Davide Di Cillo

The great Fast Company crap

Davide — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:25:17 +0000

This post wants to be a response to the article posted on Fast Company “The Great App Bubble,” in which the author base all his statements on stats taken out of context.

One billion dollars in revenue for the approximately 225,000 apps is $4,444 per app–significantly less than an app costs to develop.

Sure, this would be true if those revenues were equally distributed to all developers. This statement doesn’t keep in mind that there are thousands of crappy apps out there that don’t make a dime and applications that are developed once and republished several times (think all those travel apps where they publish a different one for each city). In the latter case even if the statement were true, I wouldn’t mind making $4,444 one hundred times over.

A typical iPhone app costs $35,000 to develop.

I really really wish this statement was true, especially because that’s what we do primarily at 39 inc.; I also wish that was the typical price we charged for the applications we build. Some applications could really be expensive of course, especially if you factor some server side programming as well, but of those 250,000 applications, I can guarantee you that 220,000 of those apps didn’t cost more than $7,000 each.

iPhone users don’t find their apps very valuable. In 2009, analytics start-up Pinch Media reported that people barely use the majority of apps they download. Only 20 percent of consumers utilize a free app the day after they download it. By 30 days out, less than 5 percent of consumers are still using it. Paid apps (page 13 of the company’s fascinating 33-page slideshow) have a slightly better performance record, but they still get hit with a steep drop in usage within a period of 11 days. The value of most apps may be in satisfying the curiosity of what the app can do, not in its usefulness or relevance in a user’s daily life.

Sure, free applications are often downloaded just out of curiosity, games are usually discarded once finished and nobody is arguing that there are a great number of disposable apps. So what? I don’t see any problems with that. As a developer you can you can make tons of money building disposable apps as well as building a long lasting success like Tweetie or Instapaper.

Marketers are spending money on iDevice apps at the expense of improving their mobile Web sites that everyone with a smart phone can access. According to Ahonen and Moore, iDevice app development actually costs 10 times more and reach is 50 times worse. Sex appeal will only trump pragmatic reach for so long.

I agree, a lot of websites should definitely try to improve their mobile website or at least make sure that the mobile experience isn’t inferior to the desktop one. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t also offer a native application for iOS, with performances and experience far superior to their web counterparts.

Venture capital is flooding into the app economy in spite of the questionable ROI proposition.

Go tell that to the people who invested in Tapulous or other successful mobile development companies. That’s how venture capital works anyway, they do ten investments and maybe a couple of those will be successful enough to pay for the other investments and still make a profit.

Steve Jobs has said 15,000 apps are submitted to the App Store each week. With this many apps to sort through, finding new, useful ones to download can be a painstaking task. Then on my phone, if I want to find an app I don’t regularly use or a new one, I need to use the search function to find it. Can you think of a faster way to get information? The browser. Once mobile Internet gets faster, apps as the key to on-the-go information and tools will be on the outs..

I suppose that for the author it’s easier to find a web application between millions of pages than a useful apps between 250,000 ones. He seemingly forgot about word of mouth, blogs, social networks and all the others ways that will always let the cream raise at top.

In conclusion, I can say that building a business solely based on mobile development isn’t as easy a task as some successful stories may infer, but definitely mobile apps are not a bubble. They could be part of a cycle for sure, where at one point they will leave their place to other things, just like other things do, but there is a big difference from being a bubble.

Tip of the day: How to multitask while listening to a video on your iPhone or iPod

Davide — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:54:08 +0000

I know, probably you are wondering why anybody would listen to videos instead of just watching them. Videos are made to be watched, possibly without interruptions. Well, if you are like me, I love to watch and listen to my podcasts at the gym, so while the video is perfect for cardio, just listening to them is enough while walking around the gym. And that’s where my problems starts. While watching videos on the iPhone, you can’t either lock your screen or multitask; but there is actually a tricky way to do it. Simply start your video than stop it using your headphones remote (click once). Then leave the iPod application and click again once on the remote and your video podcast will start behaving just like a regular audio one, giving you the ability to multitask and lock your screen.

Your e-mail is getting smarter

Davide — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:46:18 +0000

Lately I have the feeling that my e-mail is getting smarter. I always being unhappy with most of the clients and solutions to manage my e-mails and contacts, but things are changing fast. So far I’ve been using a combination of labels and the Multiple Inbox lab feature to organize my email, so that I won’t forget the things to do and they won’t be submerged by all the incoming ones. This is what my inbox look like:

But last night Google launched a new feature for Gmail called Priority Inbox, where more important e-mails are separated from the rest. To do the trick I suppose Google consider opening rate and frequency of replies for each specific sender. Of course the filter will get better with time, but I’m already happy for seeing a big player tackling the inbox overload problem. Here’s a video that explains the feature:

So far it seems working pretty well for me and I’m sure it will improve the more I use it. This feature combined with the right plugins, like Rapportive, definitely are making me love my inbox a little more.

Where is Groupon going?

10 Marketing tips for your iPhone apps

Davide — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:26:38 +0000

Last night I gave a presentation at Refresh Mobile, a combination of the South Florida iPhone meetup and the South Florida Android Developers meetup, about how to market your iOS, but not only, applications.

