This latest shutdown inspired me to write a blog post in response[1] when I first heard about it. Although the reaction is understandable, it's a shame that developers feel compelled to adopt a scorched earth policy when they no longer wish to (or are no longer able to) support their products. These indie apps are often marketed as beautiful, wholesome alternatives to grimy corporate or open source software, but how could I possibly rely on these products for essential tasks like note-taking if they're just going to disappear out from under me in a few years? The idea that software has a lifespan controlled by the developer is, in my opinion, toxic to the market. It's just one of the many things pulling the App Store down, and one of the many downsides of living in a walled garden.
As time goes on, and as I see more and more apps simply disappear off the face of the Earth when developers deem them no longer worthy of their time, I find myself switching over to software that's either backed by large corporations or open sourced, regardless of how clunky it might be compared to "designer" alternatives. My hope is that we soon find a way to collectively monetize the latter. It's simply awful that an app can just "pop" and take so many years of developer and user time with it.
(None of the above is meant to blame Vesper or even comment on the sustainability of the app economy. It's just my sad reaction as a user and, um, app enthusiast. And props to Gruber for the introspective and humble post-mortem.)
It's largely an artifact of the cloud dependency of mobile apps in particular. Every app has a bill someone must pay and a server or other cloud presence someone must maintain, patch, etc.
App stores also contribute in that an app without a dev account ceases to exist and can't be easily installed by anyone. So if the maintainer goes away so does the app.
In the PC era software could live forever. Even closed source PC apps can still easily be run today on emulators.
If I were an indie app dev building a similar product, then in addition to all the questions of business strategy I would try to bake in graceful abandonment from the start. That is: make it a paid sync service (as Gruber would've in hindsight) but build the client such that the sync service could be easily overridden, and pointed at anything that would support a particular API. Then if I have to stop supporting the app, but I have users I still care about, I can just unlock the sync service override, publish the API spec, and give people some time to come up with alternatives.
Though I guess that doesn't solve the problem of fixing bugs in the app itself. Especially if I might not have time to babysit an open-source app.
Are there any examples, in iOS, of apps that were open-sourced and are controlled by some kind of committee or foundation and still kept up-to-date in the app store? What's the lightest-weight version of that that still keeps it totally free?
(I bought Vesper over a year ago and thought it was nice but it didn't become one of my regular-use apps. No biggie: I've long been a DaringFireball reader and I'm happy to throw a few bucks Gruber's way. Plus, I was really hoping the "quality paid apps" model would work, sigh.)
Software going out of fashion shouldn't be an issue if you take care to use applications that have open data formats, or can at least export their data to something usable by other software. Hardware became a commodity; software is on its way there too thanks to its face-paced nature and devaluation from "applications" to trendy, cheap "apps". But your data will likely always be valuable, so whatever you choose to use, make sure to have continuation plans.
There is no vendor lock-in if your data stays yours. Some inconvenience perhaps; the sort of inconvenience that comes with freedom.
In this case the reason is that not only the sync service costs money, but also the custom font they use costs money. So just letting it sit there would still cost money (on top of the fee for the app store itself).
There is a market for "life support" level maintenance of companies if they get large enough. Look at companies like CA buying (and gutting) companies who have lost their mojo. I think there is an opportunity for people to do this with smaller tech companies.
The whole pricing/platform debate seems like a red herring.
> Brent took a job at the excellent Omni Group in September 2014, and from that point onward the writing was on the wall. We could have, and probably should have, shut Vesper down a year ago. But we loved it too much. Or at least I did.
> I even cheat, personally, and run Vesper on my Mac in the iOS Simulator
1. There was only one developer in the company.
2. That developer got a day job (quit).
3. Gruber and the musician partner are stranded with an app they can't update and a Mac app they can't finish on their own.
Gruber clearly loves Vesper. He runs it in the freaking simulator. I really doubt he needed to see huge financial returns to keep at it.
It sounds like the real lesson is: It sucks when your technical cofounder quits.
I made the jump to smartphones late, and I've always used Android, so I missed out on a lot of what iPhones bring to the table. However, I have owned an iPad mini since 2013, and got a few games and (vaguely) 'productivity' apps for it, all free (EDIT: nevermind, I paid for Angry Birds)
But reading contemporary accounts of what Vesper was [1][2], it sounds a lot like yet-another-notetaking app, like Evernote, and lately, Google Keep, albeit one with nice typography and pleasant UX. I sympathize that the price pressure on mobile apps is intense, but could it be that it just didn't offer a compelling enough value, or differentiation from better-known competitors? Perhaps the question is, is there truly space for a dozen different apps that on the surface appear to do the same thing?
