Releasing Outside The App Store

Do you want to be a sharecropper? Or do you want to own your own business?<p>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 <i>vast</i> amount. A few thousand customers can sustain a business indefinitely.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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:<p><a href="http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/860/crash-reporter-roundup" rel="nofollow">http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/860/crash-reporter-roundup</a><p>I haven't yet tried any of his suggestions, and since the article is from 2009, I don't know how much has changed.<p>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.<p>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: <a href="http://writing.markchristian.org/2012/03/30/make-your-own-app-store.html" rel="nofollow">http://writing.markchristian.org/2012/03/30/make-your-own-ap...</a><p>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).<p>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)..."<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>both</i> in the MAS and outside it.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Again, this is the <i>impression</i> you get as a customer. I'm not saying this is the intent, but perception is reality in the real of customer experience.<p>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.<p>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? <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/quilt-launch/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/14/quilt-launch/</a>