Pricing apps

App development is becoming increasingly common and everyday hundreds – if not thousands – of new apps are released each day. Mobile platforms, along with the web, are the most popular deployment bases. The main mobile OSes all offer an online app store of some sort that allows developers to either give away their apps for free of force users to pay for them.
A large number of apps are now ad-supported so that developers can still profit from free apps. The only problem with this model is that ads often really damage the user experience, especially in games because they just get in the way of what the user is trying to do.
The biggest alternative to ads without charging for the app is to have in-app purchases so that users have to pay for additional features in the app. This is a lot more efficient than ads because it maintains a contained user experience that is solely focused on the app itself. My belief is that these in-app purchases should add to the user experience rather than not having them making the app worse. An app with in-app purchases should function perfectly reasonably without the user having to pay to make it better – instead they have the choice. At the same time I’ve got absolutely no objections to users being encouraged (but only subtly) to purchase additional features.
At the end of the day if you’ve made a really great app you should charge for it but if you feel you can reach more users by making it free and letting them pay for some extra features in-app purchases are probably an equally good if not better option.
After that I’ve made a mental note not to try posting from the WordPress iOS app.

Converting phone apps to tablet apps

There are probably hundreds of thousands of great smart phone apps out there that are still waiting to be made for tablets. This year (more than 2010 and 2011) will be the year of tablets as millions of people buy iPads, Android tablets and Windows 8 tablets. The first two will happily run iPhone and Android phone apps respectively however there will be a little more conversion between Windows Phone 7 apps and Windows 8 apps but I should imagine that the process will be roughly the same.

The current problem is that phones are generally a lot smaller than tablets and also have different aspect ratios. For instance, the iPhone has a resolution of 960 by 640 and an aspect ratio of 3:2 whereas the iPad has a resolution (currently) of 1024 by 768 and an aspect ratio of 4:3 thus meaning that apps’ layout can’t really be the same on both.

The first method of converting an app is to literally scale up the layout so it looks exactly the same on both screens. It may be that some zooming is required on a phone whereas it isn’t on a tablet as in Safari. This method will work for some apps, but it won’t work with all apps. Here is an alternative method where you get two screens of phone information on one tablet screen:

An alternative option that works similar to the above is to split the single column that you have on the phone layout into two columns on a tablet. The above example wouldn’t really work but if you had a biography app you could do the following:

In this example the content on the phone has to scroll whereas on the tablet some of the information can be put on the left hand side in such a way that it would never need to scroll however the remainder of the information could be placed on the right of the screen and would, if necessary, scroll.

Obviously it may be necessary to reverse engineer this process and convert a tablet app to a phone app. This is probably a little more challenging as you are naturally given more space, as a developer, to work with on a tablet whereas that space becomes limited on a phone. I would recommend taking advantage of scrolling/flipping, tabs, menus and other specific phone features to ensure that the information is still on the screen.

Paper iPhone snowflakes

Its Christmas time and I have a bad habit of making paper snowflakes. This year I’ve been exploring different snowflakes (I came across a load of 3D ones and Star Wars faces) before getting an idea. Why not make a snowflake with something symmetrical. Like the iPhone. Because no one else has been as sad as me I had to create the template myself:

All you have to do is print out the above template and fold a square piece of paper like this:

You then just use the template to create the snowflake. Note that on the bottom there is a charging lead. Here is what the finished snowflakes look like:

How Apple gets away with being overpriced

Nobody can deny that Apple is a little over priced (ignore the iPhone in the above picture – it is on contract). Their cheapest computer is $600 and you cam build a similar spec PC for almost half that price. It is rumored that Apple make about $400 profit on every single iPad that they sell. Despite this Apple somehow get away with selling products for far more than the average market price. It defies the laws of economics.

The first reason is almost certainly exclusivity. Apple market OS X as the world’s best desktop OS and iOS as the best mobile OS (which it is). By only selling the operating systems on their devices and optimizing those devices for their operating systems they are essentially charging extra for the operating system. The design probably also comes in as well – Apple products are a fashion item and therefore people should be charged extra for them.

Arguably the next reason makes sense: Apple products are very good at being the best product in their market. Nobody buys regular MP3 players these days because the iPod is the MP3 player and nobody buys anything else because they have no reason to. The iPad is the best tablet. The iPhone is the best smart phone. The Mac is best at some stuff.

But the third reason is even more important and its that Apple got there first. Apple pretty much invented the style of GUI operating systems. They invented the MP3 player. They invented the smart phone (or at least they invented the touch smart phone). They invented the tablet. Because Apple invented the product, and therefore pretty much invented the market, they were able to invent the price. Apple fans are willing to pay the Apple price because it is the price.

