Category: Mobile

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.

Is Path slowly diminishing in global relevance?

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I will admit to being a fan of Path but I used to use it more than I do now. I have no specific reason for it but I tend to open it less and less. However when this latest issue happened, http://en.dailysocial.net/post/outrage-over-announcement-that-path-accepted-investment-from-bakrie-group – one of the first things my Mom said when I was complaining about Bakrie was that my Dad would be bummed if I started to use Path less. My Dad uses it to keep tabs on all of us and to see pics of his grandkids. Basically this is the only reason I use Path. My Dad is not on Facebook and Facebook is so complicated these days that a product like Path serves a very real purpose.

Problem is Path has become a social mobile network with privacy being less important than it was originally was. Usually now when I look at Path I just see a mini version of what people are doing on Facebook. I have taken to removing anyone that I don’t want to share moments with and I probably need to prune it down even more.

Now add the Bakrie thing into the mix and I feel less enthusiastic about Path. Long story short is Path raised another round and part of the money came from the well known corrupt Bakrie family. To me this means one of two things. Path is not doing well and they knew Bakrie was a mess but they just want the money. I tend to think this is the reason. The other reason could be Path and it’s execs were not aware that the Bakrie family has a bad reputation and just didn’t realize the ramifications. I find this hard to believe since a simple google search will quickly show you what the world and Indonesians think of the Bakrie family. Not well regarded.

My take is Path is blowing through tons of money on advertising and on growing. However I think they are growing in pockets or specific regions and the global appeal of the product is waning. Taking money from Indonesian investors and focusing on Indonesia only further cements that view in my mind since if Path was growing well globally they would not need an Indonesia specific focus. My point is Path shot for global dominance and didn’t make it. So now they are retrenching some to grow where they are strong but if that country is Indonesia it would mean that Path is stepping down a bit cause Indonesia for a company that was on a global path is not the great prize – it is just another large country to add to the list. Meaning the monetization is low and the bigger they get in specific countries, like Indonesia, further diminishes the global appeal because a product becomes too focused on a country versus the globe.

I could be all wrong on this but I feel Path is struggling to find a global footprint so they are beginning to focus more on where they are having success. That to me is not what Path set out to do. Now add in the Bakrie thing and it all looks a little desperate.

Or perhaps it is just all about greed. Which leads me to think that Path and Bakrie make good bedfellows.

In the meantime I moved Path off of my home screen.

Tim Bray’s 2014 outlook

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

For the techies out there – this is a fantastic read.

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/01/01/Software-in-2014

Couple of things to note.

He seems to be endorsing Go – he does not love it but plans on using it more. I need to check it out:

Go has made a deep impression on me, even though it doesn’t make me smile, the way C and Java and Ruby and Clojure did successively over the years. My intuition is that its types offer enough object-flavored utility to get by. And my strong intuition is that Goroutines and typed pipes hit a huge 80/20 point, ushering developers smoothly into writing functional code just because it’s easy and straightforward and readable. The next substantial server-side piece of software I build will be in Go.

He is not giving Node a ringing endorsement but does not seem to be shutting it down either:

NodeJS isn’t really functional, but if everything’s a callback and you’re single threaded, who cares? Anyhow, my biggest gripe with Node is the JS part at the end; more on that later.

He really gets into how the client side stuff is a mess – I don’t disagree but at the same time I am not sure why everyone thinks it should be easy or a cross platform solution is what is needed. Platforms exist and user’s benefit from their offerings. So yes – keeping up with this is hard but such is life:

The client-side mess · Things are bad. You have to build everything three times: Web, iOS, Android. We’re talent-starved, this is egregious waste, and it’s really hurting us.

I love that he said this – because it is so true:

Browsers suck too · This is an unfashionable opinion, but I can’t see why it’s controversial.

He ends it all with this:

What’s next? · On the server side, no drama I think; everything gets smoother and better. These are the good old days.

On the client, I just totally don’t know. Historical periods featuring rococo engineering outbursts of colorful duplicative complexity usually end up converging on something simpler that hits the right 80/20 points. But if that’s what’s coming, it’s not coming from any direction I’m looking, so color me baffled. Maybe we’re stuck with clients-in-triplicate for the long haul.

I tend to agree. For some of us doing major multi-platform work it is even more intensive since we have to support the three (web, iOS, and android) plus TV’s (STB, consoles) and probably even Windows Phone. A super big chunk of work. If you are good some of this can all be built on the same back end and some of it, using HTML 5 and responsive web, can also share client code.

Is this how the future will look – I think so. Cause the platform folks want the lock in and the users want great experiences that for the time being only happen when the code is mostly native. Maybe this will change someday but not anytime soon is my guess.

And of course – it is just a guess.

Read the whole post though – it is very well thought out take on the current state of development.

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.

    Google will have to deal with android

    ~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

    //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

    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.

    Crazy week in my World!

    ~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

    First up we have Rakuten buying Viki. http://blog.viki.com/2013/09/letter-from-vikis-ceo.html . This was probably be the biggest tech news for me personally. One I almost went to work there so I follow Viki very closely. I guess you can also say I am in the same space as them but much farther behind in our maturity but what happened to Viki is great for a startup like Spuul in Singapore. It shows the video space is hot, you can build something global from Singapore, exits can happen and that the dream is alive.

    I am very curious to see what happens next to the company, who stays around and what Rakuten does with all these disparate pieces that are supposedly tied back into e-commerce. People say it is like Amazon or Netflix – not sure I see that yet. I can imagine the Amazon comparison but where is the cloud stuff? Either way Rakuten is a force and now Viki has some serious backing and is supposedly somewhat independent. All debating aside – congratulations to the Viki team for an amazing exit.

