00:00:00 ◼ ► Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Marco Arment.
00:00:05 ◼ ► And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is usually not longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.
00:00:10 ◼ ► So the thing I wanted to talk through today, and so often I feel like the topics that we discuss on this show kind of start in my head as I have like the title of the show in mind and then I'm almost like backfilling the topic.
00:00:23 ◼ ► And the title I had in my mind was sort of holding the line. And specifically, something that I've just been thinking a lot about recently is the way in which so much of our work involves kind of these different axes with which we're kind of, as we're building something, there's all these axes that we are comparing ourselves against.
00:00:43 ◼ ► And so, for example, it's like, are you doing kind of short term focused or long term focused would be one kind of broad topic. Are you building something that's trying to, you know, have this long term life that exists for years and years in the App Store? Are you much more short term focused?
00:00:59 ◼ ► Are you trying to, maybe you have another axes that you could be comparing between, like, just sort of, I guess, art or artisan this or commerce. In some ways, that is a axes that you could be comparing yourself between, you know, if you're building something that, you know, if you sort of in the analogy of say you were a woodworker, and you're in your back garden, and you're, you know, you go out to a woodshed, and you're making stuff, and you're doing it for yourself, and it's fun, it's great, and you would you would be building your app, or in this case, you're building your table differently.
00:01:28 ◼ ► If you were trying to make 1000 of them and making a business of it, like there's these, these spectrums that we all exist on. And I feel like as we're going through the app process, like the creation process, we are inevitably finding ourselves, we're, we're feel comfortable on any of those, any of those spectrum, any of those axes.
00:01:46 ◼ ► Because that's the nature of what we have to do, we have to constantly be making choices about what our app is going to do, how it's going to do it, what costs are we going to incur as a result, what you know, incomes are we going to generate. And I was reminded of this really specifically recently, when you know, had the big iOS 18 launch last week. And as a result, whenever the you know, we have these launches, I tend to go around and do a survey of, you know, essentially my competitors apps to see if they've come up with something interesting in the summer that I should be doing.
00:02:15 ◼ ► Interesting in the summer that I should be aware of that I need to be, you know, not necessarily I'm going to copy, but you know, that I want to be aware of if something's happening there. And if there's, you know, an opportunity for me to put my take of that feature into my apps. And when I'm always struck by when I go to specifically with widgetsmith, where I opened the other widget apps, you know, so there's a bunch of these that exist in the App Store of a variety of different types and different kind of things. But my goodness, do these apps have really rough first run experiences?
00:02:44 ◼ ► Like, something that I really pride myself on is having a pretty solid first run experience that the first time you come into into the app from, you know, from the App Store, I want it to be great. And I guess they are on the spectrum of the opposite end of that for this where you launch a lot of these apps. And you will just immediately get the I don't even know, like the barrage of permission dialogues popping up like one on top of each other. It's not even the sequence of them. It's just like doo doo doo doo doo doo. And the first one's like, you know, hey, we'd like to track you. Hey, we want to send your notification.
00:03:13 ◼ ► Hey, we want to look at devices on your network. Hey, we want to look at your location. Like whatever it is, it's any sort of like they're asking for all the permissions all at once. And I see this, I'm just like, Oh, my goodness, like, this is so different than the way that I think about building an app and the way that I build, you know, the way that I approach things and the experience I want to have, like, if anything, I have the opposite experience where, you know, I try very hard to only show permission dialogues as a result of user action. And there's things that I'm, you know, consequences to that, like, there's things that I want to do.
00:03:42 ◼ ► There's consequences to that, like, you know, I don't, I don't ever show the ad tracking one, but I do, you know, the cookie permission dialogue that you have to show in certain markets. Like, I only show that if a user clicks on it. Otherwise, I don't show them ads, like, and that's a cost that I'm incurring. But it's just one of these things that I look at this. And I'm like, wow, we are looking at the world in such a different way. And I think it's easy, maybe in you and I think very much we have we have we have strong opinions about these things. We are coming at things with very, very particular views.
00:04:11 ◼ ► But I'm also struck by how the even you between you and me, my views on what is acceptable, what is the line that I want to hold has changed over time. There are things in both of our apps case it was where, you know, we like when we just met first launched, I had no ads in it. It was an entirely I guess what you would call like a premium experience that every user had an experience that was the same. And then there was like you had like premium plus that you could go beyond if you are a subscriber.
