My experience building paid iOS apps
With the perspective that a few years give, I wanted to write and reflect on the different aspects of building non-free apps designed for the Apple ecosystem, circa 2013–5. For context, this time was when the iPad adoption was rapidly growing and the iPhone 5 climbed to the top smartphone selling spots worldwide. These devices drove a massive success of the Apple app store — nothing less than a gold rush to build and monetize new apps in a land grab where established software brands and indie developers competed for the attention, and the dollars.
The idea
Two main elements coalesced behind this project. First, missing my previous life as a software engineer that had ended prematurely -okay, paused- after enrolling in the UCLA Anderson School of Management to pursue an MBA, I wanted to actually get my hands dirty with a real development effort, ready for mass market, and not just a prototype, or second-hand experiences by other developers, bloggers, and journalists.
Second, my father, a retired history of art professor with over thirty years of experience teaching, is a walking fountain of amenable art history knowledge: endless deep insights, peppered with dad jokes, and spicy side-stories about about the main characters of his discurse. Somehow, I wanted to marry these two forces: build something together, our project, an excuse to collaborate and produce something of value.
The concept that we finally selected was an iPad app focused on the rich history of pictorial art in Spain, from cave paints, to contemporary artists. This content-driven app would feature “chapters” describing each main movement of this long time period. The chapters would begin with a political and social context, followed by sections describing the main elements of the period, such as key painters and their most representative works.
The user experience
The main question was, how to turn a text-based narrative into a visual and interactive experience that would take advantage of the amazing features that iPads bring to the user?
We combined a few design elements:
- Detailed, but not too long. We broke the narrative into twelve chapters: prehistory, middle ages, romanesque, gothic, renaissance, mannerism, baroque, Goya, romanticism, Picasso, surrealism, and XX century. Each chapter has around 5–8 sections that are around 750-words long and can be discovered in under 30 minutes.
- Swipe-based navigation. Swiping is a natural gesture on iPads. Most of the activities in the app are performing swiping directly over the content.
- Interactivity. Selected paintings can be enjoyed full screen, and the most relevant elements of the painting can be discovered by tapping on the green dots.
- Animations: the Cocoa controls make easy and efficient to include animations in all parts of the interaction, from switching sections, to expanding images, or selecting hot elements.
- Easter egg: every now and then (in reality, once every five times the app is launched) the home screen receives the visit of Pintor Pirado -crazy painter- a tongue-in-cheek quiz game that offers a semi-fun way to recall aspects of the narrative.
- High-resolution: the more advanced Apple Retina displays -which offer twice the screen resolution-were becoming more and more popular so we included high definition content when available.
The development
Most of my professional software developing experience had been focused around the Java world, and in particular the J2EE and J2ME editions. Being new to the XCode platform and to the Objective C language, I first spent some time learning about the ecosystem. Resources that I found extremely useful were the Stanford CS 193P course ran by Paul Hegarty, my always reliable Quora, multiple blogs namely Ray Wenderlich, and the powerful StackOverflow forum.
In parallel, my dad/colleague/coauthor of the app, turned to the local library to refine the list of movements, painters, and works that the app would feature. This research evolved into the writing of the original narrative content behind the app, and the management of the translation of the manuscript to English.
As a general experience, I remember fondly this time when the app was growing, taking shape, and becoming reality. As anyone who has ever programmed can say, the design thinking, problem solving sessions, and debugging phases, can be very addictive and rewarding. I did not find major barriers to move along at a good clip, including testing in actual silicon devices vs. simulator, and passing the scary app store review — Apple is well known for having an astringent approval process in which every single app that is released to the App store gets manually reviewed for quality and adherence to the design principles that govern the store.
Monetization: paid apps vs. ads
Making an app available in the iOS app store requires at a minimum a developer license which costs $99 per year. Plus other incidentals such as registering a domain and storage for a collateral website. And of course, a quite recent Mac computer to run XCode and actual devices to test the apps on. So my main goal was to break even. Having to choose between the two main approaches to monetize the app -paid app, or placing ads- I opted for setting a price, as the user experience was very important in this particular project, and nobody likes to see ads.
Setting the price was not immediate. The good part is that educational apps tend to command a higher price than utility and productivity apps. It is common to see educational apps in the $4.99 range, only behind specialty and professional apps. Games tend to be all over the place.
To get this out of the way, the app did not make much money. During the six months it stayed as a paid app, it only managed to collect around $50, below my expectations. Doing some basic economic elasticity testing, lowering the price did not actually increase substantially the volume, so I decided to stay in the higher side of the pricing fork. It seems that whoever wanted this app, did not mind paying $4.99 vs $1.99.
The monetization options have been changing recently, with many successful apps following a freemium approach (in which the basic version is free, but then the user pays for certain additional features,) other apps following a crowdfunded investing (a la Kickstarter,) and others following a direct sponsorship model, as the very hot Patreon is promoting.
Today: open source
The app is not currently available to download in the Apple Store. However, the code of the app (including XCode project file,) the selection of images, and the original content can be found in this GitHub repository. The code has not been thoroughly maintained and it will likely need work to bring it up to the current iOS version. The license scheme I picked is Apache for the code and Creative Commons (attribution) to the content.
Final thoughts
- An app is not a business. What I mean with this is that the app itself (i.e. the code) it is only a part of the business equation. Recalling the popular Four Ps marketing framework, the app only constitutes the Product part of the Four Ps. The rest, Promotion, Price, and Placement must be carefully studied in order to turn an app into a sustainable business. In particular a significant part of the budget should be reserved for marketing and outreach.
- The barrier to build production-grade iOS apps is not in the development. With a powerful set of core APIs, an extensive documentation base, endless examples available, and an increasing number of third party libraries that encapsulate advanced features, building professional apps is an enjoyable experience to anyone with experience in programming.
- Discovery in the app store is next to impossible. It has been said multiple times before, the Apple Store is a terrible place to compete and get discovered by users. Most (99%?) downloads stem from other sources, such as ads, press articles, worth-of-mouth recommendations, or other channels. Put simply, people don’t go to the Apple Store to find apps, they go to download them once they know what they want, games perhaps being the only exception.
- Few people make most of the money. Even though the app store has been frequently described as an opportunity for indie developers to sell software, is really hard to make a living out of it. In fact, Apple likes to mention the dollar amount that it distributes to developers -after of course, applying the Apple Store tax of 30% of gross sales- but the reality is that this money is very far from being equally distributed among the developers.