    Next we have MSFT buying Nokia. This one can and will be debated till the cows come home. It essentially always needed to happen – why now? Is it about Ballmer stepping down and Elop coming home. I don’t know but I think MSFT has a huge uphill battle to make Windows Phone competitive but apart from them – it is all android and iOS, so I do hope MSFT can shake it up a bit cause it will be good for the ecosystem.

    Stoked to be mentoring over at http://jfdi.asia this year. Should be fun and great learning experience for me.

    On the Spuul front – we just launched our biggest TV deal yet :: http://blog.spuul.com/2013/09/star-plus-serials-now-available-on-spuul/ . Lots more coming as well.

    All in all an exciting week locally and globally – now over to Apple for next week!

    Android is a bigger ecosystem but takes more work

    ~ michael_msft ~ 10 Comments

    Yes – I read Daring Fireball and tend to agree with Gruber most of the time – because we share the same ideology on many things.  When Gruber talks about the whole Android vs Apple war I tend to carry a different opinion in that helping to build a startup that has huge aspirations, is very big on mobile and is working on hard markets –  we have no choice but to support Android. The idea that we would or could only develop for iOS would be suicide given how but the Android market is.

    We did go iOS first cause it was easier, is better for video and we had a rockstar iOS dev in our midst. I don’t think our experiences are the same as every developer in the ecosystem choice because we are working in video and I do think we have issues that are harder than what most app developers have. Our experiences map pretty closely to what the BBC is experiencing so when Gruber linked to this BBC post – all I could do was nod my head in total agreement.

    I can’t get into a lot of the details since as a startup we have to keep some things secret. We are the leader in our space and we have learned everything through trial and error – the school of hard knocks.

    The bottom line is the Android ecosystem did not ship with any across the board way to do secure, streaming video. Apple did. End of story. I am guessing Google sat back and decided since everything is open, the Android world didn’t need secure, streaming video. Problem is we do. So this created a burgeoning side industry where the CDN’s, Microsoft, DRM companies and video toolkit companies could develop various ways for Android to securely stream video. With Apple we don’t need these extras. So someone like Spuul had to spend a lot of time finding a cost effective way to match what we do on iOS. Not easy. This is the part the video guys have to deal with in the Android world that developers not dealing with video will NEVER see. This alone is why the BBC needs a larger team and why people like Spuul need to spend more time on Android than iOS.

    Apart from the video stuff we notice right away that customers with Android pay less, complain more about having to pay and are more cutthroat in leaving comments in the Play Store blaming the developer for everything that is wrong in the world. Fortunately we are able to respond to the comments and we try to for each and every one. I find that it helps to respond to the good and the bad – since we have started doing this our rating has gone up and we see less comment trolls. I tend to look at it like the school bully – if you stand up to the bully he becomes less of a bully. It is a shame Apple has yet to allow developers to respond to comments. This is one area where Google Play is so much better than the App Store.

    I think when it comes to the payment issues in some sense Google is far ahead of Apple since they allow companies like Spuul to offer our customers the ability to pay for subscriptions and movies on demand. Apple, wanting to protect iTunes, does not allow us to offer customers the ability to pay for rentals or movies on demand with in app purchase. This is silly – Apple needs to open up more. Google also integrates lots of carrier billing around the world which is awesome – Apple is also behind on this trend. So Google has some openness around payments – Apples does not.

    We do see that Apple customers tend to pay more – not by a slight margin either but by a HUGE margin. I have many theories around this but the one that I think makes the most sense for us in the video world is piracy takes a huge toll. People can download pirated videos and load them on their phone. They can watch pirated videos on YouTube or they can download one of many different apps that scrapes YouTube to find the pirated videos to make it painless for the user to watch or download the pirated content. Given that the Android users are familiar with this creates an attitude that within the Android ecosystem that everything should be free. This to me is what creates the largest headwind for a company like Spuul – that although we offer a level of quality and convenience far and above piracy – the users tend to assume that everything is or should be free. Apple does a better job, although not perfect, of policing pirated apps in general. Google tend to turn a blind eye to it cause since many of the apps or content that is pirated exists on Google in such a way that Google profits from it. Given this Google is slow to deal with it.

    On top of all these issues  one still has to deal with the fragmentation issue. The easiest way to explain this is to take 2 brand new phones from 2 top tier vendors. Samsung and LG for example. Using the latest OS that they ship with. We have instances where the app will work on one and not the other – usually the majority of the time it is video related. So you can imagine if we the developer experiences issues like that then so do our customers. Add up all the vendors, the phone models and the various OS versions to get a sense of how big this issue can become. It is impossible to deal with it apart from getting the phone that has the issues and figuring it out. Usually it is something small and can be coded around but other times we just can’t make it work and give up. Sure we have issues from time to time on various versions of iOS or on specific devices but not often and usually under simulation we can sort it out. With the Android errors the only way to sort it at times is with the actual device which means some issues we will never solve. This is the fragmentation issue and it is very real.

    For Spuul we have no choice but to support both iOS and Android. We also see that Android is growing like mad and in some emergent markets is bigger than iOS and continues to grow faster than iOS. I don’t see this changing unless Apple comes out with a cheaper phone and I really hope they do since users with an option to purchase something from Apple probably will if the price makes it more affordable. Either way we will keep working on both and we know that with Android it will take more time, more money and more bodies to equal what we do with iOS. It is just that simple.

    What else besides these two ecosystems? For my money I would only bet on Windows Mobile for now. BB is dead. What else is there that I would take a chance on spending money on? Nothing for the moment to be honest.