00:04:40 ◼ ► Whereas now I have ads, and I'm glad that I do that. I think it's made the business much more sustainable. It's had lots of knock on benefits and things that I can, you know, do for the app that I wouldn't necessarily be able to otherwise if I didn't monetize, you know, all of the users. But that was a place where the line shifted. And it's just an interesting thing that I want to talk about, because I find it's really challenging. And it's it's very interesting to think about how we change these our views over time. And in some ways, it'd be nice if they were stable, but they're not.
00:05:09 ◼ ► And I think so much of that is because our our goals and our desires and our incentives change. You know, in my example of the woodworker, if you're only ever going to make one table, well, you'll make a different set of choices, then if you really want to get into the business of making tables, you're going to need to change that. So if you start making apps that are just hobby things on the side, well, you can make a lot of choices that maybe necessarily aren't building towards the goal of sustainability. But if you hit a point where you're like, wow, actually, I really want to make this, you know, this indie thing, you know, make a run of it, make a run of it.
00:05:39 ◼ ► My full time career, maybe you need to reevaluate that. And I think being flexible there is important. But I think also being opinionated is also important. I think that's something that you don't want to lose your taste and your perspective on what makes something good at the expense of making it sort of ostensibly better for some other aspect of your of your app.
00:06:02 ◼ ► I try not to pass too much judgment on how other apps make money or how they succeed or how they choose to do things, because there have been all these lines in the past that we've thought like, oh, I'll never do X in my app. I'll never have ads in my app. You know, I'll never ask people for ratings, like all these things that I have now done all those things.
00:06:23 ◼ ► Like I just did an Overcast update two days ago that finally enables the rate this app dialogue. And there's reasons, because my ratings have not been very good, and there's not been that many of them. Like in a typical day, I might see a pretty low average of new ratings, but there's only like 11 of them.
00:06:42 ◼ ► And so it's like, well, if only 11 people are rating my app every day, like I think, and I'm not prompting them, and all of my competitors have way more ratings than I do, which helps them out in rankings and everything else, I'm like, I feel like at some point, like I'm a fool for not doing this.
00:06:57 ◼ ► You know, same thing with ads. Like, you know, I was looking back the other day at Overcast's revenue throughout its entire history per year, just like what I had in my tax returns at the end of the year, just like net profit, net revenue. It was shocking to see like the difference between before I had the ad system and after.
00:07:16 ◼ ► It made so much more money after the ads. And before the ads, it was like, okay, this is kind of a nice side project. Once I had the ad system in place, that took me something like four years to really work out the details of, you know, how I wanted to monetize Overcast.
00:07:32 ◼ ► Once I had the ad system in place, it went from a nice side project to my job. And not only was that great for me and my family, but that's also great because it justified me working on it more.
00:07:44 ◼ ► You know, Americans have, I think, a lot of, American culture especially has a lot of issues around success and guilt and money and guilt. And those things are oftentimes tied together depending on your cultural upbringing.
00:07:57 ◼ ► And I had a lot of that. And so for me, like the idea of like adding ads to my app to make more money, like I kind of felt bad doing that at first.
00:08:09 ◼ ► And the reason I did it at first was because the money was going down and it was going from okay to down. And so, you know, for Overcast to continue to be something that justified me working on it, I had to figure out a different business model.
00:08:24 ◼ ► And I did. And now it's working great. And that was only because I was willing to step over a line that actually wasn't that important but that I thought was important. And at the end of the day, I stepped over that line.
00:08:39 ◼ ► I put ads in the app. First I had crappy Google ads. Then I had my own great podcast ads. And no one has minded. Like it has not cost me anything. People still regard Overcast very highly. I'm still very proud of it.
00:08:51 ◼ ► I keep the ads on myself with the new one. I did not do that with the Google ads. But I do it now with the podcast ads. And I don't see anything wrong with that. It seems like everyone wins.
00:09:03 ◼ ► Like even people who might not love ads get an app for free that is maintained and updated and continues to live on.
00:09:13 ◼ ► And so I think looking at a lot of the business practices and first run experiences, I'm more gentle on other people ever since I've gone through this process. Like on how I judge other apps, how I judge myself, and how I evaluate my own decisions.
00:09:34 ◼ ► Because we have to, at the end of the day, think of these as businesses if they're going to be that role in our lives. Like if they're going to be providing income for us and having to compete for our time with other things that might otherwise provide income, then they have to succeed as a business.
00:09:49 ◼ ► And there are lots of unethical things you can do as a business that I'm not saying you should do. There's a lot of that. But there's a lot of stuff like having ads in your app that just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all.
