Category: Google

One app store to rule them all?

~ michael_msft ~ 5 Comments

Not talking about mobile phones but about TV’s. I won’t hide my disdain for the TV ecosystem and the supposed smart TV mess. Nothing smart about it really. I was recently at a telco in Singapore on their pipe, meaning a very fast line, using a new TV and when I clicked the app store button I looked at a spinner for about 3 mins. Imagine doing that on a normal internet line.

This TV stuff is a mess. Apple TV, Roku and Google are trying to cut through it but all have their flaws. Apple is Apple only, Roku is not an open platform and Google didnt make chromecast as easy as implementing AirPlay is for iOS. Yes I know chromecast is android and iOS and that it has some sense of apps but they didn’t make it dead simple to build on. Bummer. They also did not take into account DRM and encryption as much as they should have.

So the TV’s and their app stores will still exist and they suck but they are not going away just yet. So I am liking a little of what I am hearing from Opera – yes Opera. http://www.operasoftware.com/products/tv-store

Opera wants to try to build one TV app store and then get various TV manufacturers and OEM’s to embed it. Then you go to one app store, QA it and launch it – hopefully getting all the platforms that Opera is running on. Still a pain but not as bad as going to each TV vendor for each QA and legal process. Yes – legal. Unlike iOS and android app stores you have to sign contracts that lawyers make. It is a silly, silly process.

Can Opera do it? I am not sure. I am cheering them on though.

You add that Roku is doing the same thing with their stuff by getting it into TV’s. True but the Roku platform is a proprietary non HTML stack and they don’t take all apps due to there cozy DISH relationship. So Roku might have a similar plan as Opera but it won’t work is my guess due to the way they have tackled it.

We shall see.

I still want the TV is dumb glass scenario and I just project on it. One can hope.

Microsoft

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

Microsoft has a new CEO. I know little about him but he seems to curry favor with the troops and judging by what is being written about him I am guessing he looks to be the right guy to turn the place around. Yes – it needs turning around. Why you might ask? Cause tech folks like myself don’t really use anything from Microsoft anymore. I practically cut my computing teeth on everything Microsoft but now I use mostly Apple products, iOS (and the many made for iOS apps), and lots of other services in the cloud of which none of them are made by Microsoft.

However the world needs competition. A google and apple world is not great for any of us.

BB is dead – let’s not even pretend to think otherwise.

I would love to see bing compete.

I would love to see windows phone compete.

I would love, also very surprised, to see windows wow me with stuff that might tease me away from OSX.

I would love to see azure, or whatever name you call Microsoft cloud services, compete head on with AWS.

I would love to see xbox own the living room, I don’t give a SHIT about gaming, and challenge the notions of what a home entertainment (console) device could do when everything is connected up.

Lately I have been somewhat surprised at working with Microsoft around some Spuul stuff. They have engineered some good tech and offer good support but they still seem to focus everything around windows versus windows phone. Mobile and cloud is where it is at. Bottom line – they need to sort that out quick.

Office – yes I still use it unfortunately but I am miffed they don’t properly support it across all of my iOS devices well. I am guessing the new guy will change that.

So Microsoft is back in the spotlight and people like me are quietly cheering them on. Maybe even less quietly now that they have a CEO that isn’t going to mock or berate people like me.

The clock is ticking but I expect to see the new Microsoft slowly appear this year.

Wishing for more powerful app store payments

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Was sent this article by my bro @groovemonkey (with a lot more followers than me) and it got me thinking more about app stores and payments.

This is the read: http://dancounsell.com/articles/paid-paymium-or-freemium.

Paymium is still relatively unknown and gets pretty much no press coverage compared to freemium. Paymium is going to become increasingly more widespread over the coming year, and incase you’re wondering exactly what paymium is, here’s my definition:

Paymium: An app that is paid for up-front, with additional revenue being generated by charging for extra features via In-App Purchase.

