Do you want to be a sharecropper? Or do you want to own your own business?

I've had vaguely uncomfortable feelings about the app store concept on phones from the very beginning (and I've commented on those misgivings here on several occasions over the years, to mixed response), and I think all of the concerns I aired back then are coming to be proven to be real problems. When you sell an app via these stores, you don't have a customer...you have a sale. A customer is more valuable to a software developer than a sale by a vast amount. A few thousand customers can sustain a business indefinitely.

Customers can help you make your product better, and you can help your customer get more value out of the application (which means they'll be happy to pay you more). Customers can be rewarded for recommending your application to friends or coworkers. Customers can help support your product in your forums or support tracker. Customers can end up becoming your best employees (our first employee is someone who used our Open Source stuff for years, and was one of our first buyers when we created a commercial product; he's a true believer in what we do). A sale without that direct customer relationship is just a sale.

I have hopes that this is a temporary anomaly in an evolution toward a more open web with more direct connection between developers and users, but I don't have a very high level confidence in that outcome. But, I can encourage folks to not become sharecroppers, I guess.

About 15 years ago, there was a really common sentiment among tech industry titans that curating the web would be where money was made (which led to things like push content, and "portals", which mostly failed, or evolved), and this seems to be that same idea coming back in a new form. But, the curators are simply extracting value from developers and users without substantially improving the ecosystem...in fact, they're kinda bleeding the ecosystem dry, and enforcing a "software-as-commodity" model...it's Walmart applied to software. Which is a pretty dangerous situation, I think, for independent software developers, and probably only serves the largest corporations.

While we're on the subject of helpful deployment software, MarsEdit's Daniel Jalkut has an article about crash reporting for Mac apps on his blog:

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/860/crash-reporter-roundup

I haven't yet tried any of his suggestions, and since the article is from 2009, I don't know how much has changed.

In any case, from experience on other platforms, I heartily recommend making crash reporting straightforward (1-click, or even opt-in to 0-click) for users. Once you have a few hundred people using your software, "rare" crashes happen all the time and tracking them down can be much easier than with just your internal testing.

Note that OSX's built-in crash reports go to Apple, not the App developer, so they're not much use to those of us outside the Cupertino ivory tower.

I wrote up my experiences on releasing outside of the App Store: http://writing.markchristian.org/2012/03/30/make-your-own-ap...

I use Stripe for payment processing with a custom in-app UI for buying the app. Stripe has been great — they charge 50c+2.9%, so I lose about 44c per copy of DragonDrop sold (versus losing about $1.50 to Apple in the App Store).

I suggest releasing in the App Store if possible, but selling independently, too. The whole thing took about a day to set up and has been totally automatic since then.

"...You can’t offer paid upgrades. The App Store model is “buy once, get free upgrades forever”, which is of course tantamount to encouraging disposable software (and support practices)..."

And this is recently one of the culprits why mobile app developers are struggling financially; so it seems to be a big factor.

I found this a very helpful article. In particular the thing which scares me the most is always the thought of Having to deal with people's money, and so it is really nice to see someone talk about how they did it, and and how easy it was.

It's true you can't offer things called "paid upgrades" or "demo versions", but with In-App Purchases, you can mostly get around this. For example, make your app free, and make some key feature an IAP -- that's basically a demo version. Or when you make a big new version, make the key new feature of the upgrade an IAP, so new users have to pay base+feature, while existing users only have to pay for that feature.

I happen to like these: I love being able to try something out before I buy, so "free + IAP" looks great to me. But there are a lot of people who must think that "free" means "everything free, for all time", and when they discover a core feature costs 99c, they go and leave a 1-star review. So you have to tread carefully.

Another option is to make a free demo version, and just dump it on your own webpage. It's not as discoverable as the App Store, but if people learn about your app and go looking, it's not too hard to find. A demo probably has minimal needs for the things the App Store provides (like licensing, purchasing, and updating), anyway.

Here is a personal experience on what it can be like as a customer of a product available both in the MAS and outside it.

A while ago, I tried the Fantastical trial, and when I used the purchase link, I was immediately prompted to a credit card payment screen. I paid and bought the software, and all was fine and well.

