First of all, a special thank you to Kimberly for writing the previous post where she took a look at the iPhone developer program. Now, I am going to tell you about it from my perspective — one where I have already began testing the waters, and have talked to a few developers who have already had success at the App Store.
First, it is important to know that Apple designed the developer program specifically for the iPhone with some checks and balances in order to keep the growing platform steady. This has been a blessing and a curse for developers. First, it is a blessing because it provides the App Store: an all-in-one solution for hosting and selling the apps. It doesn’t require any major effort beyond the development cycle and support role anyone who wishes to sell apps to undertake. The catch is that Apple has to approve the app first, which opens a new chapter in app propriety, and also keeps 30% of all earnings. Here it varies from person to person on how these policies are viewed. Personally, I think it’s a great trade-off.
But the biggest gripe I’ve heard is that it takes a lot of days for Apple to approve an app, or update to that app. And the one thing that is most valued is time, because it means potential business losses; the perfect example being that if a bug horribly cripples the app, you’ll start losing a lot of potential users due to bad ratings (without being able to respond to them directly, either!) before you’re able to get the update online.
This happened to me in TipAgent where the numbers would come out wrong in some specific cases when splitting the bill. After smashing my head on the desk for being so stupid after I quickly located the faulty part, I submitted the 1.1.2 version that fixes this. It’s been over eight days and I have yet to see the update get Apple’s approval. Thankfully, no one cares deeply about another tip calculator, so my crisis isn’t that important. But what about the big dogs and their apps? Maybe Apple should begin by implementing a new review system where priority is given to updates based solely on bug fixes. I know it could further mess up the wait time for new apps, but you’ll be thankful when you start panicking due to an uncatched bug.
Another recent event that of interest that shows this aspect of the App Store is the infamous Twitpocalypse, which was called the Y2K bug-equivalent of Twitter. Some developers anticipated this and updated their apps to prevent this. However, simulated testing is nothing when compared to the real deal. Twitterrific was the one notable iPhone app that was hit worst. Craig Chockenberry details the whole experience in a post he made in his website, and even goes one step further to propose another prioritized review system where developers are given a specified number of tokens for such priority when disaster strikes. It is a very insightful reading.
As for making money in the App Store, from what I’ve been told, it certainly is possible but it’s hard. I cannot tell you this first-hand since I only have the one free app available. The next step I’m going to pursue is releasing a 99-cent app to test that next. It should be coming soon…
P.S. If you’re one of those who have downloaded TipAgent, I do apologize for that bug and thank you for giving it a try. The amount of downloads (in the several thousands) have taken me by surprise, especially since I have not mentioned its existence outside from this lonely corner of mine in the series of tubes we know as the internet.
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