00:10:04 ◼ ► I was so resistant to the rate this app dialogue for so long. Now Apple's own built-in apps on the phone show you. Like literally you can be using an Apple app that comes with iOS and it will show that rate this app dialogue.
00:10:20 ◼ ► And that kind of shows you just quite how much that it is just a pervasive part of the experience and no one really cares and it's fine and you're almost hurting yourself if you don't use it to some degree.
00:10:35 ◼ ► Now how you use it, that's an open question. Like I put a lot of thought into where I put the rate this app dialogue in Overcast because I don't want to interrupt people while they're trying to do something important.
00:10:47 ◼ ► So the way I'm doing it in this first version is I have it show up if you open the settings screen and a bunch of other conditions are met. Like things like do you have a certain number of podcasts? Have you been using the app for more than a few days?
00:11:02 ◼ ► Stuff like that. So it doesn't barrage you immediately and bug you constantly. Has it shown the dialogue in the last week I set it for? Stuff like that. So it's more respectful but over time I'm probably going to tweak those knobs because they will make a big difference.
00:11:17 ◼ ► By only showing it in the settings screen I'm only showing it to a very small portion of the users. This is kind of my warm-up phase to see how this goes.
00:11:26 ◼ ► But over time maybe I'll add it to a more common action like going to the root screen. Who knows?
00:11:32 ◼ ► And I've learned never to say never. Never to speak in absolutes about what I will and won't do in the future of my app.
00:11:39 ◼ ► Because it's bad for your business, it's bad for yourself and you're making these grand proclamations mostly to yourself and to restrict yourself.
00:11:51 ◼ ► And it's unwise to say that I'm never going to need this thing, I'm never going to do this thing or my app will never do X or Y. That is not a good way to run an app business.
00:12:01 ◼ ► And I think the best way to be flexible is to be thinking through trying to match your customers' expectations with their experience. And I think in the case of the ratings dialogue it's understanding A) whether they would be offended by it or think it's problematic or those kinds of things.
00:12:30 ◼ ► And if they aren't then go ahead and use that tool to enhance your business for sure. And then be thoughtful of the way in which you actually implement it.
00:12:38 ◼ ► And I think the difference is so often it is easy to think of these things as very binary. Whereas the reality is everything is a choice and a decision and you can optimize and improve any experience that a user might have.
00:12:52 ◼ ► If you think about it, if you consider it, if you really try and make it good and then try and match it to your customers' expectations.
00:13:00 ◼ ► And I mean vaguely I'm reminded of a thing that's been in the news the last week. There was a wallpaper app that was put out by MKBHD, the YouTuber viewer. And the thing that was tricky is I think he misjudged or the app, his particular involvement, that app was built it seems with a misjudgment of the way it would be received by its audience.
00:13:23 ◼ ► That the audience's expectation for what an app like that would do did not match the way that the app actually went. That it had too many permission dialogues, the onboarding experience wasn't great, there were some other UI issues.
00:13:34 ◼ ► There's lots of things that felt disconnected from the audience that I think the app landed in. Maybe they were going for a different audience and that's just why it didn't align.
00:13:45 ◼ ► But I think what you're saying with the way you're approaching your app dialogue is if you are thoughtful about it and try and make it as good for your customer as possible.
00:13:57 ◼ ► It's not this thing that, "Oh, I have ads, so now my user experience is bad, so it doesn't matter." Taking that perspective is very short-sighted versus saying, "Okay, I'm going to have ads. How can I make this a wonderful, beautiful part of the user experience?"
00:14:13 ◼ ► And maybe you can't get it as wonderful and beautiful as the other parts of your application, but that doesn't mean that you can't make them better, that you can't have a rate this app dialogue that is more thoughtful, that is not going to interrupt you from doing something that you are trying to do and then suddenly this thing pops up and gets in the way.
00:14:30 ◼ ► There's a way to do it in a way that is less likely to do that. The benefit of that is how I don't show a cookies dialogue without a user clicking on a button.
00:14:43 ◼ ► There's a big banner at the top of the app that says, "Manage advertising preferences." I think it's the name of the button.
00:14:49 ◼ ► I put it there, and this is the way it is now, exactly what you're saying. I don't know if I'll keep it this way forever, but so far it's been working pretty well for me.
00:14:56 ◼ ► Rather than showing an ad in a market that requires one of these, I have a big, slightly garish, but not in your way button that says, "Manage advertising preferences."
00:15:06 ◼ ► If you click on that, it shows the cookie dialogues and asks you for your permission for the ad network to do the cookie stuff that it has to do.
