Davide Di Cillo » Apple

The great Fast Company crap

Davide — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:25:17 +0000

This post wants to be a response to the article posted on Fast Company “The Great App Bubble,” in which the author base all his statements on stats taken out of context.

One billion dollars in revenue for the approximately 225,000 apps is $4,444 per app–significantly less than an app costs to develop.

Sure, this would be true if those revenues were equally distributed to all developers. This statement doesn’t keep in mind that there are thousands of crappy apps out there that don’t make a dime and applications that are developed once and republished several times (think all those travel apps where they publish a different one for each city). In the latter case even if the statement were true, I wouldn’t mind making $4,444 one hundred times over.

A typical iPhone app costs $35,000 to develop.

I really really wish this statement was true, especially because that’s what we do primarily at 39 inc.; I also wish that was the typical price we charged for the applications we build. Some applications could really be expensive of course, especially if you factor some server side programming as well, but of those 250,000 applications, I can guarantee you that 220,000 of those apps didn’t cost more than $7,000 each.

iPhone users don’t find their apps very valuable. In 2009, analytics start-up Pinch Media reported that people barely use the majority of apps they download. Only 20 percent of consumers utilize a free app the day after they download it. By 30 days out, less than 5 percent of consumers are still using it. Paid apps (page 13 of the company’s fascinating 33-page slideshow) have a slightly better performance record, but they still get hit with a steep drop in usage within a period of 11 days. The value of most apps may be in satisfying the curiosity of what the app can do, not in its usefulness or relevance in a user’s daily life.

Sure, free applications are often downloaded just out of curiosity, games are usually discarded once finished and nobody is arguing that there are a great number of disposable apps. So what? I don’t see any problems with that. As a developer you can you can make tons of money building disposable apps as well as building a long lasting success like Tweetie or Instapaper.

Marketers are spending money on iDevice apps at the expense of improving their mobile Web sites that everyone with a smart phone can access. According to Ahonen and Moore, iDevice app development actually costs 10 times more and reach is 50 times worse. Sex appeal will only trump pragmatic reach for so long.

I agree, a lot of websites should definitely try to improve their mobile website or at least make sure that the mobile experience isn’t inferior to the desktop one. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t also offer a native application for iOS, with performances and experience far superior to their web counterparts.

Venture capital is flooding into the app economy in spite of the questionable ROI proposition.

Go tell that to the people who invested in Tapulous or other successful mobile development companies. That’s how venture capital works anyway, they do ten investments and maybe a couple of those will be successful enough to pay for the other investments and still make a profit.

Steve Jobs has said 15,000 apps are submitted to the App Store each week. With this many apps to sort through, finding new, useful ones to download can be a painstaking task. Then on my phone, if I want to find an app I don’t regularly use or a new one, I need to use the search function to find it. Can you think of a faster way to get information? The browser. Once mobile Internet gets faster, apps as the key to on-the-go information and tools will be on the outs..

I suppose that for the author it’s easier to find a web application between millions of pages than a useful apps between 250,000 ones. He seemingly forgot about word of mouth, blogs, social networks and all the others ways that will always let the cream raise at top.

In conclusion, I can say that building a business solely based on mobile development isn’t as easy a task as some successful stories may infer, but definitely mobile apps are not a bubble. They could be part of a cycle for sure, where at one point they will leave their place to other things, just like other things do, but there is a big difference from being a bubble.

Tip of the day: How to multitask while listening to a video on your iPhone or iPod

Davide — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:54:08 +0000

I know, probably you are wondering why anybody would listen to videos instead of just watching them. Videos are made to be watched, possibly without interruptions. Well, if you are like me, I love to watch and listen to my podcasts at the gym, so while the video is perfect for cardio, just listening to them is enough while walking around the gym. And that’s where my problems starts. While watching videos on the iPhone, you can’t either lock your screen or multitask; but there is actually a tricky way to do it. Simply start your video than stop it using your headphones remote (click once). Then leave the iPod application and click again once on the remote and your video podcast will start behaving just like a regular audio one, giving you the ability to multitask and lock your screen.

Apple announce App Store Volume Purchase Program

Davide — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:42:51 +0000

Apple just sent to all their developers an email announcing a new App Store Volume Purchase Program that will allow educational institutions to buy applications in bulk for their students at a discounted price.

We’re pleased to announce the App Store Volume Purchase Program. Education institutions in the United States now have a new way to purchase your apps in volume for distribution to their students and faculty. You can also elect to offer special education pricing on your app when purchased in volume.

Developers will be able to choose to offer special pricing that is 50% of their list price to education institutions when they purchase 20 or more copies of their app.