As with freemium this type of model can work perfectly well in place of yearly paid upgrades as you can add new features overtime with IAP to continue to earn revenue from your existing customers.

Paymium apps currently only account for 2% of apps on the App Store, yet they generate the same amount of revenue as paid apps. I believe now is a good time for developers to start experimenting more with this revenue model, I know It’s something we’ll be doing with a few of our apps at Realmac Software over the coming months.

This is a very interesting model and was wondering how to apply it to Spuul but I don’t see a fit, however part of that reason is I think both app stores, Google and Apple (is there any other?), don’t offer a lot of flexibility when it comes to payments and customers. What I mean is everything is so rigid when it comes to subscription based payments.

For example with Apple they don’t offer any sort of trial capability. Example. Please buy this monthly subscription and you can use it for free for 7 days and if you like it just keep using it and we bill you after the trial period. If you can cancel during the trail period you don’t get charged but you get your 7 days. Google, Facebook and Amazon (they don’t let you set the time period though) all offer it with good results. People tend to try it and the conversion rates are good.

The other problem with almost all of these systems is that they offer fairly rigid subscription SKUs that do not transfer or modify across lines. For example – I have a 1.99 payment tier for a monthly subscription and I also have a 4.99. Customer A buys the 1.99 tier and a month later wants the 4.99. The app stores should provide an automatic upgrade SKU and just start billing the user at 4.99. Even be smart enough to charge the difference if customer A upgrades within the month. There is little intelligence in the subscription SKUs so usually one has to cancel one to get another versus upgrading or downgrading.

So when I think of the paymium stuff I think of interesting use cases like you buy the app for 1.99 and later if you upgrade in app to another tier the 1.99 could be credited by the system since the customers used the same app store for the whole process. There are other examples along this line I can think of.

What I am looking for is the app stores to provide all the bells and whistles to allow us, the developer, to craft any sort of payment and decision flow we want knowing the user is able to pay with the app store and we are able to offer what we want real time based on what the data is telling us might sell. Standard consumer sales type of stuff.

Bottom line is the app stores are generally taking 30% and I think the should offer more value for it. Don’t get me wrong – app stores are doing good things and the payment mechanisms make it easy to build mobile apps and extract money for services but their overall intelligence and feature level is still pretty rudimentary.

Thinking about TV’s

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

The TV ecosystem really is a mess. What I am talking about is the way consumers can easily consume OTT content on their TV set.

I myself use Apple TV and I mostly love it. I can throw anything from my iOS device onto it, I can buy things from iTunes, and I can use some of the apps on it to watch things but I must say I don’t use it that way much. I have played with Google Chromecast and it works well. If only Google would open it up like Apple TV to developers to cast to it. It is funny to me that in this regard Apple is currently more OPEN than Google.

I was reading Benedict’s latest Mobile newsletter for this nugget:

YouTube ‘Pair’ – turn the YouTube app on your smart TV into a mirror to whatever you do on your smartphone. This approach seems to me to make the most sense – use the sophisticated touch screen in your hand to control what appears on the TV and make the TV itself ‘dumb glass’ – whether it’s via Airplay, Chromecast, YouTube or something else, either embedded or via a cheap HDMI widget.

What I love is the dumb glass comment. This is really what we all want. The ability to easily throw on to the glass whatever we are doing on our mobile phone, computer, tablet, or device connected to the TV. What we don’t want is to click a button, with this shitty remote, to bring up a plethora of things we don’t want, and an app store that is hard to search saddled with the performance of a 1990’s computer. Looking at you all the Smart TV platforms in the world.

Sure – maybe someone wants this but I think it is mostly just the TV manufacturers wishing for an app store economy like what Apple and Google have but they can keep dreaming because they will never have it. And FYI – the economics they demand from the developers are worse usually than what Apple and Google offer. So the pitch is not very good. For example – asking for a cut of payments when they don’t even offer the payment engine.