Agree 100%. I use the built-in Notes app on iOS with no problem. And it has a macOS app. Gruber is overthinking it -- his app simply wasn't compelling.
Stuff like this is why I try to avoid apps that operate their own syncing services. If Vesper had used some kind of file format you could just keep in your Dropbox, and used that for syncing, all the developers would need to do is stop paying for the proprietary font in order to have zero operating costs.
Obviously you can't avoid all problems this way (Apple and Google and Dropbox sometimes change their APIs, or discontinue them, e.g. Google Reader), but it goes a long way to building confidence that even if the company fails, people can continue to use the app.
> Ultimately, what we should have done once we had versions of the app for both Mac and iOS is switch to a subscription model. Make the apps free downloads on all platforms, and charge somewhere around $15/year for sync accounts. That’s where the industry is going.
I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect users to pay a subscription fee for productivity apps like this. There's been a ton of backlash whenever developers, even small ones, announce subscription pricing (see 1Password[1] and Pushbullet[2]). I get the impression users are starting to feel nickel and dimed every time one of the apps they use switches over to a subscription model and they start looking for alternatives instead of being willing to pay the subscription cost. Simultaneously, obviously maintaining a sync service has a recurring cost and there needs to be a way for the developer to cover those costs, otherwise you end up in this situation where you simply have to shut down.
What users want is the same thing consumers of products have wanted forever: to pay the least and get the most they can.
The whole "free with in-app purchases" model was driven by users' unwillingness to pay for apps. So in some sense this nickel-and-dime thing is a self-inflicted wound. On the other hand, (we) developers ought to be smart enough to figure out how to handle that.
Evernote does well, because it offers ongoing value for that subscription fee. That's the key - are you offering a lot of value? If so, then subscription fees are fine. If not, then you feel like you are being nickle and dimed. Other obvious candidates (some of which don't charge) for valuable subscription are Economist, NYT, WSJ, gmail, whatsapp.
And then there is that third class of App, the ones where subscriptions don't offer much value, but honestly, we use the apps so often, we're happy to pay to support them (Overcast, Tweetbot, MyFitnessPal are ones I would put in this class)
If you think that you will attract enough new customers that you will make more money under a subscription model than a traditional paid model, there is no reason to keep the existing users happy -- if they leave, they have already paid you all they were ever willing to pay, so you aren't missing out on any money from them. (If they aren't willing to pay for a subscription, they probably wouldn't have paid a one-time fee for the next version of the product either. These are the kind of people who buy once and don't upgrade.) Even if they switch to a competitor's product, it's not like you lost any money you would have gotten from them.
In hindsight, I am now convinced this plan was fundamentally flawed. The market for paid productivity apps for iOS is simply too difficult.
When even a stalwart Apple partisan like Gruber will concede this you know things have gone horribly wrong in the iOS app market. The bulk of the blame here lies with Apple and their stewardship of the app store. They can push the iPad as real productivity device all they want but until they do something to make selling anything but games on the appstore worthwhile they're wasting their time.
Is it really just the iOS App Store though? People expect everything to be free nowadays: news, email, productivity apps like Google Docs, games. Don't think you can pin this problem on Apple.
Maybe if Gruber hadn't been such a huge voice for reform of the app store, I'd share in your glee that a "partisan" was proven wrong in some way. But he's been consistently on the side of developers while acknowledging that Apple will always put its interests first.
I'm not sure if you actually read Gruber, but he's been critical of Apple when it comes to the app store on a number of fronts over the years.
You're incorrectly attributing the failure of paid productivity apps to the app store's structure, when in fact it is entirely unrelated. It just so turns out that the market for paid productivity apps on iOS is small, no matter what Apple does with the app store.
I'm sure that the AppStore could be improved, but I doubt it could have the effect people imagine (i. e. doubling revenue or more). Most of the software people used to buy can now be replaced for free (i. e. google docs, and.. nope that's it). If you adjust for that, I'd guess the software market is actually larger than it has ever been.
Ultimately the only people who can differentiate between "Generic Notes App #138" and Vesper, are people who have been trained to care about details that most people don't care about, and that's a very small market. Most people care far more about the fact that an app syncs to Dropbox, or lets you set a background picture, than one that animates screen transitions in exactly the right way.