But later on, I learn that the software was also available in the MAS - something Fantastical didn't really bother explaining to me. When I contacted them for any kind of refund (to be used to purchase the app in MAS), I was told that they couldn't accommodate that since a lot of other users have requested the same thing - which already seems like a weird way of thinking.

They price the software in both places the same - meaning they earn more money, if people don't by it in the MAS, and I felt the entire experience to be very deceptive.

All in all, a really bad experience that I can't recommend any developer to imitate, as it does nothing to inspire customer loyalty. Especially when the developer has a financial incentive to not addressing the issue. At least from my limited perception as a non-Mac developer.

Again, this is the impression you get as a customer. I'm not saying this is the intent, but perception is reality in the real of customer experience.

Consider this another con to double-dipping, if you intend to do something similar.

I was under the impression that you couldn't install onto a non jailbroken iPhone/iPad without going through apple ( either App Store/AdHoc/Enterprise). This gives me hope that I am significantly wrong on that which would make my life much easier.

Can someone confirm that?

How do I install apps from out side the app store? Doesn't it require the phone to be in developer mode or something like that? So why is it even worth investigating if its possible or worth the effort? What am I missing?

To release on iOS (which is not the major market any more btw) outside of the App Store consider Cydia. There's millions of jailbroken devices now and the Cydia store app is included in the process.

so.. is the app store more profitable or is selling software yourself better?

Great article! I have a question for you guys. Just today, in the past few hours, we are now featured on the App Store. Since we have made the decision to put an emphasis on that release - how would you go about sustaining the momentum from that channel? http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/quilt-launch/

So, you wanted them to refund you so you could buy it again in the MAS and they would end up with 30% less money? Why would any business agree to that?

You still get the same software, you paid the same amount, and they probably have an update mechanism (the only real difference between the versions is keeping your license key).

I can't see how you can be annoyed about this. If you really cared you could have spent a few minutes extra on the site to check if they supported the Mac App Store.

What exactly is the issue? You paid the same price and gave developers more money. Sounds like a good deal to me.

While I have no clue whether it applies to the mac app store, the ios app store has rules that you can't sell subscriptions for a lower price outside the appstore compared to the prices inside (where apple takes 30% of a cut). So that might be a reason why they're not undercutting the mac app store?

https://developer.apple.com/appstore/in-app-purchase/subscri...

When buying other items, do you expect to pay less when you pay in cash? After all, the retailer is making more money by avoiding credit card handling fees.

As a developer in the same boat, I can say I'd love to give users the ability to migrate licenses, even if it means losing a little bit of money for their happiness. Unfortunately Apple only provides 50 promo codes per version, and they aren't intended to be used for this purpose. I'd send feedback to Apple asking that they change their App Store/policies to support this.

I just moved into a new house and the lawn needed to be mowed and all that, so one of my roommates made a deal with the neighbor and his kids came over to do the lawn. I went out to see if they needed anything, and I got talking with one of them. He asked me what I did and I told him I'm a programmer, and he asked me if I knew anything about jailbreaking iPods. I was completely and utterly flabergasted; I'd worked on jailbreaks back with the original iPhone and simply couldn't believe that a kid of maybe 9 or 10 in the middle of CT with non-techie parents actually knew about such things. Really speaks to how big jailbreaks and the like are these days.

The Cydia Store is also a much smaller community, which means that your new application is almost guaranteed to be noticed if it brings something cool to the table.

The piracy rates are high, just as with anywhere, but you can still make very good money on the Cydia Store, from personal experience (http://kramerapps.com/cydia/).

iOS users continue to purchase more apps, and pay for more expensive apps, than their Android counterparts, despite the gulf in overall sales and user figures:

http://www.distimo.com/blog/2011_12_distimo-releases-full-ye...

In 2011 iPad app revenues alone topped Android Market revenues by a significant margin.

edit: some more recent sources: http://www.appannie.com/game-of-phones/

http://blog.flurry.com/bid/85911/App-Developers-Signal-Apple... "Running a comparison of revenue generated by top apps on both iOS and Android, Flurry calculates that the difference in revenue generated per active user is still 4 times greater on iOS than Android. For every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android. These results mirror earlier findings from similar analysis Flurry conducted in Q4 of 2011 and Q1 of 2012."