So where do we go from here? I expect the TV guys to keep pushing since they seem to claiming successes like this: http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2014/01/06/samsung-declares-a-million-smart-uk-users/#more-96531

However I am guessing we will see more of Apple TV and Google chromecast, Roku and everything else trying to cut out the TV for something easier to use. Of course Roku is trying to land inside the TV but the end result is the same. Problem with all this stuff is there is no real cross platform standard to adhere to. Google does it one way, Apple another, Samsung another and of course Roku uses their own stack through and through. I won’t even get into what each TV stack has – every set is like a totally different platform. HTML 5 is the tool but requires a lot of cross platform troubleshooting.

Users want to walk up to their screen and just watch shit. Purpose built boxes help make this easier and Google with Android TV is making this a very possible reality. Apple needs to open up Apple TV to apps and speed up their position in the home cause Google is moving faster than Apple right now when it comes to the home. Looks no further than the Nest acquisition as an example of that. My guts says the Apple users will have an Apple home and the Google users will have a Google home. Of course Microsoft could disrupt this with X Box but it is not really open enough in my opinion.

Users want to stream on their TV – right now this is a mess.

Let’s see what happens next.

The impossible user contract!

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am sure this subject is like opening a can of flaming hot worms – there really is no one answer to it.

I stumbled across this today:
http://steveblank.com/2013/11/21/when-product-features-disappear-amazon-apple-and-tesla-and-troubled-future-of-21st-century-consumers/

The downside is when companies unilaterally remove features from their products without asking their customers permission and/or remove consumers’ ability to use the previous versions. Products can just as easily be downgraded as upgraded.

Steve makes some fair points but as a PM myself I grapple with this concept all the time. Do we have some contract with the users that we must keep everything we have ever put in the product alive? Steve almost alludes to that but I know he is just trying to make the point – especially as compared to what has happened lately with products like the Apple iWork suite.

Huge backlash over the new completely rewritten stack losing some key features but with Apple slowly pouring them back in on a new code base. The premise is that Apple rewrote the iWork suite to make it function across iOS, web and OSX. Now that the rewrite happened they are adding some, but not all, of the features back in. Seems logical but as a user you might still hate it since you still lose the feature and running old version is hard to do these days.

Latest on the iWork shuffle:
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/21/iwork-for-for-ios-and-mac-updated-keynote-gains-with-new-transitions/

We experienced some of this at Spuul as we moved over to our new API stack, brought to you by the code magicians at Spuul, since we pretty much rewrote everything from the ground up to accommodate more clients and features. This also meant looking at our current feature usage and deciding what features might stay and which ones might hit the bit bucket. Did I ask users about this? No. Mostly cause the data largely answered the questions for us – we could see what was being used and what wasn’t. We could also look at our help queries and the customers emails that I save. All of these made up a nice view that for the most part gave us a clear indication of what to do. Then we added in some ideas of our own and logical guesses to decide what to throw out and what to save.

Some of the goals were the same as Apple really. Build from a new more agile base, simplify, and then work our way back up. We are just not as big so the impact isn’t the same. With Apple – they are so big that practically anything they do will affect someone in some way. I don’t know if Apple handled it right- most of the cuts haven’t affected me but I assume they affected someone. Could Apple have polled everyone? Maybe but the poll would have created a funnel for people to complain and then even more press about it. I am not sure anyone wins at this. Expectations are just so high that everyone expects to be pleased in their own way setting up an impossible user contract.

Steve Blank uses other examples like Tesla and Google to prove his point. The Tesla one is the most interesting cause it is a software update that changes the car – something very tangible. I think Tesla should have been upfront about it and stated that for the safety of the occupants in their vehicles they felt this is the best way to handle it until they come up with more data or options. Just doing it without telling folks seems sly – in a bad way even if the goal is for good.

