All Articles Tagged state of the apps

Techcrunch ran one of their big, blazing headlines today reporting “Apple’s iPhone App Refund Policies Could Bankrupt Developers”. They cited Apple’s contract which allows for Apple to charge developers 100% of a refund, even though devs only get 70% of the payment to begin with. Under that model, developers would get hit for 30% extra each time an App Store purchase was refunded. Not nice, for certain. But apparently also not (yet?) the case.

TiPb contacted several developers to find out what was going on. While some were aware of the potential for a 100% refund charge back, none had experienced it. Uniformly, they reported very few refunds, and when they did occur, charge backs only for the same 70% cut Apple had originally passed along to them.

For now, at least, Apple is eating whatever processing, administration, and other charges that occur out of their own, 30% cut.

In general, all the developers we spoke with hadn’t seen many returns and didn’t seem to consider this a huge problem right now. This might be because the process of getting a refund is not easy to begin with. If that changes, as recently discussed on Twitter, it could become a greater concern.

As to Techcrunch’s other charge, that a refunded app becomes unusable, we’ve been unable to find an occurrence of that in the real world. If you’ve had a refund on any apps, let us know if it goes dead, keeps working but won’t upgrade, or stays the same.

The App Store, even with 25,000 applications, is still a new market and one we’re all, developers, users, and media alike, trying to figure out. Developer James Thomson recently did an experiment to see how Twitkitteh, a fun little app, would compare in terms of sales and earnings, to his acclaimed PCalc in the App Store.

The results? Thomson talks about them in a blog post entitled Where Did it All Go Wrong?

Since Twitkitteh released about a week ago, we have sold exactly a hundred and one copies, at roughly 99c each. That makes it about £50 in terms of income at current exchange rates after Apple’s 30% cut. About 14 quid of that went on the domain name for a year, and about another 11 quid on hosting the domain on our existing server.

That leaves us £25 profit for three week’s work. Oh, and minus the 120 or so engineer-hours spent designing, writing, and promoting it that could have been spent on something else. So, depending on exactly how much you rate iPhone engineers at on an hourly basis, you can calculate exactly how much we lost on the whole project.

The good news is, with his grand Twitkitteh experiment completed (for now?), PCalc and PCalc Lite have received updates:

PCalc [iTunes link] gets a brand new engineering layout, with hyperbolic trig functions, hypotenuse, leg, gamma, delta percent and more. You also get a classic theme taken from PCalc on Mac OS X, and six new key click sounds you can choose from too.

PCalc Lite [iTunes link] gets just two of the click sounds, and some other small improvements. PCalc Lite remains completely free however, and completely awesome. If you want to get a feel for how the full PCalc works on the iPhone, just try it out.

Here’s hoping quality apps like PCalc and others will sell well enough that developers won’t have to spend their limited time working on the next great fart app to makes ends meet.

We mentioned in passing during our pre-iPhone 3.0 rumor round-up that:

G-Maps has mysteriously disappeared from the App Store, and will “return soon”…

While XRoad’s website said the US East and West coast maps were being improved, the real reason speculated at the time is that they were perhaps about to re-appear as a full turn-by-turn navigation solution as part of the Premium App Store. Neither of those things happened, and now Gizmodo shares what might really have been going on:

Update: Some developers have told us that the reason G-Map has been pulled is that by including turn-by-turn navigation, it violated the terms of agreement—which is why it was the first turn-by-turn app to come out.

Of course, the App Store terms of service have now changed, allowing for turn-by-turn as long as the developer “brings their own maps” so we’ll have to keep an eye on this one and see what happens come “summer” and the official iPhone 3.0 release…

Brian Kim of Proximi wrote in to tell us that BargainBin, arguably the app that coined the term “pocket rejection”, caps off one of the stranger and most memorable weeks in App Store confusion by actually getting out of the pocket and onto iPhones everywhere.

Following up on AMBER Alert’s approval, and Tweetie 1.3’s rejection and almost immediate reversal/approval, we have to wonder if the internet outcry on Twitter and blogs actually made a difference, and something changed deep inside Apple — or if this is just a cosmically coincidental, Ozymandia-worthy joke.

Heh. Maybe Apple’s just trying to get some good faith back from developers before they preview iPhone OS 3.0 and the new SDK on Tuesday…

If you’re interested in keeping track of price-dropped apps, check out BargainBin [iTunes link] and let us know how it works for you.

Following up on the story about Tweetie 1.3 being rejected because an Apple reviewer saw the word f**k in the Twitter Trends tab, developer Crowded Road contacted us with the story of their app, Human Weather, which was initially rejected by Apple for a similar reason: someone happened to have dropped the f-bomb in the Twitter-stream while it was being reviewed.

Crowded Road went to the trouble — and no doubt cost in man/hours — to implement a filter for said reject-worthy words, and is now available FREE in the App Store [iTunes link]. But so what? As the developers themselves rightly told us:

This kind of policy is doomed to fail simply because it is impossible to police. Apple is only check the app content through a random test as part of their approval process. Of course, looking for “offensive” content as part of an approval process is futile because user generated content is both limitless and unpredictable.

