So much is happening currently that I could not wait for the second episode if I wanted to be able to do it in under 15 minutes.
Podcast: Download (13.5MB)
Subscribe to the Podcast in iTunes
My script (aka “Show Notes”) after the fold below.
Asking Users for a Review
Yves Gonzales asked:
“Would you know what the URL scheme is for writing a review in the AppStore, launched from within an app in iPhone, which opens AppStore? (I want to ask users to leave a review.)”
At first I answered that I did not think this was possible. But Yves, with the help of trusty Mr. Google discovered a better answer than mine. There is in fact a possibility to get the mobile App Store app to open on the review page for a specific app.
Dr. Touch #001 – "Prototype"
This is a prototype of a podcast episode. Please let me know in the comments or on twitter what you think about it.
Podcast: Download (28.6MB)
Subscribe to the Podcast in iTunes
Below the fold I posted my script which doubles as Show Notes with hyperlinks.
MyAppSales 1.0.12 – Fixes
This new release fixes two urgent issues that became pressing today: Downloading and Notifications.
Changes:
- FIXED: Apple modified form field names in iTunes Connect yesterday which would cause permanent “no day options found” error message
- CHANGED: Added code to get the field names from the HTML so that similar changes would not cause this problem any more.
- FIXED: Push Notifications via the Notifications would cease to function. This was a bug on the server-side. Any new subscriber would overwrite the previous subscriber.
- ADDED: If there is a Notifications account set up then the app will now check if it is subscribed at every launch. It will then subscribe if it is not – for some strange reason.
Any version prior to 1.0.12 is no longer able to download reports as of today. So if you put off updating until now then you have no choice any more.
To update either do a fresh checkout or update your existing working copy. If you have not linked your checkout back to the repository please do so and then “SCM – Update Entire Project”.
I’m also announcing the MyAppSales VIP List. If you are a CEO or otherwise important person and cannot be bothered to update your working copy of MyAppSales via XCode then this is for you. I have very limited space available on my device list but for VIPs on this list I will be making AdHoc builds for each future version. You may apply for inclusion via e-mail.
Forbidden Fruit in Apple's APIs
Apple appears to be cracking down on apps these days which are not sticking to the SDK agreement when it comes to using undocumented (read “private”) APIs. I’m attempting to make a list here, so if you have received the usual slap on the wrist for actually using one of the undocumented “features” to make it easier on yourself then please let me know so that I can add it here.
The problem with these undocumented API calls is that up until now Apple did not seem to uniformly care if they where to be found in submitted apps. But lately the reviewers seem to have gotten a static analyzer into their hands. With the help of which they can dump all the method names in your app so they will see if you are naughty or nice.
The official statement is that Apple is working on making more and more undocumented API public. They claim that those APIs are not properly tested and will probably change between OS versions thus breaking apps that rely on them. We’ll see if some of these following methods will eventually really become public.
Add one Week and Skip Weekend
dbarret asks:
“I need some help with this issue and I’m hoping you have the time to point me in the right direction, here goes:
- I want to display today’s date in a UILabel, then with a button event, the tricky part…
- display a date 7 days in the future UNLESS it’s the weekend, then it will display the following Monday.
So basically I want to display ONLY weekdays, no weekends… it that even possible?”
Of course it is possible. In this case it’s not even very difficult.
I assume that you know how to display a UILabel and set its text. So in this article I’ll show how to enhance what we previously learned about adding days to NSDates and add extra code to also skip weekend days.
Smart Developers track their Best Apps with MyAppSales
Sure, you should be doing your coding mostly because you enjoy it and only secondarily for the money. But it’s no sin to get a kick out of checking yesterday’s sales report and seeing how well your babies are performing. My aim for MyAppSales is to be the preferred mobile tool for this purpose.
I lost track some months ago, but I estimate my user base to be around 250 people worldwide. Because I am distributing MyAppSales as source code only this automatically requires users to have at least some fleeting knowledge of how to download source code from a Subversion repository. This is called “positive preselection”. That’s one of the reasons why I can hypothesize that MyAppSales users are smarter than the average Cocoa Touch developer.
I am proud of my baby and I was interested to learn which of the multitude of apps which are being tracked with MyAppSales are considered by their makers to be their crowning achievement . So I’ve asked my customers via Twitter which of their apps they deem to be their masterpiece (so far) and today I’m proudly presenting the best apps of the smartest developers to prove the hypothesis from this article’s title. I call this …
MyAppSales Users’ App Showcase
Entires are sorted in order of submission. All wordings and descriptions are verbatim. The statements are not meant to be reviews but to illustrate which skills, talent and knowledge need to come together to make what a developer has the right to call “his best app”.