Steve closes out with user contract idea of some sorts:

A 21st Century Bill of Consumer Product Rights

For books/texts/video/music:

  • No changes to content paid for (whether on a user’s device or accessed in the cloud)


    • For software/hardware:

  • Notify users if an update downgrades or removes a feature
  • Give users the option of not installing an update
  • Provide users an ability to rollback (go back to a previous release) of the software

    • This is interesting but in the world of App Stores this is tough to manage with all the auto-updating and no ability to roll back. So for any of this to happen the folks like Apple, Google and MSFT would have to allow the developers to manage stuff like this. Today it is not really clear how one would do that.

    Great topic to think about but a tough one to really have a definitive answer for.

    iOS or Android first?

    ~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

    Update: Bernard did a nice piece, much longer than mine, about this as well. Check it out:

    http://www.bernardleong.com/2013/11/19/android-or-ios-first-definitive-guide-startups-corporations/

    ————-

    I am a slacker when it comes to blogging cause I just don’t put enough focus on it. Love writing and I have so much I want to say but I don’t have enough time to always put together a quality post. For a while now I have been meaning to discuss the whole Android iOS debate a bit further. This was mostly due to this article :: http://stevecheney.com/why-android-first-is-a-myth/

    With Spuul we went iOS first – for good reason. We were going after the Indians who live overseas and since we are in the streaming video space there is still not a great secure standard for doing proper streaming video on Android. Apple has eHLS built in so it was a no brainer. In general I think it really depends on the markets you are going after and what your product is that will decide which platform to tackle first. The idea that there is a blanket rule for one or the other seems to be for developed markets but if say for example you are going after India, Pakistan or the Middle East – it would be hard to think that going after iOS first would make much sense. Android is just much bigger in the undeveloped markets. That’s a fact and Apple for the time being is not concerned with this.

    I love iOS. I won’t lie. As a USER it is the best thing ever. As a coder, which I am not, coders tell they like iOS better but of course my Android guys loves coding Java. He loves making our Android app but guess what he carries as his primary phone? An iPhone cause as a USER it provides him what he wants in his day to day experience. So from different angles one platform may appear to be better than the other.

    As the product guy I must admit that as of late – I would rather manage an Android app than an iOS one. This is another field I want to talk about but for another post – the whole product manager thing. Lately Google is making big strides in the Android world when it comes to what they offer the folks managing an app to success both in usage and monetization.

    Yes – at the core Apple users tend to buy more and tend to pay for things that people on Android tend to think should be free. Our stats show this over and over again but the growth in Android is eye popping and shows no signs of abating. Plus, as noticed on my recent trip to India, you see way more Android than iOS. Still even with this stats – we get more people paying in India on iOS than on Android. I am sure this is a global phenomenon.

    All that being said I think most companies going for the jugular will need to support iOS, Android and Windows Phone. It might be easy to say go iOS first but once again it depends on the market, the product and the monetization strategies. If you are not going where iOS is the core leader than chances are hitting Android first might make more sense.

    The issue for me lately is around app management and monetization. This is what is causing me to favor Android recently. What I mean by favor Android is that sometimes it is making more sense to lead or test features with Android first and then if they make sense bring the same features over to iOS. Why? Simple. I don’t have to wait for approvals when pushing a new app, Google has a built in beta program for apps, and I can pretty much sell anything I want via in app purchase. On top of that Google is hooking up with carriers around the globe to offer carrier billing for in app purchase. This is huge stuff and slowly it is turning the tide some in the ecosystem wars.

    Further to this is the ability for us to see our comments and ratings on our Android app while also being able to reply to the commenters. At Spuul we experienced first hand how a lot of comment/rating is mostly drivel and even some weird form of trolling but yet once you start responding to everyone the trolling stops and the reviewers tend to take a more logical approach. Bottom line is we managed our app up from 3.x to 4.x by responding to the users and using this channel as a form of communication and support. This is something Apple is sorely missing out on in my opinion. This is where you can see Google knowing how to build for the internet extending a slight light due to their technical prowess.

