0:00:00Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing
0:00:04news of note in iOS development, Apple and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm
0:00:08an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia. This is show number 68 and today
0:00:13is Thursday, July 26th. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes. So let's
0:00:18get going. All right. So first, a little minor note, as you all probably know, yesterday
0:00:22was Mountain Lion Day, which I'm sure we all celebrated in our own ways. For me, the thing
0:00:26that I honestly look most look forward to is reading all the reviews. Not
0:00:30necessarily because they have new information. Sometimes I do, sometimes I
0:00:33learn things, sometimes I don't. But they're just delightfully geeky and I'm
0:00:38a geek, I'm a nerd, I love look for this stuff, this is what I enjoy, and so it's
0:00:42kind of like, it's almost like reading fiction or a pleasure book for me. It's
0:00:46like it's a great thing to enjoy. Of course John Siracusa, you know, world
0:00:50famous reviews and that's certainly, so far it's the one that I've enjoyed the
0:00:55most, though I must say I haven't gotten through all the ones that I have queued up to read,
0:01:00so I'm looking forward to read the rest of them. But anyway, so Mountain Lion launched
0:01:03yesterday and I didn't upgrade. And I feel like it's an interesting thing to talk about
0:01:09why I didn't, and so I will. So basically today, or sort of right now, what I'm working
0:01:16on is I have three major updates that I'm trying to ship out before I go on vacation
0:01:21to the beach, not next week but the week after.
0:01:24And these are some big updates to all my apps, my main bread
0:01:27and butter income generating apps
0:01:29that I'm working on these updates for.
0:01:31And my goal is to get these updates out
0:01:34before I go on vacation.
0:01:35Great, so Apple can do the review while I'm away,
0:01:37and so on.
0:01:38So that's sort of my high level goals right now.
0:01:41And the last thing I want to do as I'm sort of heading down
0:01:46that path is to make a change that has the potential
0:01:50to mess up my toolset.
0:01:52Because while being frustrated, fixing a problem,
0:01:55or having issues in development can be annoying,
0:01:58what's really, really, really annoying
0:02:00is when you're fighting your tools, when
0:02:02you're doing things that aren't productive that you just never
0:02:05know.
0:02:06Well, I don't think the main tools that I use, like Xcode
0:02:08or Photoshop, those types of things,
0:02:11I don't think will have problems on Mountain Lion.
0:02:13But the area that I'm most nervous about
0:02:15is always things that I do on the command line,
0:02:18and things that just get weird and messed up
0:02:20whenever you would upgrade your OS.
0:02:22So there's a project I have for my web service stuff that's
0:02:25all Rails-based, and it has a MySQL.
0:02:28And if it's anything like when I installed Lion,
0:02:30all of a sudden my MySQL server may stop working.
0:02:32Maybe it won't.
0:02:33Maybe all my homebrew installations
0:02:35will get messed up, or my path gets changed,
0:02:38or all these weird things that can drive you crazy
0:02:41and just totally make you lose a day, or two days,
0:02:43of just what's going on.
0:02:46And there's no reason for me to have Mountain Lion.
0:02:48It's cool.
0:02:49It's great.
0:02:49I look forward to getting it and I have it right now.
0:02:53Like it's sitting on one of my old laptops
0:02:55that I can use and play with.
0:02:56I just submitted an update for Five Live
0:03:00which is approved with the full notification center support.
0:03:02So I know Mountain Lion.
0:03:05But this is more just a cautionary tale.
0:03:08And if you've already installed Mountain Lion
0:03:09and you're in a similar situation, I hope for the best.
0:03:12I hope you didn't get sort of caught out
0:03:13by any weird gotchas.
0:03:15But moreover, it's just one of these things
0:03:17of being very, very protective of your tool chain,
0:03:21of how you build your apps.
0:03:24And I talked about this a little bit before an earlier episode.
0:03:27I'll have a link in the show notes.
0:03:29But I was talking about how I do SDK betas and things.
0:03:33And this falls right into that in the same way.
0:03:36Fair enough, Mountain Lion is a GM now.
0:03:39And typically my policies, my main machine is only GMs.
0:03:44But that's the only thing I ever run on them.
0:03:46I have betas and things.
0:03:47I'll typically run those on a secondary laptop.
