2m? Probably not.
This one is manifestly false because millions of lines of excellent software have been written and we all use it for precisely nothing. Some people have referred to Tweetie 2 as a labor of love – well, doing it for nothing, for the love it, that’s what that actually means. A lot of such software is part of iPhone and Mac. Where’s the three bucks for those developers? Why haven’t those developers starved?
For comparison, even in the paid model, outfits like Flying Meat and Balsamiq manage to provide excellent support and products without gouging a full upgrade price every time all you want is a bug fixed. Sometimes doing things ‘the Apple way’ is not a good thing.
For further comparison, millions of people live on $2 a day.
No, but fixing the bugs for nothing would be nice. Especially for people who just bought the thing a week ago.
That line sounds familiar. Isn’t it what you all said about Tweetie 1?
Maybe Tweetie 2 will also turn out to be so bad it needs a rewrite? It’s already clear that we should expect it to be no longer supported within 10 months or so, one way or another. That is the argument isn’t it? $3 every 10 months or so, or no more updates. So we can see what will happen when there are no more features to add, but there are still bugs that need to be fixed.
What would have been better would have been to give a discount to all users on Tweetie 2 for a short time – i.e. a discount aimed at existing users, but since that can’t be enforced, allowing new users to get the cheaper price too. Say $1 less – and after all, $1 is not a lot of money right? So that should have been no problem.
The fact here is that you’re taking Loren to taks because, essentially, you feel entitled to get Tweetie 2 for free because you got Tweetie 1.
Which you clearly are not.
And nitpicking on three friggin’ dollars to say, afterwards, that the price is right down to two leaves me speechless.
millenomi,
I don’t give a stuff about the $3 and I don’t feel entitled to every subsequent version of Tweetie for free. As I said, I’ll probably pay it. So you simply made that up.
I do however feel that there is an unwritten understanding that if you pay for software, then it will be supported for a reasonable period and that, if getting a bug fix means getting the new version, that should be free or discounted. There are plenty of bugs in Tweetie 1 – and I haven’t had this version of the software all that long – has anyone? It’s not even a year old, right?
I think the situation has a lot more to do with Apple not supporting the more normal discounted upgrade kind of model than anything peculiar to Tweetie. But there are definitely better ways to handle the limitations imposed by Apple.
Task. Taken to task. That’s what you get when you post without a spellchecker. :(
So here is the problem with your argument. You are asking if $200,00 to $2,000,000 is worth one person’s time right? These are optimistic numbers first off, I’m skeptical that they had 2 million in revenue. However, even if they did for a business these really are not big numbers. $3 is not a lot of money and neither is $200,000 and I am sure that this app takes more than on person’s time (even if it is one guy working three times as long as he should).
The main problem is that with software development creating something is only 20% of the cost. Maintaining and extending software (bugs, OS upgrades) is 80% of the cost. That $200,000 will not take them very far in terms of being able to maintain a budget to improve their app.
At some point when you are doing this full time to support yourself (like me) you will need to start to make hard choices to keep your *baby in diapers*. So, really if a business has customers that are not willing to pay $3 for their product then they will have to abandon the product and move on.
The problem here is that you’re nitpicking on price where the actual problem, as you yourself indicate, is that the developer’s behaviour has not lived up to an expectation that, frankly, is unwarranted (a staggering amount of consumer software producers stop providing updates for older versions when a new major comes out. All Mac uISVs that come to mind do that and for products more than ten times as costly as Tweetie — see Transmit for example).
It’s less a shortcoming of the model as much as it’s a shortcoming of the expectations produced by the model (automatically notified free updates engender a feeling that all updates will be free forever. No: all updates the developer wants to make free will be.)
But the most appalling thing to me is that you leverage this broken expectation to basically demand upgrade pricing on a three dollars app. With by the way a basically broken argument (when you’re down to selling at $3, $1 is a much higher impact on revenue — one third! — than on platforms where mass market users are willing to spend $30 or $50!). I cannot imagine myself making this request at these prices, ever.
@millenomi
“a staggering amount of consumer software producers stop providing updates for older versions when a new major comes out.”
Right – and the reason is that they provide incentives for people to move to the new versions. Why? It’s cheaper for them to support one version, so they pass some of the saving on in the form of a discount.
It also tends to piss off people who bought version 1 a month before version 2 comes out, so there is often a discount for recent purchasers also.
And yes these are the expectations people bring from the desktop world, which may be wrong. Oviously these are smaller numbers so perhaps we are talking disposable software and a whole new ballgame. But in that case let’s stop talking about ‘major revisions’ as well, you can’t have it every way.
Lastly, you’re still talking about expectations of ‘free forever’ – please stop. Nobody is arguing that.
@mattdrake
“The main problem is that with software development creating something is only 20% of the cost. Maintaining and extending software (bugs, OS upgrades) is 80% of the cost. That $200,000 will not take them very far in terms of being able to maintain a budget to improve their app.”
Sure – that is their problem though.
Like I say, other vendors with great products have similar problems – but they manage to solve them while delighting their existing customers.
“So, really if a business has customers that are not willing to pay $3 for their product then they will have to abandon the product and move on.”