These are the slides from the presentation:

Update:
Here’s the video of the presentation courtesy of Damian Montero

Apple announce App Store Volume Purchase Program

Davide — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:42:51 +0000

Apple just sent to all their developers an email announcing a new App Store Volume Purchase Program that will allow educational institutions to buy applications in bulk for their students at a discounted price.

We’re pleased to announce the App Store Volume Purchase Program. Education institutions in the United States now have a new way to purchase your apps in volume for distribution to their students and faculty. You can also elect to offer special education pricing on your app when purchased in volume.

Developers will be able to choose to offer special pricing that is 50% of their list price to education institutions when they purchase 20 or more copies of their app.

DeviantArt Muro, an impressive HTML5 application

Davide — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:34:18 +0000

DeviantArt just released Muro, a drawing application completely HTML5 powered. Not only that, but it perfectly works on the iPad as well, making it a great alternative to the native drawing applications present in the store. To use Muro you need a DeviantArt account, and it’s totally free for both the basic and pro modes, basic for beginning artists and pro for more experienced users. It supports advanced features such as layers, filters, multiple brushes and keyboard shortcuts. This is a great example on how powerful HTML5 could be and a perfect response to all those people who believed that HTML5 wasn’t good enough to compete with Flash in more complex applications.

Analytic tools for your iPhone application sales

People are asking for less

Davide — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:31:43 +0000

Take a look at some of the most successful applications in the last few months, even in the last few years. People are craving less. They are tired of overcrowded experiences. Strong evidence of this can be found in the success of applications such as Instapaper and Flipboard.

Instapaper, in combination with the iPad, completely changed the way I consume my daily readings. Now, whenever I see an interesting article, I instapaper it so that I can read it later, when I can give it my full attention, without annoying multiple pages, overwhelming ads, and with less distractions and noise. Even Apple recently added a similar feature to their browser with Reader, a feature that lets you visualize the article à la Instapaper. Some bloggers complained that, in doing so, Apple was penalizing the websites that make their buck from advertising, but in my opinion, when a user clicks the Reader button, this simply expresses a desire for less, for clean, for readability. I’m sorry dear blogger, I love your articles, but I’m sick of your 14 blinking banners right next to it. I’m tired of having to scroll pass your Google Adsense links in order to get to the content. I hate having to go through five two-paragraph-long pages, so that I can help you spike your page views.

Similarly, Flipboard creates a more elegant and cleaner way to consume your Twitter and Facebook stream. Thanks to big images, fewer elements per page, and an intelligent usage of the space, it helps the user focus on the actual content. I feel I’ve been getting so much more from Twitter and Facebook since I have less things to distract my attention. No more cows and gangsters in the way. No invitations to the latest time sink.

People choosing to use these applications are begging developers and designers to create experiences that are cleaner and more pleasant to use. Just listen to them.

Where is Groupon going?

Davide — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 17:15:17 +0000

Andrew Mason, Groupon’s CEO, recently announced deals personalization, a feature initially available in six cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle. This move by Groupon was done for several reasons, such as the necessity to differentiate itself from several clones (which are sprouting at the same rate of Groupon’s deals, daily) and an large amount of requests from businesses to be featured on the site. Deals personalization definitely made sense to me, so much so that the announcement was made just few hours before the soft launch of one of my projects, WishADeal.com. How many times have you looked at your inbox and thought, “why am I getting e-mails for pole dancing classes and spa deals?” This is exactly why Groupon is adding some level of personalization. With Wish A Deal I go even a step further by letting you pick the category of the deals you’d like to receive, and gather them from several daily deal sites in a single e-mail.

But where is this daily deals market going? My guess: now that the market is saturated by a leader, Groupon, and multiple clones, the next natural step will be to focus on verticals. Woot spun off Wine Woot, Shirt Woot, and so on. This would be a great time to launch sites such as Daily Burger Deal or Vegan Daily Offer. At this point, people are familiar with the concept of daily deals and would definitely appreciate a really specialized and targeted service. And, I’m willing to bet that this is something that sites like Groupon and Living Social will offer in the near future.

No related posts.

Design for mobile: 8 things to remember when designing for mobile

Davide — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 20:52:53 +0000

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Miami Design Meetup where I pointed out 8 things I think you should always remember while designing interfaces for mobile apps and websites.

Rapportive extension for Safari

Davide — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:48:37 +0000

During my “Google Chrome” phase, I learned to love some of its extensions. One of those is Rapportive. It’s a super simple CRM for Gmail, that replace the ads with the personal information about the sender based on their email address, pulling data from Twitter, Crunchbase, Linkedin and many other sources.

Since Safari 5 came out I decided to go back using Apple’s browser, but I immediately missed some of my favorite extensions, so I decided to try to port them to the unsupported platform. The first one I tried was Rapportive. I actually almost did nothing thanks to a library for porting Chrome extensions to Safari published by Michael Gundlach (author of AdBlock).

Of course this extension is unofficial and unsupported, and I’m sure the Rapportive guys are already working on a better extension for Safari (even though on the site they said the next browser up is IE). If you can’t wait for them and you want to use their great product on Safari 5, here is my version:

Update
The guys at Rapportive just released the official Safari version of their awesome plugin. To get it, just visit http://rapportive.com with Safari and click install.

No related posts.