I'm sad to see another indie Apple-ecosystem developer close down, but I saw this coming as soon as Vesper was announced, and I'm not in the least bit surprised. Unfortunately too many of the Mac/iOS old-school community go for the "I know best" + waterfall development approach, rather than trying to figure out the product-market fit. I say this as someone who has worked in both an old-school Mac OS company, and startups who have been far more agile.
That's what you get when your app design/development philosophy is based on Steve Jobs.
This is one of the most annoying things about the Apple ecosystem. People have heard that Steve Jobs was proven to know better than everyone most of the time. They've heard that Jobs didn't care what was popular, he just knew what people would like before they even realized it. Apple fanboys like to fancy themselves similarly.
I don't think the myth was true for Jobs and I definitely don't think it's true for Random Apple Fanboy #2,764,241 (and yes, John Gruber is included in this, though his number may be slightly lower).
It's really irritating when developers approach their audience as sheep to be led rather than customers to be pleased.
I think there's still a need for a simple/practical notes app. Apple's built in app has improved tremendously since so it's hard to judge but IMO there's still a big enough market that extends beyond John's followers.
But... an app that has monthly expenses but only charges a one time fee can't really be sustainable. It's completely misaligned, and that's why it failed.
Pardon me while I go off on a bit of a rant. I've played with Vesper and it is a fine app. It is also the perfect example of the power of the web.
There isn't anything that Vesper is doing that can't be done on the web. You could even write Vesper as a single-page app, and use a ServiceWorker with Firebase or PouchDB or whatever to run the sync. The infrastructure to do all this is very, very easy to do on the web.
This is not rocket science-- this is how far the web has come in a very short time. The UI could absolutely be the same as the iOS native app and while you might have a bit of scrolling hesitation on the interface, it would be perfectly accessible.
Suddenly you're on every mobile device, Android, iOS, iPad, desktop, whatever. The absolute hardest and most time-consuming endeavor would be to get the Stripe account set up for the one-time "in-app" payment to get sync working.
John and Brent and Dave made a fine app in 2012, but I would certainly hope that the next Vesper starts out life as a web app.
Unfortunately, I don't think I've ever used a web app that feels anywhere as good as a native app. You can feel it in every interaction.
You say "a bit of scrolling hesitation". I say that... and janky button taps... and broken back/forward navigation... and browser chrome always getting in the way... and random divs constantly getting selected along with text... and mistakenly-tapped links taking me who-knows-where... etc. Plus: if the developer decides to shut down their web app, it's actually done, forever, with no recourse.
I'm the sole developer of InstaPDF (https://instapdf.com) and have been so for 4.5 years. It's a completly self funded project that I am working on in my spare time. Even then, my cost do not exceed $35 a month.
However the things I've learnt during building and maintaining it have been invaluable and helped me in so many other projects.
I don't get how running a sync server or adapting the product with in-app purchases would require too much time. When it is a labour of love and you still use it every day - why shut it down? Is he going to reverse his decision once it gets all the attention with the news of it shutting down? How can it cost so much when all it does is sync text? Why not hook into CloudKit for sync?
These are questions I would much rather prefer that he addressed
OT, I'm always reluctant to sign up for products/services that hide their pricing. I looked for it on your website and found nothing. You should fix that.
And how about the opportunity costs of working on your project?
One of the big selling points of Vesper was the design aesthetics. There's a very real cost to that in the form of license fees for fonts.
So sure, they could replace the fonts with free fonts, turn off sync, and keep distributing the app. At that point it's a different product, one that they aren't proud of.
There is a lot of price pressure on iOS apps, people expect them to be free or at least under $2. At that price you need to sell a lot of apps to make a profit, and probably very few apps reach that level. I've tried the opposite, selling a higher priced app and accepting the much lower sales numbers, and I think it has resulted in a better return than going low cost, but it's still not earning enough to grow. I do look at the prices that desktop apps get with envy, so maybe it is time to go back to that market? The idea about designing for mobile first though, that makes a lot of sense.
John mentions having to redesign for iOS 7, but the reality that there are many of these events that mean that you have to keep developing. New iOS versions, new screen sizes, WatchOS, (tvOS), new input methods, updating UI, all add up to quite a bit of work just to stand still feature wise.
I think the days of making money on the App Store are gone.
Would you not build a web version first? I mean, you can use that on both a phone and a desktop.
While I'm reading this I can't help thinking that this is a great example of a bunch of developers who are more interested in building an iPhone app and are using a product idea as as excuse to do so.
But hey, if you don't try you certainly fail. I have been there too. Live and learn.
It is interesting to me how someone who is so knowledgable about Apple could make such basic mistakes about his own app strategy. Lots of people make apps that are not popular but Gruber is someone who has seen them all come and go and yet he built something that was just not compelling.
This project always felt to me like him wanting to prove that the App Store was still a place for the classic sort of high quality artisanal app you associate with the Jaguar to Leopard era of OS X (or the first 12 months or so of the App Store before it started the race to the bottom).
Think it's time for even die hard Apple fans to accept that the App Store is now the same low quality garbage dump of low income crapware that for many years they claimed the Android ecosystem was.
Nice app, but he nails the issue with not having a desktop app. I guess mobile first cannot mean mobile only (yet?). Lots of other Markdown-enabled note taking apps that work with Dropbox that allow you to use one app on mobile and another on desktop. I like nvALT on desktop and Drafts or 1Writer on iOS.
> In the pre-iOS 7 era, building an iPad app was like building a second app.
You know, it's funny Gruber was bitten on the arse by this when he was amongst the people who flung poo at Android on tablets for not forcing people to rewrite applications for the tablet form factor.
Does it strike anyone else as weird that one of the two costs driving them out of business was the licensing costs of a font? Jeez man, I think good design is important too but make a compromise somewhere.
Also, fixed cost sales vs unbounded maintenance costs is just a doomed business model from the start.
I really like open source projects for certain things, especially these productivity apps that may bring their little twists and design flair but ultimately end up holding a ton of user data. I'm pretty sure Vesper users would love to be able to easily move their data to a less beautiful (bye Ideal Sans!) but still functional alternative right now, without a massive conversion/migration process.
> The biggest factor is that we have recurring costs: the sync server and the licensing fees for Ideal Sans, Vesper’s typeface. We’re losing money every month.
The costs of running the server I can understand, but if the app had value then surely changing the font to a similar but free alternative would not have made customers stop using it?
[+] [-] archagon|9 years ago|reply
As time goes on, and as I see more and more apps simply disappear off the face of the Earth when developers deem them no longer worthy of their time, I find myself switching over to software that's either backed by large corporations or open sourced, regardless of how clunky it might be compared to "designer" alternatives. My hope is that we soon find a way to collectively monetize the latter. It's simply awful that an app can just "pop" and take so many years of developer and user time with it.
(None of the above is meant to blame Vesper or even comment on the sustainability of the app economy. It's just my sad reaction as a user and, um, app enthusiast. And props to Gruber for the introspective and humble post-mortem.)
[1]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2016/08/21/tool-reliance/
[+] [-] elsurudo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|9 years ago|reply
App stores also contribute in that an app without a dev account ceases to exist and can't be easily installed by anyone. So if the maintainer goes away so does the app.
In the PC era software could live forever. Even closed source PC apps can still easily be run today on emulators.
[+] [-] biztos|9 years ago|reply
Though I guess that doesn't solve the problem of fixing bugs in the app itself. Especially if I might not have time to babysit an open-source app.
Are there any examples, in iOS, of apps that were open-sourced and are controlled by some kind of committee or foundation and still kept up-to-date in the app store? What's the lightest-weight version of that that still keeps it totally free?
(I bought Vesper over a year ago and thought it was nice but it didn't become one of my regular-use apps. No biggie: I've long been a DaringFireball reader and I'm happy to throw a few bucks Gruber's way. Plus, I was really hoping the "quality paid apps" model would work, sigh.)
[+] [-] wvh|9 years ago|reply
There is no vendor lock-in if your data stays yours. Some inconvenience perhaps; the sort of inconvenience that comes with freedom.
[+] [-] jvdh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arielm|9 years ago|reply
I wrote about it as well https://arielmichaeli.com/my-thoughts-on-vespers-unfortunate...
Ultimately a lot of the sadness comes from what looks like missed opportunity IMO, which is really tough to predict.
[+] [-] mathattack|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] admax88q|9 years ago|reply
Free Software puts the user first. All other forms do not.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bouncingsoul|9 years ago|reply
> Brent took a job at the excellent Omni Group in September 2014, and from that point onward the writing was on the wall. We could have, and probably should have, shut Vesper down a year ago. But we loved it too much. Or at least I did.
> I even cheat, personally, and run Vesper on my Mac in the iOS Simulator
1. There was only one developer in the company.
2. That developer got a day job (quit).
3. Gruber and the musician partner are stranded with an app they can't update and a Mac app they can't finish on their own.
Gruber clearly loves Vesper. He runs it in the freaking simulator. I really doubt he needed to see huge financial returns to keep at it.
It sounds like the real lesson is: It sucks when your technical cofounder quits.
[+] [-] niftich|9 years ago|reply
But reading contemporary accounts of what Vesper was [1][2], it sounds a lot like yet-another-notetaking app, like Evernote, and lately, Google Keep, albeit one with nice typography and pleasant UX. I sympathize that the price pressure on mobile apps is intense, but could it be that it just didn't offer a compelling enough value, or differentiation from better-known competitors? Perhaps the question is, is there truly space for a dozen different apps that on the surface appear to do the same thing?
[1] https://www.macstories.net/reviews/vesper-review-collect-you...
[2] http://drippler.com/drip/best-note-taking-apps-iphone-and-ip...
[+] [-] valleyer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twblalock|9 years ago|reply
Obviously you can't avoid all problems this way (Apple and Google and Dropbox sometimes change their APIs, or discontinue them, e.g. Google Reader), but it goes a long way to building confidence that even if the company fails, people can continue to use the app.
[+] [-] nodamage|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect users to pay a subscription fee for productivity apps like this. There's been a ton of backlash whenever developers, even small ones, announce subscription pricing (see 1Password[1] and Pushbullet[2]). I get the impression users are starting to feel nickel and dimed every time one of the apps they use switches over to a subscription model and they start looking for alternatives instead of being willing to pay the subscription cost. Simultaneously, obviously maintaining a sync service has a recurring cost and there needs to be a way for the developer to cover those costs, otherwise you end up in this situation where you simply have to shut down.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/4vziyr/1password_lau...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/3t5mrb/pushbullet_...
[+] [-] sidlls|9 years ago|reply
The whole "free with in-app purchases" model was driven by users' unwillingness to pay for apps. So in some sense this nickel-and-dime thing is a self-inflicted wound. On the other hand, (we) developers ought to be smart enough to figure out how to handle that.
[+] [-] ghshephard|9 years ago|reply
And then there is that third class of App, the ones where subscriptions don't offer much value, but honestly, we use the apps so often, we're happy to pay to support them (Overcast, Tweetbot, MyFitnessPal are ones I would put in this class)
[+] [-] twblalock|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|9 years ago|reply
When even a stalwart Apple partisan like Gruber will concede this you know things have gone horribly wrong in the iOS app market. The bulk of the blame here lies with Apple and their stewardship of the app store. They can push the iPad as real productivity device all they want but until they do something to make selling anything but games on the appstore worthwhile they're wasting their time.
[+] [-] reitoei|9 years ago|reply
Uh, maybe the app just wasn't that good, or someone made a better/cheaper one.
The only reason this is even being talked about is because of who the author is.
[+] [-] perishabledave|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elicash|9 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if you actually read Gruber, but he's been critical of Apple when it comes to the app store on a number of fronts over the years.
[+] [-] mikeryan|9 years ago|reply
I'm totally unclear how you made the leap from a difficult market for productivity apps on iOS to this being a app store problem.
[+] [-] vecter|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiny|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt4077|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danpalmer|9 years ago|reply
Ultimately the only people who can differentiate between "Generic Notes App #138" and Vesper, are people who have been trained to care about details that most people don't care about, and that's a very small market. Most people care far more about the fact that an app syncs to Dropbox, or lets you set a background picture, than one that animates screen transitions in exactly the right way.
I'm sad to see another indie Apple-ecosystem developer close down, but I saw this coming as soon as Vesper was announced, and I'm not in the least bit surprised. Unfortunately too many of the Mac/iOS old-school community go for the "I know best" + waterfall development approach, rather than trying to figure out the product-market fit. I say this as someone who has worked in both an old-school Mac OS company, and startups who have been far more agile.
That's what you get when your app design/development philosophy is based on Steve Jobs.
[+] [-] cookiecaper|9 years ago|reply
I don't think the myth was true for Jobs and I definitely don't think it's true for Random Apple Fanboy #2,764,241 (and yes, John Gruber is included in this, though his number may be slightly lower).
It's really irritating when developers approach their audience as sheep to be led rather than customers to be pleased.
