0:00:00Hello, and welcome to Developing Perspective.
0:00:03Developing Perspective is a near-daily podcast discussing what's new and interesting in iOS,
0:00:09Apple, and related technologies.
0:00:11I'm your host, David Smith.
0:00:12I'm an independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia.
0:00:16This is show 0.8, and today is Friday, July 22nd.
0:00:22The format of Developing Perspective is pretty straightforward.
0:00:25I'll cover a handful of links and articles that I found interesting in roughly the last
0:00:2924 hours, and then I'll have a more general discussion towards the end.
0:00:34The show will never be more than 15 minutes and never include third-party advertising.
0:00:38So let's get started.
0:00:40All right, first, a little update on the Vodsis patent dispute.
0:00:46Vodsis has now demonstrated that they are perfectly happy to go after anybody.
0:00:53they filed suit against a whole laundry list of additional people, including such famous
0:01:01as Rovio of Angry Birds fame, Atari, EA, Square Enix, Take-Two Interactive.
0:01:10So basically they're saying, "Anybody's fair game.
0:01:14We'll go after the big guys, we'll go after the little guys, we'll go after everybody."
0:01:18So, not really great news except for it's probably good that people with bigger pockets
0:01:24than independent iOS developers are now in the fray.
0:01:28So that definitely seems like overall a good thing, though there's not really that much
0:01:33good news when someone sues a developer.
0:01:36All right, next, there's an article over on the Daring Firewall talking about the iPad's
0:01:43dominance in the tablet market.
0:01:46And specifically it's kind of just walking through how soundly the iPad is beating every
0:01:52single one of its competitors.
0:01:55From top to bottom, left to right, basically at this point they've sold roughly 28.7 million
0:02:03iPads.
0:02:04A generous estimate, for example, of Android tablets is 1.3 million.
0:02:11So it's about 21 times the sales.
0:02:15So if you're a tablet developer thinking about running an Android app, it may not be worth
0:02:21your time.
0:02:22Next, and slightly related, an interesting thing that Google announced over on the Android
0:02:28developers blog is as part of a way to address some of the device fragmentation issues, they're
0:02:36now allowing developers, or will be soon allowing developers to submit multiple app packages
0:02:43in Android terminology.
0:02:45are called APKs for a particular product, and then you can use that to differentiate
0:02:51between different platforms, different types of platforms, etc.
0:02:56Such sounds like it's good in theory for a way to address it.
0:03:01However, as a developer, that just sounds like a huge pain.
0:03:07Next is over on the TextMate wiki on the Macromate site, they posted an article about some of
0:03:20the compatibility issues and challenges using TextMate on Lion, which is just good to take
0:03:26a look through.
0:03:27And they say at some point they'll fix them, but definitely challenging in the way that
0:03:34I feel about that right now.
0:03:36I've been using BB Edit all of yesterday, but this morning I broke down and installed
0:03:41TextMake again.
0:03:43There's something about it that's just so ingrained into my workflow now that it's hard
0:03:48to change to something else.
0:03:51And so I really hope that eventually they will update that and adjust it.
0:03:56And lastly, there's a great couple of links over from iFixit, where basically they finish
0:04:03their teardown of the two latest pieces of Apple hardware.
0:04:07This includes the MacBook Air 13", as it was just released, as well as the new Mac Mini.
0:04:15If you're a geek at all, you'll probably enjoy watching this.
0:04:20I just love looking through.
0:04:21You see just some of the engineering and the polish that went into both the creation of
0:04:26the device and sort of from its inside out, which is really impressive given that most
0:04:31Most users will never see it, so it's just always sort of shows such an attention to
0:04:36detail in the creation of this hardware.
0:04:39So I definitely recommend looking at that.
0:04:41As always, it's got a lot of depth and is very, very thorough.
0:04:47And especially I was intrigued by some of the things they talked about.
0:04:52On the Mac Mini it looks like that is a follow-up to yesterday when I said that may be the best
0:04:58developer machine out there right now, that story continues because it seems as though
0:05:04it's incredibly easy to upgrade, change, and tweak and work with, which is something that
0:05:09you would definitely want in your machine if you're going to use it for a while.