But it’s not really a question of unwillingness to pay. People who think it’s about $3 just aren’t reading. It’s about the whole relationship between devs and customers in the app store.
You made your only valid argument in the very first sentence. The rest of your post appears to just be link baiting. But I’ll bite.
• Actually your first point is valid. You should have stopped here, but you went on.
• Your second point is not valid and you know it. He wants the money because… he wants the money! Well that was easy. On to your next point. (Link baiter? ‘Fraid so.)
• Your third point isn’t valid either (and you know this, too). Again, you are just link baiting. Or you must live off a trust fund and don’t have a real understanding of commerce. Developers giving apps away for free most likely have other jobs that pay the bills. The people living off two dollars a day… yeah, they are most likely starving. (More link bait!)
• Not every bug can be fixed in an update. Sometimes the fix is in a paid upgrade. Life’s like that. Again, you know that. (Link bai… oh you get the idea)
• Meh, that’s just marketing. (Link bai… um nah, this is just whiney)
As far as your last statement about a short time discount, hmm… maybe.
I king you link baiter of the day! Congrats!
It befuddles me that the logic you apply for a $30, $50, $99, $2000 app is applied to a $3 app. No sane business model can provide you a discount on that. That is the whole of the matter.
‘bait_taker’
“You made your only valid argument in the very first sentence. ”
I wish I could return the compliment – however I couldn’t find anything valid or even coherent in your post.
@millenomi
“It befuddles me that the logic you apply for a $30, $50, $99, $2000 app is applied to a $3 app. No sane business model can provide you a discount on that. That is the whole of the matter.”
I don’t see any real difference – the unit prices are smaller but the volumes are higher. And it’s where the whole ‘V2′ idea comes from.
But then if we are really talking disposable software we are talking about something new.
And you’re still fixated on the price, anyhow, when’s it about keeping your existing customers happy. Implicit in the whole V2 thing is that the market consists almost entirely of existing customers. Well, in that case making them feel vaguely shafted and that *they* are disposable is probably not a great idea.
As I said the problem stems almost completely from Apple’s broken store model – which is apparently some kludge based on a system originally intended for music – but it’s the existing users that the problem is getting sloughed off on.
You seem, instead, fixated on the opinion that keeping existing consumers happy is more important than the bottom line, which is flatly wrong from any business perspective. I remind you that update discounts are a tool primarily meant to have existing consumers buy updates rather than stay on an older version of the software and pay nothing more, which has the significant but ultimately secondary, at least in the case of volume apps, effect of making old customers happier.
Evidently the people at Atebits feel that this work is so significant that having existing people repay for it is more important for their coffers than making existing customers happy, even factoring in any bad press (and its possible effect on the bottom line).
Note that your happiness is important to a business so long that it helps a business’s profit and the secondary goals of that business’s stakeholders. If a business has to make people unhappy, sometimes, it will do so if it’s ultimately better for its bottom line or for a stakeholder’s satisfaction.
millenomi,
“You seem, instead, fixated on the opinion that keeping existing consumers happy is more important than the bottom line, keeping existing consumers happy is more important than the bottom line’
I really think any business in the position of needing to choose between keeping its customers happy and staying in business is probably in serious trouble.
Either the business needs to get existing customers to upgrade or it does not.
If it doesn’t, then there is no need to charge them for upgrades. It is purely discretionary.
If it does, then surely it would like to do so without pissing them off? I mean, if your business requires your existing customers to pony up $X every now and then, keeping those customers would seem like a very good idea indeed.
Even at the most basic level, this decision means that existing customers lose all settings etc (and saved searches?). I don’t see how anyone could defend this as sound business or in the interests of any of the parties (Apple, Atebits, Customers).
But as you note there is no way to give them an update price.
So in essence to keep a minority of the customers happy (because let’s be honest: with an app with this much PR traction, most sales will come from new users, rather than upgraders), you propose cutting Atebits’ profits one third. Which is insane, in my opinion.
@millenomi
” most sales will come from new users, rather than upgraders”
If that were really true (and I doubt it) then there would be no issue: Tweetie 2 would simply be pushed as a regular update. Existing users would get it for free (you say they weren’t gonna buy it any way) and new users would pay…atebits would get the same revenue they would have gotten anyway everyone would be happy.
But I don’t think it is really true.
You should go look at Loren’s own talk about Tweetie – it’s on iTunes U. At one point he discusses the whole upgrade problem and clearly had in mind doing upgrades at around $1.
Nobody is suggesting anything here that isn’t common practice and blatantly obvious. It really is a problem that upgrade discounts aren’t available and everybody knows it.
Are you arguing that business should charge less if they have more users? That’s backwards… Business are rightly incentivized to charge whatever maximizes their return- that typically means finding the highest price that the average user is willing to pay (simplified of course)…. Both you and I determined that Tweetie 2 was indeed worth the price, so we paid for it.
If charging for updates and not supporting prior versions is intolerable, then users will let the developer know with their wallets and the developer will have to adjust their strategy or find themselves out of business. Seeing as Tweetie 2 is in the 100 top grossing apps (and that’s *without* counting Tweetie 1 sales, of course), it seems like this question has already been resolved.
I agree that upgrade discounts seem to be the most obvious and clean solution though… they need to implement that soon.