00:15:14 ◼ ► The interesting thing by doing it that way, the consent rate that I have for places where I show this is something like 95%, 96%. Last time I looked, it is shockingly high as a consent rate.
00:15:27 ◼ ► I think part of that is coming from people. I'm not interrupting them. It's not the fifth screen they've seen after a big barrage of privacy prompts.
00:15:35 ◼ ► I've shown respect to you, and then as a result of that respect, maybe you are more likely to trust me and to consent in this case to the ads being shown and the required cookies and things that have to be sent as a result.
00:15:51 ◼ ► The result of that is a better user experience, and ultimately, I think, a better experience for me because I viewed this as something that was an opportunity to be improved and to be optimized and to match with my users' expectations that I'm trying to be a user-centric developer in that way.
00:16:08 ◼ ► I think it shows, and I think people appreciate it. In lieu of an ad this week, similar to what we did in the last episode, we are not going to have a traditional ad. Instead, we're going to talk to you briefly about Relay's campaign for St. Jude.
00:16:23 ◼ ► Every September, that's what Relay's been doing for I think this is the seventh-rate year of this campaign. It's a thing that the network does essentially to give back, to raise money for a good cause. At this point, I suspect if you are listening to this show, you probably listen to some other shows on Relay or you listen to ATP.
00:16:42 ◼ ► And so you've probably heard the spiel about St. Jude, how they do all this amazing work to fight childhood cancer and related illnesses, and they do it in a way that means that parents don't have to pay for any of the care that their children are receiving and all those wonderful things.
00:16:57 ◼ ► So if you go through those at length, you've heard it all before. And if you've reached the end of September, as we're recording this is right at the end of September, and you haven't donated, then in some ways there's not a lot that I can say to convince you, most likely. And if you have contributed, that's great.
00:17:13 ◼ ► Instead, I thought it might just be interesting just to have a brief, more philosophical discussion, or think about just the role that charitable giving has, at least the way that I view it in my life, because most people listening to this, I think, are software engineers.
00:17:28 ◼ ► Which means that we're good at making software. That's what we can do. But charitable giving in many ways, I view it as, it's a way for us to affect the change we would love to see in the world that we are not able to affect ourselves.
00:17:41 ◼ ► I'm good at making software. I'm not good at treating cancer in a child who has it. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a nurse. I'm not a researcher. Those aren't the skills that I have. But I would love to affect the change in the world that there are fewer children who suffer with cancer and fewer parents who worry about the paying for the care that their children need in a terrible situation like that.
00:18:04 ◼ ► And so I can't do that work myself. But what I have is the ability through my work as a software engineer, I have, you know, that's given me resources, and I can give those resources to people who can make that change.
00:18:16 ◼ ► And it's one of those things that I think I find very freeing in some ways is the ability to use money that I make from the thing that I'm actually good at to affect the change that I would like that other people allow other people to do their jobs and support them in doing that.
00:18:30 ◼ ► And I think that's something that St. Jude absolutely does. You know, there's a group of really skilled, thoughtful, engaged people who are very mission oriented and getting rid of childhood cancer.
00:18:41 ◼ ► And they've been working at this for years and years and they're doing a great job. And that's why we support them.
00:18:45 ◼ ► And if you would like to effect that change in the world, then by all means, please go to stjude.org/relay to do that. Or if there's other changes you want to make in the world that you're unable to do, find other causes to support.
00:19:01 ◼ ► But I think it's just one of those things that's good to have a thought about the reason we give. And the reason we give is because we want to change the world in ways that are big and small, powerful and, you know, sort of narrow.
00:19:12 ◼ ► But it's something that any of us can do, regardless of our given vocation or our skill set.
00:19:23 ◼ ► All right. So you mentioned a few minutes ago MKBHD's new wallpaper app. I think it's called Panels, right?
00:19:30 ◼ ► I'm glad you mentioned that because I've seen so much sub-mastadoning about this app over the last few days. And at first I'm like, "Why is everyone talking about wallpapers and why are they so angry about it?"
00:19:45 ◼ ► It took me a while to figure out what was going on. But I'm glad that we brought this up because this is a good example of a lot of people misunderstanding success and being, I think, very envious of it in a very, I think, petty and unwise way.
00:20:03 ◼ ► MKBHD could make an app like this that, by all accounts, was seemingly not an amazing app. I didn't install it. I don't know. But certainly, as you mentioned, I saw there were complaints about it taking too much tracking data with its ad network.