No doubt this is correct, as creative internet users already know. F**k getting filtered? Fug, fukc, fack, fock, f u c k, and limitless other combinations impenetrable to machines but easily parsed by human pattern-matching brains, will easily slip through to offend those easily offended and amuse those easily amused alike.

We’d typically finish up with a rant about how the App Store could be improved, made more transparent with clearly defined criteria, even establish a ratings system for apps as they have for iTunes media, but really, even they must know this by now, right?

Wow, alliteration much? Not sure if it was just a delay (as Apple seems mostly impervious to pressure from the web or customers, open letters included), or some bizarre equal and opposite reaction to Tweetie 1.3 being rejected, but AppleiPhoneApps.com is now reporting that Jonathan Zdziarski’s AMBER Alert app has (finally?) been approved and published to the iTunes App Store:

AMBER Alert [iTunes link] is now available at the [US] App Store for free, and gives users real-time information regarding missing children. Zdziarkski worked closely with the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children to make this the official AMBER Alert tool for the iPhone.

Another app, BargainBin, is still languishing in limbo, however, prompting an interesting question on the same site about whether or not the App Store uses “pocket rejections” at times.

Clearly the App Store process remains anything but clear…

So, who could it be running the approval process for the iTunes App Store at Apple? Hmm. Tough one. Let us put on our little thinking caps here for a moment…. SATAN?!

No, of course, not, nor the Church Lady from SNL, but it must be someone equally cartoonish, how else do we reconcile the App Store rejecting Tweetie 1.3 for containing “offensive language” in search results returned from the public Twitter “Trends” rankings? (via Twitter)

We can search for all manner of unholy pr0n in Mobile Safari, should Apple Reject their own core application because of what it may return as well? Are they expecting developers to become censors and str the fck out of words the way Apple.com does? (see below).

Of course, this could just be one rogue App Store review processor gone horribly wrong, but Apple still bears responsibility for a totally opaque, seemingly capricious review process that creates incidents just like this — over and over again.

They’re likely selling enough fart apps and games to make this a small problem from their end, but they’re losing badly when it comes to the good will of truly innovative developers and bleeding edge techies who form the core of any true next-generation platform.

Wake up, Apple. You’re better than this.

(And good luck to Tweetie developer Loren Brichter on getting Tweetie 1.3 approved — as it should be — and into all of our waiting iPhones quickly!)

Screen shots showing the rejected “language” in Tweetie and others for the sake of comparison after the break (NSFW-L)…

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Longtime reader and tipster The Reptile wrote in to tell us about Fortune’s coverage of the iPhone Amber Alert app and its problem getting into the App Store:

Now Jonathan Zdziarski, one of the original iPhone hackers and the author of several O’Reilly books, has hit on something that might work. It’s an open letter to Steve Jobs pleading with Apple’s CEO to speed up approval of the Amber Alert iPhone app that’s been sitting in the queue since February 14. The application uses GPS location information to funnel sightings of missing children to the nearest law enforcement agency as quickly as possible.

Has Apple dropped the ball? There doesn’t seem to be a duplicates functionality, or official Amber Alert app that could explain the problems this time (see PodCaster and StarPlayr), does there? Is Apple that understaffed and ill-prepared in the face of 25,000 apps, or are the $99 novelty apps and iPod touch-highlighted games making so much money, no one really cares about the rest?

Full text of the letter after the break…

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As many of us eagerly wait for Twitterrific 2.0 to hit the iTunes App Store, developer Craig Hockenberry has provided an interesting insight into the mind — and strategy — behind one of the most high-profile development houses in Apple-dom. Says Hockenberry on being Trendy:

As software developers we often fall into the “just one more feature” trap. We want a 1.0 release to be awesome, and that one more thing will only take a day or two, and people will love it, so why not?

Because that awesome feature could be a very good thing to generate buzz and sales for a 1.1 or a 1.2 release. And by not “doing it all” in the first release, you get your product to market faster. You’ll be making money while you implement that cool new feature.

And holding back can have another advantage: you might find that your users want something different than what you had planned. Their input can often change your idea, so don’t waste time doing something without feedback.

The rest of the article is a worthy read, as is his blog Furbo.org in general.

Seems Emoji aren’t the only thing being scrubbed from the App Store today! MacRumors is reporting that old reviews made my users who hadn’t actually downloaded the app they were reviewing are also being removed. Apple stopped non-users from reviewing apps a while back, this is just retroactively applying the new policy to the old reviews:

Several long standing apps have seen dramatic decreases in their review counts. SEGA’s Super Monkey Ball count dropped from 4197 reviews down to 3710 while Namco’s Pac Man dropped from 395 to 122.

Most everyone involved, from developers tired of no-good-nicks trying to game the system, to users tired of sorting through gamed or off-topic reviews, will likely appreciate this move. Maybe this is one rejection Apple’s done right?