0:03:49Sometimes with Xcode, the way they do it now,
0:03:51I may, as we get close to iOS 6, I
0:03:54may have two versions of Xcode installed
0:03:56because they're fairly well separated.
0:03:58But even that, I feel really nervous about.
0:04:00And what I'll likely end up doing instead
0:04:02is doing something like cloning my hard drive
0:04:06and running off an external one when I'm working on it.
0:04:08I just always want to have a known working toolset just up
0:04:12and ready to go.
0:04:14And so even now that Mountain Lion's out,
0:04:16it's no longer beta, the Xcode 4.4.
0:04:19I mean, all these things, I just don't want to change anything
0:04:22when I'm in one of these crunch zones.
0:04:24Once I get back from vacation, when I'm on vacation,
0:04:27it's like, whatever.
0:04:28If I'm fiddling around at the terminal for a while,
0:04:31working out why my SQL won't start, it's like, OK,
0:04:33that's fine.
0:04:34I don't really have a deadline.
0:04:35I don't really have a goal.
0:04:36I don't really have anything that I'm pressed on.
0:04:39So anyway, that's the way I do--
0:04:43so it's sort of how I'm handling Mountain Lion,
0:04:45how I'm handling this upgrade process.
0:04:48But Mountain Lion looks awesome, and I can't wait to get it.
0:04:52All right, and so the main topic for today's show
0:04:55is I'm going to talk about studying the App Store.
0:04:58And specifically, this got started from a tweet
0:05:02that I tweeted out.
0:05:02There was a lot of discussion this week, a lot,
0:05:05a lot of discussion about Sparrow and David Barnard's
0:05:09article about if, in some ways, it's like,
0:05:12is it the end of the indie, or the gold rush is over,
0:05:15and those types of questions.
0:05:17And so my response to that was to say,
0:05:20the way that you-- the path to success in the App Store
0:05:22hasn't changed.
0:05:23Like, the way in which you actually
0:05:25make your money in the App Store to be successful
0:05:29hasn't changed.
0:05:30It's hard, detail-oriented work, which
0:05:33is simple and straightforward.
0:05:36I keep at it and work on it.
0:05:39Studying the App Store, which is what
0:05:40I'm going to talk about for the rest of the show,
0:05:43and then two other attributes-- being flexible and being
0:05:46patient.
0:05:46Being flexible is just understanding
0:05:49that when you try things, they may fail,
0:05:51and just being flexible about that.
0:05:53I mean, like, all right, that didn't work.
0:05:54Try something else.
0:05:54Let's try something else.
0:05:55I mean, I have shipped literally dozens of apps.
0:05:59And part of that is that flexibility of, like,
0:06:01I try something, it doesn't work, whatever, I'll move on.
0:06:04And not getting too stuck on things.
0:06:06And then patience is understanding and looking
0:06:08for the fact, knowing that being successful will just take time.
0:06:13And there are no overnight hits.
0:06:14You know, it's very rare.
0:06:15It's typically, it's like, oh, you know, whatever, Rovio,
0:06:18the classic example, like, oh, man, they hit it big with Angry Birds.
0:06:21They're an overnight success.
0:06:22Well, Angry Birds may have been an overnight success,
0:06:24but the studio, you know, whatever, it's their 12th app.
0:06:27But anyway, the thing that I want to focus on now--
0:06:29And I've got a lot of people asking me about this when I say,
0:06:33it's really important that you're a student of the App
0:06:35Store.
0:06:36And what do I mean when I say you have to study the App Store?
0:06:39What is there to study?
0:06:41It's a store with lots-- it's like going into Target
0:06:43and saying, I'm going to study Target.
0:06:46That's a little weird.
0:06:47And Target is a big department store
0:06:49if you're outside the US.
0:06:51Anyway, so what I mean by that is
0:06:53it is very important for you as a developer
0:06:56to really have a good grasp of what's going on in the store.
0:07:00That you are not blindly building things and creating things.
0:07:03Just sort of often a vacuum with the hopes
0:07:05that they'll hit and resonate with your audience.
0:07:08So you need to know what other developers are doing.
0:07:11You need to know what customers are liking, what they're not liking,
0:07:14what are opportunities, what are things that have already
0:07:16been filled and saturated.
0:07:18And the way that I kind of study that-- and I spend a lot of time on this.
0:07:22It's probably not insubstantial, like probably maybe a half a day
0:07:25a week.