The fan community also helps move things along because as my developer-user circle theory states, where the nerds go first the crowd follows (and sometimes the opposite way round).

Who will be the phone manufacturer of the next decade?

Nokia is one of the most successful cell phone manufacturers of the last decade as it was building affordable phones when people wanted them. However, Nokia did not predict the smart phone revolution and failed to jump ahead of the market fast enough meaning that today it is has been left behind. This is happening to other companies as well – RIM (the makers of BlackBerry) are dying out despite their devices being incredibly popular with teens.

BlackBerry phones were the business phone a few years ago. Today that place has been taken by the iPhone and it is now the teen market that are using BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?) due to BlackBerry Messenger which provides a free method of doing instant messaging. Because the business market (where it made most of its profit) RIM now have a problem.

Other phone makers are dying as well. Many companies that previously made the phones that everyone used are now unpopular with more expensive alternatives preferred. The date that the companies started dying was January 9th, 2007 in late morning California time. Steve Jobs walked on to the stage and announced he had been waiting for that moment for two and half years. And then he unveiled the iPhone.

The iPhone changed the game completely. Sure, it was over priced but people wanted it. People flooded to Apple stores to play on them. It was the device of the decade. Nobody had expected. The iPhone took the phone industry and tipped it upside down.

Today Apple are selling more and more iPhones. Sales figures go up every year. It is clear it is very difficult for them to go wrong because the iPhone remains the most desired phone and so Apple are likely to keep growing. If Apple release a cheaper iPhone next year for the holiday season they will have killed every other company.

Nokia won’t be the biggest phone company in the next decade. Definitely not. The Lumia 800 which was released recently is their last chance at being big in the phone market. Perhaps another company will appear but one thing is certain: Nokia is dead and Apple is king.

 

Some iPhone 4S/iPad 2 videos for you

I was in the Apple Store the other day and I shot these:

Oh, new GarageBand!

Lovely old Apple have gone and updated GarageBand for iOS so now it works on iPhone and iPod Touch (rather than just iPad). This probably means that a lot more people will begin to download it (like what happened when iMovie was made available for iOS) which will be a good thing for Apple.

A lot of blogs would stop here because all that has happened is Apple have updated GarageBand for iOS and it has some new features. But I would like to read something into this: I think this is a move by Apple to help to do one of two things.

The first thing (which is reasonable) is to bring new users to the Mac so they can use the full, proper version of GarageBand and all the other iLife apps. This would make sense because a lot of people I know have an iPod Touch/iPhone and a PC but would like decent music production software. The new GarageBand app may encourage them to look into Macs and realize that they could buy a Mac and do it. It would probably be a hopeful move by Apple that a $5 app would encourage people to buy a $500+ Mac.

The alternative is that Apple are gradually moving over to iOS being their key platform. It arguably already is, however the future does seem to be set out for a merger of iOS and OS X. iWork has already partially moved to iOS and with other key apps like Safari, Mail and iTunes already there it doesn’t seem surprising the iLife is the next stage. Putting GarageBand on the iPhone could, for all we know, be the beginning of the end of the Mac.

Of course I could be reading way too much into this and Apple might actually just be putting GarageBand on iPhone because it makes a damn good iPad app and they figured they could make some more money.

The next four years of Apple

Apparently Steve Jobs set out a four year plan for Apple before he died – a rumor that seems reasonable. The question is, however, what the next four years will bring.

The next product that Apple is rumored to be launching is some sort of update to the MacBook line – either a more affordable version of the MacBook Air (i.e. sort of bringing back the regular MacBook) or producing a thinner, smaller MacBook Pro. These do seem realistic and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did come about in the next few months.

Next year Apple will probably launch the iPad 3, though rumors online seem to be fairly quiet and I would suggest that Apple won’t update it until summer (new iPads normally come in spring). It’ll probably be thinner, have an A6 processor and Siri built-in with iOS 5. I don’t think they’ll be changing much largely because they don’t really need to.

Another one that I would bet on for early next year, probably earlier than the iPad, would be a new Mac Pro or iMac. Neither will be major updates, they will just have faster processors.

Around this time next year I think that we’ll probably begin to see OS X 10.8, OS11 or iOS 6 – they are almost guaranteed to be the same thing and according to MacRumors Apple are already developing it due to an increase in the number of visitors to their site from ‘Intel 10.8′ which is what the next version of Mac OS X would show up as. Of course, people could be using a User Agent switcher to trick them. It seems likely that iOS and OSX will merge in someway because loads of updates were thrown at both, and it seems difficult to go beyond Lion – the biggest cat of them all.

Late 2012 or early 2013 (provided the world hasn’t ended) will probably bring an iPhone update with the next version of iOS regardless of whether it is merged with OS X. The iPhone 5/6 or whatever Apple call it will probably have 4G connection built in and will probably use Apple’s A6 chip (which hasn’t actually been announced, we can just assume they’ll make it) and probably finally have a boost to 1GB of memory.