So what are those super powers? You’re about to find out …
Ignoring Certificate Errors on NSUrlRequest
Fabian asks:
I’m trying to request data from a website via HTTPS that does not have valid certificate. How can I ignore the certificate error?
When the iPhone makes a HTTPS request it verifies that the certificate used to encrypt the data has a valid root certificate authority. Usually – for big sites – this is provided by Thawte or Verisign or any other recognized Root Certification Authority (CA). A bundle of the public certificates of such CAs is installed in the OS and enables the client to know which CAs are valid.
The problem arises however if you don’t have the funds to purchase such a certificate from a CA, those are expensive. Or sometimes you want to create a certificate for your own use or testing. This is called self-signed certificates. Those are also deemed invalid at first glance, unless you tell your browser to accept these certificates. Or it may be the case of Twitter who seem to have an expired certificate on one of their API servers.
The new Whites – Worthy Polycarbonate Successor
A couple of days ago I got a chance to take a first feel of the new “low-end” MacBook. Well, it’s not so low after all.
For a while it looked like Apple would totally abandon the plasticBook line in favor of making everything out of Aluminium Unibodies. Though there still seems to be a magic line for quite a few Mac buyers at $1000. The cheapest Pro starts at $1199 and personally I would prefer if this would be the Thousand-Dollar-Laptop, but there’s also something psychological or maybe historical that entices Apple to continue the white line.
Maybe it’s because you can more easily affix stickers on a shell that’s made out of Polycarbonate? Hey it’s just a fancy pancy word for Plastic, so it would not mind if your kids stick some cartoon characters on it, next to the glowing Apple logo. Reimagining the fruit as just having been handed by the evil queen to Snow White?
These days when I get asked, “Oliver can you recommend a Laptop?” you can guess my answer: Mac and if you absolutely need Windows, run it in Bootcamp or virtually. Turns out the school director already had been Mac-infected for at home, so my suggestion to also get a Mac for use at school fell on fertile ground.
Being the resident Mac-Maniac I was asked to set up E-Mail, printing and install Office. In turn I asked to be recorded while unboxing the beast.
I had almost forgotten to mention this video on my blog. But then I saw on YouTube that the views already had surpassed my previous video of Unboxing a Magic Mouse. So I felt compelled to also provide an honorable spot on my blog for it.
It appears that while the Magic Mouse is way more hyped as being revolutionary and many people openly discuss if it’s worth it, the audience for white MacBooks is an order of magnitude larger. Or put differently, way more people are looking for the cheapest method to enter the Apple ecosystem, than are in the market for a fancy new mouse.
The White MacBook again pushes the envelope. Now the shell is made of 2 big parts and the top feels like plastic, the bottom like a powdery rubber. No firewire, No more seperate line-in. That’s now combined into the headphone jack. I supposed to be able to use an iPhone headset for remote-control and external Mic.
You now get up to 7 hours worth of battery life with the enclosed big battery. Now all mobile Macs have no user-servicable battery any more. So you will have to bring your favorite toy to the store and get it replaced there in 2-3 years when the retainable charge drops below a useful mobile working endurance. There’s been much discussion about the user-friendlyness of such an approach, but having now doors or stickers on the bottom of a laptop goes a long way to give you even more the feeling that “Mac just works”. Being a Windows administrator by day and seeing lots of notebooks, I honestly believe that even the simplest mobile MacBook blows any other Laptop out of the water in terms of ease-of-use and industrial design.
While we are still waiting for Apple’s answer to the netbook craze – which will not come this holiday season – the new white one is the perfect choice to give as a first Mac to your kids or wife. Daddy can still have a shiny aluminum Pro on his lap and thus be the king of the castle. All coming together in perfect Apple-Harmony for Christmas.
Q&A with iPhone Business Owner Selling for $100,000
After I had laid out my analysis about Brice Milliorn offering his iPhone Apps Portfolio for sale on eBay, I got contacted by the owner/seller himself. He offered to respond to any deeply probing questions I might have. Journalistic curiosity got the better of me and so I constructed the hardest questions that I could think of.
Here are his answers, verbatim and unedited.
1. You claim to produce 86% of your income from the USA, yet none of your apps appear in the top 100 in any category there. What is your explanation for this?
There are 100,000 apps on the app store and my apps pop in & out of the top 100 from time to time. Also obviously a Top 100 is only a 0.001 percent of the total app store product mix, considering there are 100k apps out there now. So just because you don’t show up in the Top 100, doesn’t mean you don’t sell a lot of apps. And furthermore, it is good that my apps are being recognized internationally as well.
2. If your business is still growing (and would grow more with “proper marketing”) how do you explain the steep decline in average royalties for the past 30 days compared to the 60 or 90 days range?
Lack of marketing, lack of updates, lack of attention, and o’yes 100,000 apps on the app store!