00:20:22 ◼ ► A lot of people, though, were like, "Well, I can make a wallpaper app." Or, "I did make a wallpaper app, and I'm not charging $50 a year or whatever he's charging for the premium stuff." And they just cannot believe this.
00:20:35 ◼ ► The thing is, people are not buying MKBHD's wallpaper app because they love every single wallpaper in it and they find $50 a year a reasonable price to pay for wallpapers. They're buying it because they like Marques Brownlee. They like him. They're buying it based on brand and celebrity and style and fashion.
00:20:58 ◼ ► It's all these other factors that we app developers are often not only unaware of a lot of times, but often actively disdainful of.
00:21:07 ◼ ► And I think that's unwise for a lot of reasons. First of all, I wouldn't slag this guy in public for taking advantage of what he's built over time to have this amazing empire of work and fame and brand recognition and people recognition.
00:21:25 ◼ ► He's built this up for a reason. People like him a lot. I like him a lot. I love his work. People like MKBHD, he has worked to build that up, and he is now broadening. He's kind of spending some of his celebrity cred that he's built up to go into other areas, to have different brand partnerships or merchandise deals or whatever it is.
00:21:47 ◼ ► That's business. That's part of the app business, too. Imagine if I made Overcast and I never promoted it on my podcasts. Would that feel bad that I'm unfairly promoting a podcast app?
00:22:01 ◼ ► Do you think some Overcast users use it just because they like me? Yes, of course they do. Why would I not use that?
00:22:09 ◼ ► And no one would be benefiting if I silently released an app under some other name and didn't use my name at all. Who would that benefit? No one. It doesn't matter.
00:22:20 ◼ ► And so I feel like people who are getting all upset about MKBHD's wallpaper app, it's mostly just jealousy that they have to work a lot harder to get people to care that much about their app.
00:22:32 ◼ ► And yeah, that's true. That's part of business. You have to use what you have. You have to use the assets you have. You have to use what you've built up and what you have access to.
00:22:40 ◼ ► Some people have already built up audiences. He didn't have this audience just bestowed upon him. He built it up. He worked on it for years and years and years.
00:22:50 ◼ ► He works his butt off to build that audience. So of course he's going to leverage it into something else if he can. We all would do that. I've done it. You've done it. We've all done stuff like that. That's just part of business.
00:23:02 ◼ ► And I don't think it's wise to look at what he's done and say, "Well, my wallpaper app, it's ridiculous. He can charge more and his wallpapers aren't as good as mine."
00:23:12 ◼ ► I've seen so many bad takes about this. It's pretty remarkable. But it's mostly rooted in unproductive avenues of thought.
00:23:22 ◼ ► Yeah, he can do that because he's him and he's built up a lot of stuff that all of us haven't.
00:23:29 ◼ ► If your wallpaper app can't charge 50 bucks and have a lot of ads in it and succeed as well as his, it's because you don't have his audience.
00:23:37 ◼ ► You can try to build that. There's nothing stopping you from trying to do the same thing.
00:23:43 ◼ ► And for him to not use his audience and his brand and everything would be needlessly stupid. Why wouldn't he do that?
00:23:54 ◼ ► I think it's important when you're looking around the app store, why is this other app succeeding in ways that mine isn't or that I think I can't?
00:24:03 ◼ ► Some of those, the answer really is, you can't. Sometimes I'll see another podcast app and it'll have just tons of reviews and installs that really don't match up to its representation in market share numbers when people measure it in other ways.
00:24:20 ◼ ► Things like downloads from big hosts will sometimes release their stats of what their client apps are and stuff like that.
00:24:25 ◼ ► You see, these apps are not even on the chart. They're so loaded on the chart, but how do they have all those installs and how do they keep outbidding me for search terms?
00:24:32 ◼ ► And the answer usually is venture capital money. They raised a lot of money and they're spending it on user acquisition.
00:24:38 ◼ ► Some of those things are legitimate and some of them aren't. But they're doing it and that's how they're able to outcompete me in certain ways.
00:24:45 ◼ ► And at first, a long time ago, I would get mad. I'd be like, "Man, they're just burning money. How could they?"
00:24:51 ◼ ► Then I started buying search ads and burning my own money. And I'm burning a lot less money than they are.
00:24:55 ◼ ► Then there's people below my status who are looking at me saying I'm the one burning the money on my search ads and I'm driving up my search ads.
00:25:04 ◼ ► Then they can't bid on the same keywords for as cheaply or whatever. It's kind of a ladder.