After that the future is unclear because people aren’t even making predictions for where anything will be, but I would be prepared to bet that there will be another big product range  - like the iPhone or iPad. The technology probably doesn’t currently exist for whatever the mystery 2013/4 Apple product happens to be, but I bet the only person to have come up with it (and written it down) was Steve Jobs.

iPhone 4S Overview

The iPhone 4S announcement has just come to an end, but what have we got that is new? Not much, I’m afraid. The first major thing that Apple are quite keen for everyone to remember is iCloud, which will be launching next week. The service will be available from next week when the iPhone 4S is released, and I will definitely be getting my free @me.com email address. The iPod Nano and Touch also got updates, but it wasn’t anything major. The iPhone itself is basically a little bit thinner, looks exactly the same on the outside (not like any of those weird concept designs that have been flying around the internet all summer) and is much faster.

It was updated to have an A5 processor so that it can get really quick, and the major improvement in this area is for gaming, as graphics were also doubled in performance. The chip has also been built from the ground up with additional features for next tasks such as face recognition in the camera app. It has also had  speech recognition.

Speech recognition was a big thing at the end with Apple announcing Siri, a service that will start in beta that works out exactly what you say and want. There were demos with Siri calling people, texting, getting locations and weather among other things. It is only in Beta at the moment, so it will definitely improve.

The iPad did get a bit of mention as Safari is now coming with proper tab browsing. Apple has also made a new way of stalking people: Find My Friends. The idea is really simple – you find out where your friends are. I really, really hope that nobody hacks this. Ultimately, the phone doesn’t really seem to be very different except from the camera (now 8MP and 1080p). The price, thankfully, has also dropped and you will be able to get the iPhone 4 and 3GS for even lower prices.

By the way, I wouldn’t bother going on the iPhone site as it is half broken.

New post: Where the iPhone is coming first.

Let’s Talk iPhone (updating live)

Overview of iPhone 4s is here.

OK, right now Apple is setting out the future of the iPhone 4S/5. But they haven’t actually given anything about the hardware away yet – most of what has happened so far has just been about iOS 5. Here is what has happened so far:

• New feature called Cards that lets you send cards/postcards to people for $4.99. Because we all used email
• Notifications built into the OS
• iMessage has been announced again (everything after that is pretty much WWDC over again) and it is basically just BBM but for iPhone. Its pushed to all devices over Wifi and 3G
• Twitter is now baked into the OS as well, with a dedicated app
• Newsstand – basically iBooks for appers
• New lock screen shortcut
• Improved Camera app
• Game Center improved with photos
• iPad now has proper tabbed browsing
• PC free setup
• iOS 5 rolls out to 3GS+, iPod Toucn 3G+ and iPad from October 12th (iCloud will come out as well)
• Everything is happening in the iCloud with documents and backup
• iTunes Match is a new service that gives you documents and finding friends
• —iPod stuff!—
• A bit of talk about the iPod (two new iPods)
• iPod Nano update – easier to use and more Nike stuff built in and more clocks and wrist straps because that is basically all they are used for these days. Also had a price drop
• Time for new iPod Touch – basically the same but with iOS 5 and a price drop
• —iPhone stuff—
• It’s an iPhone 4S now
• Slimmer
• Faster with 2x faster graphics and chip (A5) which they are saying will make games better
• I bet there will be a price drop…
• BTW, Apple Store is still down
• Oooh, battery life is improved
• Wireless is now much faster
• New improved camera (now 8MP)
• A5 chip designed to do more with the camera
• Quality looks good and it doesn’t look the camera is that slow either (fastest currently in a phone)
• Full HD (1080p) recording
• AirPlay Mirroring means streaming apps to big screen (like games to Apple TV)
• Recap of specs
• “The most amazing iPhone yet”
• Appears we’ve got some AI built in (app called Siri that does voice recognition – and they are even doing a demo, which works)
• Siri can do weather, time, stocks market, finding restaurants, directions, send/receive messages, calendars, reminders, definitions (used a bit of WolframAlpha for that one), countdown to Christmas (82 days, by the way)
• Though Siri isn’t perfect
• It reports itself as “I am a humble personal assistant” that only runs on iPhone 4S
• Also used for general dictation
• Going to have to learn your voice
• Now showing video about iPhone 4S
• Yeah – big price drop. Starts at $199!!!!!!! (iPhone 4 8GB will be $99! and 3GS 8B for $49) – that is with 2 year contract though
• Pre-orders will start on Friday, actually come out on the 14th around the world (28th in most countries though)!
• And that is the end of the iPhone bit (with no more coming)