0:07:26I spend just sort of studying the App Store
0:07:29to try and make sure that I'm not missing a trend.
0:07:31I'm not losing it.
0:07:35There's a cusp of something that's coming,
0:07:36and I'm going to get sort of fall behind and then end up
0:07:40sort of lost behind that.
0:07:42And so what I do is there's three main ways that I do this,
0:07:46and I'll walk through them sort of each.
0:07:47The first and most important is just
0:07:49to spend a lot of time browsing the App Store,
0:07:52whether it's on your phone, whether it's on your iPad,
0:07:54whether it's in iTunes, especially iTunes.
0:07:57I really like browsing the App Store on iTunes on my Mac
0:08:00just because you can get so much information so much more quickly.
0:08:02You can look at a list of 50 apps, 100 apps very easily,
0:08:05whereas on your phone you're kind of always adding next page, next page,
0:08:09next page.
0:08:11And so what I'm doing there is I'm looking primarily
0:08:14at whatever the top lists are.
0:08:16So top free, top paid, and especially top grossing.
0:08:20And I'm trying to understand what's working right now.
0:08:22What's resonating with customers?
0:08:24What are people interested in?
0:08:25And often what I'll do is-- it's funny.
0:08:28I don't typically read a lot of my own reviews for my own apps
0:08:30because that's just depressing and kind of sad.
0:08:32But I like reading other people's reviews.
0:08:34I like understanding what the customers don't like and do
0:08:37like about the apps that are being successful
0:08:40and to try and pull little nuggets from that that'll
0:08:42help me make my apps better.
0:08:45And so I work on just sort of reading through a lot of that.
0:08:48And you're especially spending a lot of time
0:08:49in top grossing, which is really what I want to--
0:08:52top grossing is great, because that's where I make the most--
0:08:55those are the people who make the most money,
0:08:57and that's a variable I'm trying to optimize
0:09:00to make the most money.
0:09:01So one thing to keep in mind, though, with grossing
0:09:04is that it does not include things like I-Ad or advertising.
0:09:07So you also need to make sure you're taking a look at a lot
0:09:09Ad-free, the top free charts, because often those apps
0:09:12potentially are actually making more money than some
0:09:14of the things engrossing just from their advertising revenue.
0:09:17So just a little side note.
0:09:19Once you kind of have a good sense of that,
0:09:21the second tool that I find very, very valuable
0:09:24is to look at something like App Annie or App Figures, which
0:09:27are tools that let you look at the historic trends of rankings
0:09:31of individual apps.
0:09:33And this is something that is just incredibly valuable.
0:09:37When you see an app that is successful,
0:09:41rather than just having a snapshot and say, OK, well,
0:09:44that's number five in its category right now.
0:09:47Then you can say, well, how did it get here?
0:09:50Is this-- is it some update they've done?
0:09:54Did it just launch and go straight there?
0:09:56And you can go and look at the history of those.
0:09:58And what is often really helpful as you develop
0:10:00more of a portfolio of applications
0:10:02and have some data yourself about what sort of a rank
0:10:05correlates to in revenue, is you can sort of see
0:10:08how their revenue is moved up and down,
0:10:10see kind of how that's gone.
0:10:11And this is often really helpful when I'm deciding
0:10:13I want to make a new app.
0:10:15What I'm looking at evaluating a market is,
0:10:17I will look at what is a typical pattern for an application
0:10:21as it goes through its lifespan from launch to stable state.
0:10:27And so say I'm making a calendar app, say I'm making a weather app,
0:10:30say I'm making whatever.
0:10:32I'd go and look at whatever the most successful five other of those,
0:10:36because almost certainly there are.
0:10:37I mean, there's very few new ideas in the App Store.
0:10:39It's more just new implementations and new takes on things.
0:10:43And you just kind of follow that and see, OK,
0:10:45these apps seem to have a big spike and then fall down.
0:10:49Or they tend to never spike up big,
0:10:51but they're nice and stable.
0:10:52And that's really helpful for you to know in terms of,
0:10:54is this a worthwhile business decision to make?
0:10:57Are you pursuing something that is going to make lots of money
0:11:02down in the long run?
0:11:03Or is it more likely that this is going to be a quick flash?
0:11:06Sort of a quick flash, you make a bunch of money
0:11:08in a couple weeks, and then it really falls off.