    On monetization Apple leads but increasingly Google is offering more ways to get it done – the carrier billing movement for example is very real and brings paying for things to the masses without credit cards. Yes Apple has a lot of users with cards but this is concentrated in the developed markets thus making it useless in the undeveloped markets where people want to pay with phone credits or post paid billing cycles. The second area of differentiation is where Google, although they sell movies and music, allows a developer to use in app purchase for anything – meaning I can use their stack to also sell my own movies and music. Apple on the other hand prevents developers from using in app purchase where the developer is selling something similar to iTunes. For example – Spuul cannot sell an individual movie via our iOS app. Only Apple can. It’s silly but yet is a sign of the difference. Apple makes money on the transaction anyway so not clear why they don’t allow us to use it apart from the only reason I can think of which is to protect iTunes. If Apple wants to win in the living room with something like Apple TV then they need to let developers charges for things – single movie or subscriptions.

    For the moment I only see Android and iOS winning. Will this last – tough to say but slowly I think Google is chipping away,ever so slightly, at Apple’s lead by making this fit the way the world is moving. Apple could easily reverse this by also providing some of the same capabilities in their platform.

    Time will tell.

    A startup’s secret weapon – customer service!

    ~ michael_msft ~ 2 Comments

    I have always been preaching, even if it is not easy, that with how much work a startup does to get customers you might as well make them feel loved with your customer service so that they stay with you.

    We had a slight glitch with our android app yesterday – being in the streaming business with video makes for some complex apps that must always work and are used 24/7. So when we have an issue the email and app store comments come in fast and furious. We figured out the issue and pushed a new app. Thank god for my team being available on a sunday to make it so.

    So what do we discover after fixing the app – a nice google play comment like this:

    ★★★★★
    App version 1.2.6
    Oct 6, 2013 at 11:10 PM
    Amazing Amazing app and even better service. Fixed bug within a day!!

    Stuff like this is awesome since we all know that startups will have issues but being able to fix them and get feedback is priceless.

    I also must add that this is where Google Play is ahead of Apple App Store since they allow us to see the comments and respond to them directly – which I think makes a huge difference in getting to user issues, keeps the trolls out and allows a company to manage their ratings up. All not possible on the App Store. Huge bummer.

    Anyway. Customer service. Get on it.

    Google will have to deal with android

    ~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

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    Saw this today on the wire and had to think about it some.

    We know RIM is dead. Over. They can open up BBM and hire lots of celebs to flog it. It’s over. It is NOT coming back. Someone may buy it but I don’t think RIM is even worth buying at this point.

    MSFT just bought Nokia and we will have the integrated software and hardware stack that is Windows Phone.

    I have written about dealing with android before from the perspective of Spuul – http://www.nokpis.com/2013/08/13/android-is-a-bigger-ecosystem-but-takes-more-work/ .

    When I look at the android device charts for our Spuul app it is totally dominated by Samsung – but we also see MicroMax in the top 10 as well for India. Somehow I just think this won’t last since the world is getting that the vertically integrated stack that starts with the hardware/software combo is the way forward.

    MSFT now gets this.
    Apple invented it.

    Samsung gets it but they don’t have the apps or the software – they use Google for that. What would a Samsung phone be without android and Play Store – it would look like the old shitty pre android Samsung phones. No one buys those anymore.

    Google has to do something. Is it going to abandon android for a Chrome ecosystem? I guess it is possible but they don’t seem to be moving very fast on that. Chromebook sucks and I can easily live without my Chrome browser – I know others can’t. When I look at the development work for android for what we do – there is NO path to Chrome for dealing with secure audio video well with the UX performance we desire. If this is the path why are they not showing it yet?

    Samsung to me either had to fork their own stuff or come up with something new – otherwise they are just too dependent on Google. Google is too big and powerful at this point with the full stack that they will let one vendor be the face of their ecosystem. I know they have Motorola now and maybe it eventually is just going to be Google Phone but even that is moving pretty slow.

    I can’t predict the future but I just don’t see Google not wanting to change the consumer perception that the Mobile World is Apple, Microsoft and Samsung in the eyes of people buying phones.