3. You say “a person who can market them will have much better results”. How can you predict that if everybody knows that after an initial sales spike there is only a long tail to farm on?
Marketing 101, see below.
4. What’s your factual foundation to claim that “the numbers may be better” as a sales argument?
Marketing 101, and I know this because the spike in sales that you saw (see charts on link list at bottom) was because of the little marketing that I did have time to do. Also a lot of these apps can have focus marketing, meaning they deal with certain areas of the US, so marketing can be focused on that area or that segment of people (i.e. College Students).
5. How did you yourself arrive at the number $100,000?
- Well I like what I am doing, don’t have much time but still like it, for me to give it up, a big number would need to be paid, 100k is that big number.
- However when valuing the business, I think it is a small price to pay. When you value real estate you look out 5-6 years. If you take my sales and look out only 2-3 years, this business will pay for it self easily.
- I also arrived at this number by looking at the two previous cases that I know of (see below for 2 example cases in question #10) of iPhone developers selling their business and after talking to them about their situation. These apps were sold between 5k and 10k each, I am selling 87 apps for 100k, that is $1,149 each.
6. Currently it is unlikely that you will find a buyer. Small guys don’t have the money. Big guys don’t see an audience. What’s your plan B? Would you also be willing to only sell shares of your company to interested investors? Like $10,000 to get 10% of your monthly royalties would be around 36% annual interest.
I wouldn’t say I won’t find a buyer? I have had over 100+ emails inquiring about it further and there are 70+ watchers on ebay right now. My website has had over 3000 hits in just 3 days, the ebay auction has over 3000 page views as well. I have no plan B. Like I said above, I like what I do and to get me to sell it would have to be a BIG number. Not willing to sell shares of company. 100k, take it or leave it.
7. Or how about only asking for a certain percentage in cash and getting paid a percentage from royalties over a certain period?
Again, not willing to do this, 100k take it or leave it, I enjoy what I do.
8. There is a guy named Joe Madox who is seemingly interested. When defending your offer it sounds like he has already made up his mind to try to come up with the sum. Or is a friend of yours?
This guy has asked a lot of questions, more than anyone. He owns a publicly traded company. He was thinking about paying me in shares of his company. I declined, cash only.
9. You are saying you’re selling “your business”. Does this include the legal entity plus bank accounts belonging to it? What’s this “collateral” you speak of?
Selling the assets of the company, meaning the 87 apps, not the name of the LLC or the LLC itself, little confusing I realize. The collateral is all the source files, the website files, images, everything the user needs to run these apps and update these apps and completely relinquish these apps from me! No bank account b/c not getting the LLC, just getting the apps themselves.
10. Based on what legal foundation do you think you can sell your business at all? Sure you can sell a corporation, but how does Apple deal with such a sale?
I am selling my programs, not Apple, not my LLC. There have been previous developers who have sold their business fine, I contacted them to ask questions, got a response from them, said everything went smoothly. Here are those two examples…
Example 1:
Example 2:
http://blog.secondgearsoftware.com/2009/10/bitbq-acquires-fitnesstrack-emergency.html
11. How big is the business risk of your news providers cutting your sports-related apps off?
Well I have fended them off so far but there are a lot of hoops to get around with these apps, a new person starting these types will take weeks and weeks of trial and error with Apple before it ever gets approved. There are also other news providers I could always use I am sure.
12. In Summary I must say that you are doing a very bad job at presenting your business as something worth purchasing. Anybody who has the money to spend on your company also has the financial sense to want to see a good business case. You fail to present it. We all don’t know what will be in 3 years. Apple may still dominate the Smartphone market. Or it may not. And also coming out of the crisis it has become extremely hard for anybody to get a loan for 100k for a business.
I think we all know, the only company to better the iPhone, is Apple. And the economy is/was bad but there is always someone with more money than they need looking for a golden opportunity.
13. Therefore I suggest that you need help in 1) compiling the numbers in a more transparent fashion, 2) maybe even going so far as to providing the apps.db from MyAppSales for download (It does not contain login data, which is on your keychain), or a ZIP of your past financial reports. 3) formulating a plan B as outlined above.
I am NOT going to give out the individual numbers but I will break them down more. The reason I will not give out the individual numbers is because my best selling ones will then be duplicated.
These numbers are again from AppViz as of 11/07/09.
- Rule book Apps 8,712
- Sports Related Apps 12,479
- Friday Night Lights, ANTZ, & iSpy 4,533
Any further questions can be direct to me at jbmjbm22@me.com.
Also further info can be found at the following redirected sites:
JBMJBM, LLC iPhone App Website
JBMJBM, LLC Sell Page (with CHARTS)
JBMJBM, LLC Ebay Sell Page
JBMJBM, LLC Press Release