Things I use: my menu bar collection

Davide — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:57:08 +0000

As you can see from the image above, I have a quite few application icons in the menu bar of my Mac, so I decided to write a post about them. I think those are really great application and I’m sure some of you could find them helpful too. From the left:

Notify: It’s a really minimal email client, that completely run from your menu bar, you can read and send email, perfect for quick emailing, and it also links you to your mail application. Perfect if you use Gmail or other web email services.

Dropbox: This is my main file sharing platform. I use this daily to share files with the rest of 39′s team so we always have the latest version of what we are working on. And you don’t have to do anything, just add it to your Dropbox folder and it just works.

Little Snitch: It’s a great application to make sure that anything can go in or out from your Mac without your permission, and also monitor your network usage.

CloudApp: This is another file sharing tool, just simply drag a file to the icon and it will be uploaded to a server and the link to it will be placed in your pasteboard. I mostly use the screenshot feature, so that every time I make a new screenshot, it automatically uploads it to the cloud and creates a link to it.

Snippets: I use this application to manage all my snippets of code or portion of test I need to use often. It has a great shortcuts support and it makes writing boring stuff (code included) much faster.

Alfred: This is a quicklaunch application (similar to Quicksilver), really fast, beautifully designed. I’m so used to it that I use it even to switch to already opened applications.

Air Display: This is the latest addition to my menu bar. This application lets me use my iPad as an external monitor over wifi. Really handy if you ask me.

I hope some of these apps could help you as well. Now the question is: what’s in your menu bar?

The new Twitter iPhone app is out

Davide — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:12:01 +0000

Just updated Tweetie 2 to the new version simply called Twitter. In order to update it I needed to use “update all” from iTunes and sync my iPhone. At first glance you can see they changed the icon (I liked the old one much better) and when you first open the application, it shows you trending topic and suggested users even without logging in.
The same interface is used for the search page as well. I also noticed you can updated your account informations (bio and such) but I’m not 100% sure that this wasn’t possible before.

Bill Gates talking about Apple’s mobile ecosystem… 4 years ago

Davide — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:03:07 +0000

Sounds familiar? Just as a note, the iPhone at the time had been presented but not yet released to the public.

Is the Gizmodo iPhone HD scoop a fake?

Davide — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:06:54 +0000

Talking with a friend about the new iPhone HD revelations by Gizmodo, we noticed how the logo on the letter Apple sent them to repossess the iPhone prototype wasn’t their latest version. Not only the logo, but on the bottom right the font used is the condensed Garamond that Apple used to use years ago. This is exactly Apple’s stationery circa 2005. Here’s a comparison between Gizmodo’s letter and others Apple sent to other individuals. Let’s see if you can spot the differences.

Gizmodo’s letter:

Comparison n.1:

Comparison n.2:

What can we deduct from these images? We have 3 possible scenarios:
1) Gizmodo got seriously punk’d
2) Gizmodo really received the mail but they were too lazy to scan it so they just recreate one themselves
3) Somebody at Apple should update Mr. Sewell’s stationery

What do you think about this story?

The new Twitter iPhone app is out

The real reason why Apple is banning some applications

Davide — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:16:00 +0000

I’m not sure why I haven’t thought about this before, but now the reason why Apple has been banning “arousing” apps looks so clear to me: iAd.

A while ago I was talking with Peter Martinez, co-founder of Pikchur, and he was explaining to me why they have to make sure to filter out all pictures with adult or questionable content. Even if these images were driving huge amount of traffic to the website, it was driving away higher CPM networks and advertisers that have policies against advertising on sites with questionable content.

This is exactly the reason why Apple went back on his steps and banned from the iTunes App Store all the bikini/boobs/too-much-skin applications. And this is confirmed by another fact: Apple started banning those applications one and a half months after they acquired Quattro Wireless. Doing so at that time they made sure that the mainstream audience (not nerds, the only ones who care about changes in the 3.3.1 of the TOS) would focus of what the last event introduced and not what Apple banned.

A lot of people often complain about Apple’s decisions, when they ban applications or other things. My guess is that those people probably forgot that they are a business, and 99.9% of their decisions are business driven.

Goodbye Laptops

Davide — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 05:34:53 +0000

Ok, maybe it’s not going to happen tomorrow, but it won’t be long before it will happen.

originally from: http://superamit.tumblr.com

Goodbye bikinis, hello gambling!

Memory Zoo: our first iPad application

Davide — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:34:40 +0000

I’m proud to present our first application for iPad: Memory Zoo, a simple memory card game for kids. We already have many ideas on how to expand the application but we decided we really wanted to be in the store on the launch day. The application has already been approved by Apple, now it’s just a matter of waiting for those iPads to be shipped and for people to start downloading the app.

Memory Zoo features one and two players mode, two difficulty levels, best times chart and awesome animal illustrations for kids.

Check out few screenshots from the app: