I can’t express how much fun I had with Mat & Sean (& Red Bull energy drink) making this app.

Recently I received a note from the company that Fresh Comics had some issues on the Kindle Fire:

Dear Audacious Software,

We have recently evaluated your app’s compatibility with Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. This added test process is here to verify that every app available for download on Kindle Fire will provide our customers with a high-quality experience on their devices. Your existing submission of Fresh Comics has compatibility issues with Kindle Fire. We would like to keep your app set to Compatible with Kindle Fire while we wait for you to submit an update that addresses the following issues:

Fresh Comics exhibits consistent, reproducible instances of hard-locking the device, force closing, or crashing when tested for compatibility on Kindle Fire.  When users press the map button on an individual shop’s page, the app force closes.  Steps to reproduce: 1. On the Shops tab, select a shop.  2. Press the map button to see the force close.

A logcat file is attached.

Please review these issues and update your submission to address the incompatibility. You may find it helpful to review the Kindle Fire FAQ in the Amazon Appstore Developer Portal.

To manage your account details, as well as any marketing material updates for your app, please use the Developer Portal. If you have any questions about your app, the Contact Us link in the Developer Portal is the best way to get in touch with us.

We thank you for your continued support of the Amazon Appstore.

Best regards,

Amazon Appstore Account Team

Their note included a stack trace that pinpointed a problem I had missed since I had MapQuest installed on my Fire as the default mapping app. I deleted MapQuest, and replicated the crash as described. A few minutes later, I had a fix submitted to the respective Android app stores.

I bring up this bug report as something I really appreciate as a developer. There are too many app stores out there (who will remain nameless) that treat the app store approval process as a CYA maneuver and only do the cursory testing of apps before accepting them into their marketplace. This note from Amazon demonstrated to me that they do take seriously the quality of apps on their platform and are willing to reach out to developers to address issues like the one identified.

Great job, Amazon!

The only excuse that I can offer for the delay for making this news public (months later) is that I’ve been extremely busy and it’s only been recently that I’ve had the mental oxygen to begin writing again. Here are some of the projects that have been keeping me away from blogging:

Power2Switch: While I resigned my CTO position at the company in October, the company remains a very active client to this day. In last couple of months, I’ve helped them improve the Django infrastructure I created over the summer and the company is now serving customers in a more markets than ever before. We’ve increasingly automated the backend, allowing Power2Switch to more responsively serve more customers while it extends its offerings into additional markets and states.

Meeps: In October, I began working with an old friend on a new product he was building in Boulder. The result is Meeps, an iOS application for topical conversations with anyone in the world. Working with the Meeps team, I had a blast pushing the envelope of iOS development to implement their vision for group conversations. iOS users: Get it from the App Store now.

Fresh Comics: Windows Phone 7 became the next major platform for Fresh Comics with an initial release of the app on the Windows Phone Marketplace back in January. The Windows Phone launch was the most successful thus far, and the WP7 application remains under active development along with its iOS and Android siblings. WP7 users: Get it from the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Research clients: Over the past several months, I have helped researchers create tools for understanding language on Twitter and I built an experimental workbench for survey researchers. The beginning of this year saw a major revision to the SMS Bot text messaging system as it is now being deployed in medical contexts to better understand how patients recover after surgeries and other major operations.

2012 is shaping up to be a promising year as the external work pipeline fills up and I plan ahead for developing more internal products. I’ll do my best to avoid another long hiatus and get back to updating this space with useful content as time permits.

While I was travelling the country over the past couple of weeks, I’d also been negotiating for a new position in a local start-up, Power2Switch. I met the Power2Switch founders a couple of months ago courtesy of a Princeton alumni mailing list, and I was impressed with what they were trying to do to help folks manage their electrical usage & associated costs. Given my work on Shion, it became apparent that we were both working toward the same ultimate goals, but approaching the problem from different angles. I invited Phil Nevels & Seyi Fabode (the Power2Switch founders) to my Shion testing lab (also known as my home) for a demo of what I was doing in the home automation space and we hit it off.

Seyi & Phil founded Power2Switch back in 2008 and quickly built a compelling business that attracted the attention of the Chicago investor community and they were successful in being selected for Excelerate Lab’s summer startup incubator program. They approached me about coming aboard, and I’ve accepted the role as Power2Switch’s technical cofounder. While I’ve been approached several times with similar pitches, Power2Switch has been the first one to “hook” me. I appreciate that the company is addressing a very timely problem for everyday folks (high electricity prices) and that I can explain what the company does to my friends & family back home.  :-)

When we were discussing me joining the company, I warned Phil & Seyi that I like to push the envelope of what’s possible technologically, and that I’m wouldn’t be content stopping at just matching electricity buyers with electricity retailers, and to my surprise this is exactly what they wanted. I can’t say more about what might be in the pipeline, but I do believe that this business is on the verge of making a major impact on people around the nation. In addition to joining a great team as a technologist, this is a great opportunity for me to expand my experience and abilities as an entrepreneur as well.

Thus, I’ll be joining the Power2Switch team fulltime on June 1 (tomorrow), and I’m quite excited to be getting started an all of the numerous things we need to do to make a major positive impact both ecologically and economically. However, in order to give this effort my full attention, I’m putting Audacious Software on pause for a while. I will not be seeking any further consulting engagements for the foreseeable future. I will be working with current clients to wrap up any existing obligations by the end of the summer.

Furthermore, most current Audacious Software projects will enter maintenance mode for the foreseeable future. This means that I’ll continue to update and maintain my current crop of apps; but I will be constrained to what extent I can expand their respective “empires” aggressively. For example, I had been evaluating an expansion to the Fresh Comics project that would use the data I’m already collecting weekly to sell web-based services to comic retailers. Plans for this offering are now on hold indefinitely.

In terms of Shion & Shion Online, I will be sharing more details about that product’s fate soon. I will continue to maintain and develop the system, and I hope to share some exciting details about its future later this summer. For the moment, its current development will continue as before (if not a bit better, as I have several updates that I need to push out).

I’m quite excited about this opportunity and look forward to sharing more as timing permits. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below or send me an e-mail at chris@audacious-software.com.

For new users of Fresh Comics and potential business partners and customers, I wanted to spend a few minutes explaining the Fresh Comics business model and what I’m trying to achieve with the app(s).

If you haven’t already, please head over to the Fresh Comics website to get directions to your favorite app store (iOS & Android). Download the app – it’s free – and give it a spin.

Done? Good.

As you can see, Fresh Comics is a completely free app that lists the week’s latest comic releases as well as provides some nice features for enthusiasts looking to stay abreast of their favorite creators, titles, and publishers. This functionality is all free and I have no plans to start charging for any of that.

However, in its current incarnation, Fresh Comics is missing a vital component – the store finder. This is a feature that is implemented, but won’t be available until either I can license a database of US comic book stores or build one myself. I’m currently talking to some groups about licensing theirs, and I’m confident that this feature will see the light of day soon.

In anticipation of that, I wanted to provide a brief explanation of the store finder feature as this will be how it will support the app financially.

My goal for this feature is to create a win-win situation for comic shop owners and comic book enthusiasts. When the store locator is pushed out, it will look like the screenshot below:

In short, the store locator is a two-tiered list. The bottom group consists of all of the stores in the local area, sorted by distance from the user’s current location. The design goal behind this is to enable motivated customers (comic readers who want the latest releases now) to find a suitable shop close to them. I have no plans to charge comic shop owners to be listed in this section.

The top group – “Special Offers & Deals” – is where Fresh Comics pays its bills. How this works is simple – if you’re a local comic shop running a special promotion or sale, you can use Fresh Comics as a channel to get the word out. Your store listing will be bumped up from the free “Nearby Stores” section into the premium “Special Offers & Deals” section that the user will see first. This listing in Fresh Comics will cost a flat rate per day.

If a user clicks through to a store listing in either group, the app displays a page with information about the store:

What I want to present here is the name of the store, any relevant contact information, and an image of the storefront to help customers find and visit the store. This also includes hours of operation.

If the user clicks the button in the upper-right of the interface, the app presents several options to connect with the store:

Depending upon the contact information available, this feature will present the customer options to view the store’s website, view it in the local Maps application (with driving directions), call the store directly (on compatible devices), or to send an e-mail. The more options that a store provides for customer contact, the higher the odds of finding the mode that the customer prefers.

Again, this functionality is provided to all stores for no cost.

For the stores that are running a paid promotion, their spot in the store list changes, as well as including a badge on their store page:

If the customer clicks the badge, they will see the coupon on their device:

The terms of the deal are completely under the store’s control, and an optional coupon code can be added so that the store can track the effectiveness of the promotion at purchase time.

So, that’s the current missing functionality. It’s implemented and is working – I’m waiting to complete the process of acquiring or building a database of the stores to populate this section.

In terms of the advertising rates, currently I’m planning to launch this feature with basic text-based promotions for a rate of $1 per day that your promotion is available to local users within the app. This is sufficient for me to meet my financial goals, and I think it’s a very reasonable rate to reach a group of savvy and motivated customers every week.

If you’re a comic store owner and would like me to contact you when this launches, please send an e-mail to shops@freshcomics.us and I’ll be happy to send out an ad kit when this feature is ready. If you have any thoughts on how I can improve the utility of this feature to send more customers your way, I’m very open to suggestions.

As a lifelong comic fan myself, I’m very excited to be in a position to help fellow readers keep up with the latest releases as well as creatively use mobile and networked technology to improve the prospects of the local comic shop.

So, what’s the problem?

The fundamental issues are conditions of listing that book through Apple’s service. There are two important conditions that Apple is enforcing:

1. Apple takes 30% of the price of the purchase as a fee.
2. The vendor must sell the content at the same or better price through Apple’s service.

Given that content-selling apps must implement the in-app purchases as per Apple’s instruction (or risk being booted from the App Store), this means that the vendor’s profit margin on in-app purchases just became X – 30%. If the vendor previously had a 45% profit margin, it’s now 15%. If the margin was 30%, the vendor makes no profit. If the profit margin is less than 30%, the vendor is now losing money.

Given that the Apple cut is a hefty chunk of any sale, some content vendors like Amazon and Barnes & Noble elected to not participate using in-app purchases and to implement and manage their own payment and delivery infrastructure. This was a useful compromise: the vendors kept their original profit margins and customers enjoyed lower prices. Other companies like Comixology elected to use the in-app purchases and passed onto their customers a simple and easy-to-use purchasing option tied to an iTunes account.

When the story broke a couple of weeks ago that Apple rejected Sony’s Reader app because of these new conditions, I assumed that someone reported the story incorrectly. Given the new e-book agency model that Apple pushed with the introduction of iBooks, for any book sold, a fixed 70% of the purchase price goes to the publisher (Del Rey, for example), and the remaining 30% goes to the bookseller (Amazon, for example). Now, I’m not privy to the negotiations in progress at the moment, but the combination of Apple’s demand for 30% and the agency model suggests that under the standard agreement, Amazon, Sony, and Barnes & Noble cannot make a profit on any content sold through the in-app purchasing. Thus their nonparticipation up to this point.

As an e-book reader, I’m very pleased that both the Kindle and Nook apps are available on my iPad. The iPad isn’t my preferred reading device, but I like having my books available there when I leave my dedicated reader elsewhere. I’ve bought into the Kindle and Nook ecosystem primarily because of the contents’ ubiquity. In contrast, I’ve avoided Apple’s bookstore because I like reading on other devices more than the iPad.

So, what’s going to happen to these apps? If Apple’s recent policy changes take effect, there are three options:

1. The third-party content vendors keep their apps and prices as is, and surrender the 30% to Apple.
   
   (status quo outcome for users, bad outcome for vendors.)
2. The third-party content vendors raise their prices by 43% to maintain their existing profit margins.
   
   (Bad outcome for consumers, status quo outcome for vendors).
3. The third-party content vendors abandon their apps and users on Apple devices.
   (Bad outcome for consumers, bad outcome for vendors.)

Given that I think no business will accept the first option, we’re left with two remaining possibilities: one that’s bad for consumers and retains the status quo for vendors, and the other that is bad for both consumers and vendors.

Apple fans explain the rationale for this change by arguing that in-app purchases will be better for users by being tied to their existing iTunes account and there will no longer be a need to leave the app to buy content. They also argue that Apple is entitled to a “finder’s fee” for bringing the user to the content in the first place. Let’s look at these two rationales:

“In-app purchasing is more user-friendly.” First of all, let’s recall that the original reason that apps like the Kindle required bumping out of the app to buy content was because Apple prohibited vendors from implementing an in-app purchasing mechanisms of their own. Despite Apple’s erection of this artificial barrier, Amazon and Barnes & Noble created sufficiently usable mechanisms of purchasing the content that the platforms have flourished on the iOS devices.

If Apple is only acting on behalf of the user, they can eliminate the third-party in-app purchase prohibition and iOS developers can build a better native experience without the need to pay prices inflated by Apple’s “tax”. I believe that Apple’s in-app purchasing functionality is valuable for developers who want it. 30% is a reasonable fee to pay if you are unwilling or unable to set up your own payment infrastructure. The major problem is making that mandatory for everyone, regardless whether someone else can process payments better (e.g. Amazon).

Consequently, I believe that Apple is trying to address a problem that is entirely of their own making. If the goal is user-friendliness, offer the in-app purchases, but also allow third party to roll their own within their apps.

“Apple deserves a finder’s fee.” Apple is currently justifying their new policy by claiming that since they have such a great platform, they deserve a reward for bringing the user to the app. They’ve stated that vendors can keep their own external processing systems and keep all of the profit from users referred to from outside.

I would actually be fine with that, if a couple of things were different. If Apple allowed vendors to inflate the price of their in-app purchases to cover Apple’s commission, I wouldn’t be writing this blog entry. Similarly, if vendors were able to opt-out of any Apple promotion in exchange for a waiver for the 30%, that would be kosher to me as well. The problem is that by dictating that apps must be delivered through their App Store (& subject to Apple’s final approval) and that prices can’t differ, Apple is basically imposing their “finder’s fee” on everyone else. In some cases, the vendor will keep that fee, and in others, the vendor will surrender it to Apple. In all cases, prices for the consumer will go up to cover that “fee”.

Furthermore, I find Apple’s assumption that the App Store is a great marketing vehicle to be a bit wrong. As I’ve documented before, app stores are terrible markets. The limited screen real-estate combined with an overabundance of apps and a poor search interface makes the App Store useless (as a discovery tool) for the vast majority of apps out there. Sure, a handful of apps will rise to the top and rake in the riches, but I’d sooner bet on a random actor becoming a superstar in Hollywood than make a similar bet on a random app becoming a hit in Apple’s marketplace.

Since the App Store is a poor vehicle for marketing and promoting an app, developers still have to set up external resources to bump the app up into people’s attention. This means (at a minimum) an external website and lots of promotion outside of the App Store. If Apple’s store was as good as they claim, none of this would be necessary. So, for the average app, what is it getting for that 30% fee: basically nothing. This is why I’ve chosen to opt out of the Mac App Store altogether – a choice that I don’t enjoy with the mobile platform.

~

Looking a little closer to home, at Audacious Software, I have two projects in the pipeline that will be going out to iOS users in the next month or two: Shion Online and Fresh Comics. Given my disdain for the App Store revenue model, I’ve built both apps with an eye towards generating recurring income using my own payment and marketing infrastructure. Shion Online will be monetized using monthly subscriptions, while Fresh Comics will be ad-supported in a very novel way.

When crafting these business models, I did so under a certain expectation that the app market rules were somewhat settled. I doubt that Apple will be coming after me in the next couple of months for their cut of Shion subscriptions (it’s not considered content – yet) or their cut of the Fresh Comics advertising revenue. However, a couple of weeks ago, I also thought that they weren’t going after Sony’s Reader app. Since I think Apple’s being very disingenuous with their reasons for the need to make these policy changes, I don’t trust them as a reliable business partner. If Apple is successful in extorting their fee from Amazon and the other vendors, I don’t see what would stop them from extending that policy further and trying to take a 30% cut of ALL commerce and economic activity on iOS devices.

“But, Apple built iOS and they are entitled this,” some have been arguing. I disagree. I paid to join the iOS ecosystem by purchasing Apple hardware. Fine. As a developer, I pay Apple a yearly fee for the right to submit apps to their App Store. Fine. However, at which point are the iOS applications I purchase or build considered “mine”? I’ve paid my fees and my dues – is Apple ever going to get out of the way?

In recent months, I’ve been recounting to friends that I really miss the days when I could be a genuine Apple fan. I miss Apple, the computer maker, but now I’m rooting for the rest of the market to smack them down over this greed. I never thought that this day would come, but I’m now wishing for Real Networks to knock some sense into Apple.

Sad.

• Reverse engineering home automation controllers at Shion Online. I’ll be speaking about Shion at Northwestern University’s School of Continuing Studies this evening.
• Polishing and tuning Fresh Comics for its App Store submission later this week.
• Working with a client on an HTML5 imaging app.
• Preparing a paper with a client for submission to the JITP’s conference on computational social science. Our work involved reinventing the web proxy server to collect information about voters in the 2010 US general election.
• Setting up a custom version of the OpenStreetMap infrastructure for use in some upcoming geospatial projects.

There’s probably a few things that I’m leaving out, but as this list indicates, Audacious Software is currently running at full steam.

What’s the difference in adoption between the free lite version and the paid full version?

As of this moment, the most relevant version of the paid app (at the $0.99 price) has been on the market since Dec. 24 and in that time, it’s gathered about 20 purchases since that date. (Approx. 30 day time period.) Of those installs, about a third remain active on the devices.

The lite version of the app has been available since Jan. 10 and has gathered almost 400 downloads since that date. (Approx. 10 day time period.) Of those installs, about half of the installs remain active on devices.

I’m not surprised about the order of magnitude differences in download. However, I am surprised that the active install rate for the free version (50%) is higher than the rate for the paid version (32%). This suggests to me that users of the free versions are more satisfied with their app than the paid users, which is the opposite of what I predicted.

Has the free version been an effective advertisement for the paid version?

Absolutely not.

Prior to the introduction of the free version, the paid version of the app was being purchased once about every day or two. Since the introduction of the free version, only a single copy has sold in the last ten days. This suggests to me that the free version is a sufficient substitute for the paid version and is capturing the customers that would have paid for the full version in the absence of the free version.

While I initially found this disconcerting, the results mirror the phenomenon obtained by Dan Ariely in his “free Hershey Kisses” experiments:

“Free” is kind of an incredibly tempting human hot button. And sometimes it’s great and sometimes it gets us into trouble. I’ll describe to you quickly the experiments we do. So in the experiments we do, we say “Okay what do you want, the Lindt Truffle for fourteen cents or Hershey Kiss for one penny?” Almost everybody says “Thirteen more cents for a better chocolate is a good deal because it could only take one of the other.” Everybody understands the value of the Lindt is high. Then we discount them both by one penny. Now, the difference and the qualities are the same – difference in price is the same – but now everybody goes to the free Hershey Kiss.

Given that I enjoyed Ariely’s book some months back, there’s really no excuse for me forgetting to account for this in my own outcome predictions.

One alternative explanation for the results I’ve obtained is that people just don’t like the app and the chance to try it for free warns them away from the free version. I’m not ready to accept that explanation yet, because both apps are rated quite favorably (4 stars for the free version, 5 stars for the paid version).

What are the key lessons here?

If this were a money-optimizing endeavor rather than a brief experiment in consumer behavior and price sensitivity, the introduction of the free version of the app would have been the end of the commercial enterprise. Common sense dictates that a limited free app would give consumers a chance to experience the app and a handful of customers who wanted more control would spend the meager $0.99 to upgrade to the full version of the app. This didn’t happen – the free version absolutely killed all demand for the paid version.

When I get some more time, I am planning on a follow-up to this experiment. Since I cannot add a price to the free version of the app and continue the experiment, the Wall of Life is effectively done for now. I’ll keep it up on the Market to see if anything interesting happens, but I’m not expecting too much.

However, I have an idea for an entirely new live wallpaper and I’m looking forward to replicating Ariely’s other results – customers flocking to the more expensive truffle when the Hershey Kiss costs a cent. In this new experiment, the role of the Hershey’s Kiss will be played by a $0.99 lite app, and the truffle will be the full version priced at various points above the lite version to find the position that maximizes income. With any luck, I’ll have the time to start writing the new app in a few months and the experiments may continue as early as April.

Stay tuned.

There are already two apps that implement this functionality on the App Store: PullList and Pocket Comic. (I discuss these apps in more detail on my original Fresh Comics blog post.) When I decided to put together Fresh Comics, one of the deficiencies that I wanted to address in the existing apps was the ability to use the app when limited network connectivity is available. Since I usually look up what’s new when I’m in transit on the subway, this seemed like a reasonable feature to add.

Since Apple’s App Store approval process is not sufficiently predictable and responsive that I can bundle the comic data with the app and release updates each Monday, the app needs to download the latest data from an online server and use that copy. This data consists of two main items: an RDF metadata file that encodes the creators, title, and other information about the week’s comic books and the associated cover files. Depending upon the quantity and quality of the cover images, a weekly download may be as much as fifteen megabytes in size.

In my ideal implementation, when the user launches the app, all of the covers and metadata will be there from the beginning, and there will never be any indication that the app is missing data. To the user, the app should always appear to have a full set of the week’s latest data and covers. Using ASIHTTPFRequest, I have achieved this once all of the data has been downloaded the first time. The problem is that initial weekly download.

From a responsiveness point of view, the app has no problems downloading the comic metadata file. It’s a simple XML file that compresses well and loads almost immediately on download. The problem is the cover images. Since the app includes a full-screen cover viewer, I would like to have images that are the same size as the iPhone’s native resolutions: 320×480 or 640×960. Individual JPEG images of these sizes can be more than a hundred kilobytes in size, and a typical week may have as many as one hundred fifty new comics with covers. The total download size for this week’s collection weighed in at twelve megabytes.

In the age of WiFi and 3G, twelve megabytes isn’t an excessive size, so I have no qualms allowing the user to download the data using their broadband or cellular connection. However, the download process can some time (depending on the connection), which is where the challenge lies.

In the current builds of Fresh Comics, on a fresh download, I’ve implemented a progressive display scheme that does the following:

1. It fetches the week’s textual metadata and displays that information as soon as possible in the app. Until the cover images are available locally, the covers are shown using a placeholder image.
2. The app keeps a queue of pending cover downloads. For the rows that are visible, the app downloads those thumbnails in the background first. As the thumbnails download, the display updates to reflect the new data.
3. After the thumbnails are downloaded, the app begins downloading the full resolution cover images.

Since the goal of the app is to get the information into users’ hands as soon as possible, Fresh Comics has hierarchy of information priority: textual metadata (titles, creators, etc.), thumbnail images, and finally, full cover images. Using this approach, I’m satisfied with the results I’ve achieved on devices ranging from the earliest iPhones to the latest iPod Touches. The solution works as well as the platform permits and it degrades gracefully as connectivity becomes limited. While I’m proud of my solution, I am quite annoyed that it was necessary in the first place. Since “downloading content for later offline use” is not one of Apple’s seven permitted background tasks, there’s not too much else that I can do to improve the situation.

In contrast, on the Android and Symbian platforms, the solution is simple and straightforward. On Android, I create a system service that wakes up every 24 hours to see of there’s something new and download the updates in the middle of the night. On Symbian, it’s easy to hide the app’s user interface and implement a similar background data check. Implemented properly, neither of these approaches will have any noticeable impact on the device’s performance and battery life.

While I’ve had a mostly positive experience putting together Fresh Comics for the iPhone, Apple’s limitations on background processing results in a suboptimal product for iOS devices when compared to competing platforms. (The Android version will be out soon.) I remain more positive about Android than iOS precisely for reasons such as this. While Android is not as polished (out of the box) in terms of its native controls and look-and-feel, it’s a much more expressive environment than iOS. iOS is a very nice platform for many apps, but once you try to write a proper networked ubiquitous app, it’s limitations become apparent.

Apple’s iOS decisions place it firmly in the “direct manipulation” camp in the direct manipulation vs. software agent debate. However, as long as processing power and network availability remain limited and unpredictable on mobile devices, there will be a need for applications to implement some autonomous functionality to respond to these limitations in order to provide the best experience possible. That I hit this wall writing a simple new comic releases app is somewhat disconcerting. I wonder how many iOS apps remain stunted because of the lack of proper background processing. There’s a solution to this problem, but Apple’s continual refusal to allow iOS programmers true multitasking makes iOS a more limited platform in terms of what is possible on mobile devices.

This post shares some the results thus far.

Pricing

In late October, I released the app on the Android Market for a price of $2.99. I kept that price until late December and “shipped” nine (9) copies of the wallpaper. Four (4) of those shipped copies were refunded within the Market’s refund window, netting a grand total of five (5) sales between Oct. 21 and Dec. 22. (Please keep in mind, I have not marketed this app in any meaningful way outside the Market, so these numbers should be interpreted as baseline performance figures.)

Around or on Christmas (Dec. 25), I updated the application in the Android Market and slashed the price to $0.99. In the last two weeks, I’ve had eighteen (18) total downloads, seven (7) refunds, yielding a net gain of eleven (11) copies successfully sold. If this trend persists, I’m on track to make more money at the $0.99 price in three weeks than I managed in two months. Lesson learned: small changes in price can lead to an order of magnitude more downloads. This isn’t unexpected, but it’s nice to have some numbers to quantify the difference.

The Wall of Life  - Lite

Last week – after the price drop – I received a request via e-mail to make a free version of the live wallpaper. The requester explained that she was in a tough financial situation and would appreciate more free apps (who wouldn’t?). I didn’t know how to interpret this message – was the writer someone truly down on her luck, or was this a scam to get a free app? I didn’t know.

Since the Wall of Life is more a petri dish for me than a revenue generator, I played along. This last weekend, I created a “lite” version of the wallpaper and listed it on the Market for free. The “lite” edition differs from the full version in that I removed all the configuration options, save for the options to change the cells’ color and shape. I removed the options for setting the interval between generations, the size of the cells, and the option to keep the field stationary (as opposed to the visual illusion of “flying” over the grid as you swipe between screens).

I listed the app on the Market shortly after it was finished and waited for the market results. For reasons unknown to me, the download count in the Market’s developer console remained stuck at zero for several days. Then, this morning, I finally received the results that I was awaiting.

The paid version of the Wall of Life currently sits at 26 (lifetime) downloads, with 10 users currently using it (38%).  The free version is registering 225 downloads, with 162 users currently using it (72%). So, in two days, the free version has almost 9 times the number of downloads that took the paid version more than 2 months to reach. Again, this isn’t an unexpected result, but it’s nice to have some data to back up the intuition. I would explain the difference in the number of active installs as an artifact of how new the wallpaper is. As time elapses, I expect this number to regress around the 38% of the paid app.

An unanswered question that I still have is the effect of the “lite” version as an instrument to up-sell users to the full version. Since I don’t have a lot of data on the free version yet, it’ll probably be several weeks until I can do a proper statistical analysis to see if there’s a significant effect there. An interrupted time series analysis should be quite useful in this particular case (paid downloads before the introduction of the free version vs. paid downloads afterward).

(In)conclusion

Other than what the numbers currently show, I don’t have any deeper conclusions or insights to draw at this moment. Apps “sell” better as prices fall, which is common sense. I’m interested in seeing if the “lite” version improves or worsens the money made by the paid version, but that post will have to wait for a few more weeks while I collect data.

What about marketing? Since this particular app is a fairly niche bit of software that appeals to a small subset of users, I don’t expect that I’ll expend too much effort on getting the word out. As it stands now, it’s a useful tool to simply have online to get a sense of the baseline Android Market performance and I’ll probably keep it like that. If there’s an argument made to do otherwise, I’m happy to listen. Unfortunately, I think that “Life” is probably a bit too niche to draw any useful conclusions about the efficacy of various marketing strategies.

However, I do have another app coming soon that will be listed on both the Android and iPhone markets. This app will have a wider appeal, so in addition to the cross-app store comparisons, I hope that it will shed some light on concrete Marketing strategies to improve download numbers and sales.

Stay tuned.