00:25:09 ◼ ► And there's nothing stopping me from trying to go out there and raise venture capital money to try to acquire growth in much more expensive ways than what I can afford with my current structure.
00:25:22 ◼ ► Nothing's stopping me from doing that. Those people who did that, who went out and went through the startup train and raised money and are burning it like crazy to acquire more users.
00:25:32 ◼ ► I shouldn't look at them with disdain because I could do that too. And they put in the work and they did it. I chose not to.
00:25:44 ◼ ► So there's oftentimes a lot of these kind of artificial walls we put up in our mind, this kind of theme of the episode of just like, "Oh, we're not going to do that," or "We can't do that."
00:26:01 ◼ ► And there's lots of reasons why you might choose not to go down a certain path or take a certain strategy or action. There's lots of that and certainly we talk about that a lot.
00:26:15 ◼ ► Yeah, and I think in it, there's also this aspect of just making sure that we are making—I mean, I feel like one of the most reoccurring topics on this show is about being intentional about the choices we make about our products and making sure that we're not doing things because we saw someone else do them, because you think it's just somehow absolutely the right idea, the wrong idea, whatever it is.
00:26:39 ◼ ► You're making an intentional choice based on a clear-eyed understanding of what your goals are and how your goals are best achieved. That is fundamentally the goal.
00:26:49 ◼ ► And whatever the app, you look at a competitor, you look at how they do it, it's important to just understand their motives, their desires, their end result, where they're trying to align their app and all the different axes they can build it on could be very different than yours.
00:27:02 ◼ ► If their goal is just market share, they're going to approach that very differently. The best way to get market share is usually to buy lots of ads to promote your product.
00:27:10 ◼ ► That's just the nature of that business, and if that's what you want, well then that's what you need.
00:27:14 ◼ ► But if that isn't the case, then also make sure that you're aware that if you see someone who seems to be succeeding, make sure you try and understand why they're succeeding.
00:27:23 ◼ ► And is it for other reasons than just, oh, quality, or who made the best app? Well, that's not really the race. The race isn't who made the best app if you're trying to see who has the most number of downloads.
00:27:35 ◼ ► It's going to be who's spending money on advertising, who has the best marketing plan, who has all the other kind of things going on in the creation process.
00:27:42 ◼ ► And I think that's something that I sometimes see when I look at these apps and I see things that are like, hmm, I wouldn't do it that way. And that's fine. I'm making my apps in my way.
00:27:53 ◼ ► But I also now have the maturity to look at it and be like, yeah, I can see why they're doing it that way. I can see what that's gaining them, what benefit that's allowing them.
00:28:03 ◼ ► And if I can look at something and know why they're doing it, now I have the ability to decide if that suits me, if I can learn from that experience.
00:28:10 ◼ ► And if I can't, then great. If it's not something I want to do. But I think being clear-eyed about that is very helpful.
00:28:16 ◼ ► I think what you're saying there is great in the sense of we all have different abilities, we all have different skills, we all have different advantages that we have.
00:28:23 ◼ ► And we want to play all of our cards as best we can. And I think in that process, the kind of development that you and I tend to advocate for is one that is thoughtful still.
00:28:32 ◼ ► That you aren't just, oh, I'm going to add ads to my app. Great. I'm just going to check every box I possibly can for everything that I could possibly try and collect about my user to just maximize that.
00:28:42 ◼ ► Well, if I'm going to have them, I may as well have everything awful. It's like, you don't have to build it that way.
00:28:47 ◼ ► Most of these choices have a lot of gradation between existing and not existing and existing in thoughtful ways.
00:28:54 ◼ ► And so, I would just sort of encourage us all to hold the line on the things that are important to us, but be flexible about where that line is and how we apply it to ourselves.
00:29:02 ◼ ► Yeah. And if the path you want to take is to do none of the things that will kind of boost your visibility or market share or success, you're going to have a hard time succeeding.
00:29:14 ◼ ► And a lot of apps are made for reasons other than that. A lot of apps, you could be perfectly happy to have an app that does not have commercial success, but is instead useful in other ways.
00:29:23 ◼ ► That's fine. I have apps like that. But if your goal is commercial success, you've got to play the game and you've got to use what you have.
00:29:29 ◼ ► And one way to do that is to start a YouTube channel for 15 years and build up a massive audience and then try to make an iOS app.
00:29:36 ◼ ► A different way to do that is what we're doing. There's lots of ways to do it. There's a lot of ways to succeed.