0:05:14The MacBook Air, there was only a few little interesting things to look at.
0:05:20Mostly the one that caught my eye is that the SSD hard drive is not soldered to the
0:05:26logic board in their teardown, which means that in theory someone could be able to make
0:05:32a third-party replacement for that, which could be nice, which could be a way to save
0:05:37some money.
0:05:38Though something like that in a MacBook Air definitely would make me worried, because
0:05:43it's such a small, light, and highly-tuned piece of hardware that replacing a significant
0:05:50portion of it like that would definitely worry me a little bit.
0:05:54All right, that's the links for today.
0:05:57Today's general discussion, I'm going to talk about advertising for applications.
0:06:04And this is something that I have a fair bit of experience with from a lot of my different
0:06:09apps.
0:06:10I've been doing app development now for well over two years.
0:06:14And I've tried just about every different way you can try and promote your application.
0:06:19I've tried the sort of click for install versions,
0:06:23the iAd for developers, advertising
0:06:28on podcasts and related things, using AdMob and all those.
0:06:33And mostly I want to discuss this in case it's something
0:06:36that you're thinking of doing for one of your applications.
0:06:40And if you are, I'm especially interested in trying to warn
0:06:45you that that's a bad decision.
0:06:48Generally speaking, at this point, you can't, in a cost effective manner, drive downloads
0:06:57of your applications from advertising.
0:07:00You can do it in, you can create drive downloads, but it's very rare that you'll make your money
0:07:06back from them.
0:07:07I think they're probably the only people for whom this works is for services or larger
0:07:15infrastructure where they're trying to make more money than just the initial purchase
0:07:21from the application.
0:07:23So an example of something like that would be a freemium game that has lots of in-app
0:07:28purchases or things.
0:07:30There you may be able to make it back, or another example would be a service where there's
0:07:36a free app but you need to pay a subscription, or there's a larger value to having lots and
0:07:43lots of users than just the initial purchase price.
0:07:48But if you're a developer and you're thinking about it, your experience, for example, if
0:07:52you go over to somewhere like AdMob and run a campaign, will be along these lines.
0:07:57You'll go, you'll say you give them $100, set up some nice ads, hit run.
0:08:04In a few hours, typically, sometimes even in just a few minutes, your $100 disappears,
0:08:10And they say, "Oh, 200 people clicked on your link and looked at it in the App Store.
0:08:15Next day you'll open up your sales and you'll see absolutely zero change."
0:08:19It seems as though the people who are clicking on those are not, by and large, people who
0:08:25are actually going to buy an app or even necessarily get a free app.
0:08:30So definitely that's been my experience when I've tried that.
0:08:34I tried iAd for developers, which is Apple's own platform for promoting applications.
0:08:42I did a whole blog post about that, but it is... even that still didn't convert in a
0:08:49way that was cost effective or productive.
0:08:53I did an advertising campaign over on the 5x5 network.
0:08:57It drove a lot of downloads, but even still, it was unable to really pay for itself.
0:09:06In that case, I didn't really mind as much because I really support what they do, and
0:09:10in many ways it was more of a contribution than necessarily buying ad space.
0:09:16But all the same, it's definitely, as a business, that's not necessarily a sustainable, viable
0:09:22thing, at least for sort of smaller applications.
0:09:25if you're selling a $50 piece of software, maybe you could make your money on that because
0:09:30you wouldn't need to convert nearly as many people. But I think the data for less than
0:09:36like a 5x5 campaign is you'd need 1% of people to buy your app and you don't see anywhere
0:09:42near that if your app was $2. So generally speaking, that's just something you probably
0:09:48want to stay away from. At this point, it's not something I really consider very much
0:09:52other than the occasional trials and experiments here and there, just to make sure nothing's
0:09:58changed if a new venue opens up. But at this point, that's just not really effective. So,
0:10:06just something I thought I'd share from my experience. Hopefully you can save a little
0:10:10money by avoiding that. But otherwise, that's it for today. I hope you have a good weekend
0:10:16and a good Friday, and I will see you on Monday. Bye.