[+] [-] arielm|9 years ago|reply
But... an app that has monthly expenses but only charges a one time fee can't really be sustainable. It's completely misaligned, and that's why it failed.
I blogged about it here https://arielmichaeli.com/my-thoughts-on-vespers-unfortunate...
[+] [-] mark242|9 years ago|reply
There isn't anything that Vesper is doing that can't be done on the web. You could even write Vesper as a single-page app, and use a ServiceWorker with Firebase or PouchDB or whatever to run the sync. The infrastructure to do all this is very, very easy to do on the web.
This is not rocket science-- this is how far the web has come in a very short time. The UI could absolutely be the same as the iOS native app and while you might have a bit of scrolling hesitation on the interface, it would be perfectly accessible.
Suddenly you're on every mobile device, Android, iOS, iPad, desktop, whatever. The absolute hardest and most time-consuming endeavor would be to get the Stripe account set up for the one-time "in-app" payment to get sync working.
John and Brent and Dave made a fine app in 2012, but I would certainly hope that the next Vesper starts out life as a web app.
[+] [-] archagon|9 years ago|reply
You say "a bit of scrolling hesitation". I say that... and janky button taps... and broken back/forward navigation... and browser chrome always getting in the way... and random divs constantly getting selected along with text... and mistakenly-tapped links taking me who-knows-where... etc. Plus: if the developer decides to shut down their web app, it's actually done, forever, with no recourse.
[+] [-] mmackh|9 years ago|reply
However the things I've learnt during building and maintaining it have been invaluable and helped me in so many other projects.
I don't get how running a sync server or adapting the product with in-app purchases would require too much time. When it is a labour of love and you still use it every day - why shut it down? Is he going to reverse his decision once it gets all the attention with the news of it shutting down? How can it cost so much when all it does is sync text? Why not hook into CloudKit for sync?
These are questions I would much rather prefer that he addressed
[+] [-] ww520|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markdown|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criddell|9 years ago|reply
And how about the opportunity costs of working on your project?
One of the big selling points of Vesper was the design aesthetics. There's a very real cost to that in the form of license fees for fonts.
So sure, they could replace the fonts with free fonts, turn off sync, and keep distributing the app. At that point it's a different product, one that they aren't proud of.
[+] [-] voltagex_|9 years ago|reply
Okay, what's the cost/benefit for buying a custom font for an app? I'd never even have considered it as something I should do.
[+] [-] jdswain|9 years ago|reply
John mentions having to redesign for iOS 7, but the reality that there are many of these events that mean that you have to keep developing. New iOS versions, new screen sizes, WatchOS, (tvOS), new input methods, updating UI, all add up to quite a bit of work just to stand still feature wise.
I think the days of making money on the App Store are gone.
[+] [-] pan69|9 years ago|reply
While I'm reading this I can't help thinking that this is a great example of a bunch of developers who are more interested in building an iPhone app and are using a product idea as as excuse to do so.
But hey, if you don't try you certainly fail. I have been there too. Live and learn.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|9 years ago|reply
And provide an inferior experience on both. I'm just one user, but I would have been reluctant to buy it.
[+] [-] gkanai|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intoverflow2|9 years ago|reply
Think it's time for even die hard Apple fans to accept that the App Store is now the same low quality garbage dump of low income crapware that for many years they claimed the Android ecosystem was.
[+] [-] BooneJS|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|9 years ago|reply
You know, it's funny Gruber was bitten on the arse by this when he was amongst the people who flung poo at Android on tablets for not forcing people to rewrite applications for the tablet form factor.
[+] [-] karmajunkie|9 years ago|reply
Also, fixed cost sales vs unbounded maintenance costs is just a doomed business model from the start.
[+] [-] nalllar|9 years ago|reply
This is probably not a good thing. Video by Louis Rossmann: "Believing in luck compromises the influence we have over our own life."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q6hpsGjcIo
[+] [-] jbk|9 years ago|reply
That sounds quite difficult to market and sell, when there are many alternatives, like Evernote, or OneNote that are close to free.
[+] [-] LVB|9 years ago|reply
I ran into this with todo.txt on Android. The flagship app (https://github.com/ginatrapani/todo.txt-android) was basically abandoned, but it is open source and some time ago was forked into what became an active--and better--alternative (https://github.com/mpcjanssen/simpletask-android).
[+] [-] unfunco|9 years ago|reply
The costs of running the server I can understand, but if the app had value then surely changing the font to a similar but free alternative would not have made customers stop using it?