0:11:10And if that's the case, you just may tailor your development
0:11:13accordingly. You're not necessarily going to want to invest heavily, for example, in
0:11:17infrastructure costs or things that are going to have long-range expenses, like a big web
0:11:22service or those types of things, if an app is only going to typically make you money
0:11:26right up front and then fall off dramatically. It's going to be hard to support that down
0:11:31the road. Whereas if apps in that category and of that type have a tendency to be fairly
0:11:36stable in the long run, great. Maybe that will support that kind of thing.
0:11:40And the last way that I kind of study the App Store is I make sure that I follow and
0:11:46interact with people on Twitter who are, I guess you could mean like, the like, I don't
0:11:51know, the cheesy PR version would be like the the thought leaders in the App Store,
0:11:56people who are doing a lot of this. And I have a list in the show notes, you know, sort
0:12:00of just off the top of my head, here are some of the people that I follow who I find really
0:12:04helpful from like a studying the App Store perspective. It's people like Ian Marsh, David
0:12:09Barnhard, Eli Haddad, Phil Ryu, Blake Patterson, Marco Arment,
0:12:13Paul Haddad, Steve Stressa, and Federico Viticci
0:12:19are some of the people who I just follow.
0:12:23And what they do is you get these little nuggets.
0:12:26You get all these little bits and pieces
0:12:28that allows you to piece together
0:12:33what's going on on the developer side of the App Store.
0:12:36And this is where you'll get complaining a lot.
0:12:38And they'll be like, oh, man, app review time is terrible
0:12:41right now.
0:12:43That's good to know.
0:12:43Or, wow, have you seen this app?
0:12:45It's terrible, but it's doing really well.
0:12:47I wonder how they did that.
0:12:48And you'll get a good conversation about it.
0:12:50And you'll get ideas.
0:12:50And you'll get opportunities to interact with these people who
0:12:55are successful in the store or spend a lot of time talking
0:13:00about the store.
0:13:01And that really just helps kind of couch and develop your
0:13:04perspective on it, which is, I guess, the topic of this show,
0:13:07developing perspective.
0:13:09The goal, and what I say even when you're studying--
0:13:11so those are the three methods.
0:13:12But the goal of what you're trying to do
0:13:15is that you have an understanding of how money
0:13:18is made in the App Store, which is vital for you
0:13:23to be able to do what you-- to make apps
0:13:25and to be successful at doing this.
0:13:27You're trying to look for trends.
0:13:29You're trying to say, OK, it seems like apps
0:13:31are heading in this direction, whether that's
0:13:33from the UI side, whether that's from the marketing side,
0:13:36whether that's from the revenue side.
0:13:38It's like, wow, of the top 100 apps engrossing,
0:13:42the majority of them use in-app purchase.
0:13:44Maybe that's something I need to work on a way
0:13:46to integrate into my application.
0:13:48Whatever it is, you're trying to find those trends that you
0:13:51can use to maximize your own revenue
0:13:53and optimize your applications.
0:13:55Users are saying in a lot of reviews
0:13:58that, man, I really don't like this, that, or the other.
0:14:01Don't do this, that, or the other.
0:14:03or they're saying, wow, I love the way they did this.
0:14:06Great.
0:14:07Consider using that in your application,
0:14:09or consider learning from that lesson.
0:14:12Because ideally what you're going to do
0:14:14is you're either going to learn from other people's successes
0:14:17and learn from other people's mistakes.
0:14:19And that means you'll hopefully have more successes yourself.
0:14:22And if you are mistakes that you make yourself,
0:14:25that you then have to learn from.
0:14:27So anyway, that's how I study the App Store.
0:14:29It's something that takes a focused effort that you
0:14:32You need to spend the time doing something I spend a lot of time when I have a spare
0:14:36moment.
0:14:37I'll just go into the app store, top charts, and just be thumbing through, looking at things,
0:14:41seeing what's going on.
0:14:42All right, that's it for today's show.
0:14:44As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns, complaints, hit me up on Twitter.
0:14:48I'm @_davidsmith on Twitter, the Twitter feed for this show.
0:14:52If you'd like to get updates whenever new episodes are posted, which is typically Tuesdays
0:14:55and Thursdays now, just as a reminder, is @devperspective.
0:14:58And otherwise, I hope you have a good week.
0:15:00Happy coding, and I will talk to you next Tuesday. Bye!