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FDX Reader

Making the App Store better

April 23, 2014 Apps, Bronson, FDX Reader, Highland, Weekend Read

Roughly this time last year, I wrote about how the App Store encourages topping the charts and racing to the bottom, and how that hurts both developers and users.

David Smith has compiled a list of recommendations for making the App Store experience better. I especially agree with several of his suggestions:

1: Apps should be required to pass approval on an ongoing basis.

I’d go further and say that if an app has had no activity for a set number of months, it automatically gets de-listed. I suspect more than half of the apps in the store are effectively zombies, abandoned by their creators. These apps’ only function is to clutter up search results.

6: Make the process of applying for a refund clear and straightforward.

Right now you go to reportaproblem.apple.com and then fill in a form. I’d love to see this integrated into the App Store app itself. Perhaps even into the Purchased Apps area.

Roughly 10% of our support emails are from people who really should just get a refund because they bought an app without really understanding what it did. We have a boilerplate email that walks them through the process of applying for a refund, but there’s no reason it needs to be so complicated.

I think prices for some apps could easily and appropriately rise if customers understood they could get their money back if unsatisfied.

11: Make the rating scale a rolling, weighted average rather than just current version, at least soon after updates.

We update our apps very frequently, sometimes twice a month. Each time we do, our ratings drop back to zero, effectively punishing us for improving the app.

A rolling, weighted average would better reflect not only how satisfied users are with the current version, but with the product overall.

In the iOS App Store, our products are Weekend Read and FDX Reader. FDX Reader is old — it hasn’t been updated in a year — but we’re keeping it around until the iPad version of Weekend Read.

By my criteria, should FDX Reader be dropped from the store? I don’t know. It still sells, and we haven’t gotten a support email for it in months, so users are apparently satisfied with it. But if we got a warning email from Apple saying it needed to be updated or face de-listing, we’d pay attention. More than anything, that’s what a regular review process would achieve: making developers take another look at their old apps.

For iOS, we also have the Scriptnotes app, but it’s made by Wizzard Media. We release it under the Quote-Unquote label only so we can track downloads.

In the Mac App Store, our products are Highland and Bronson Watermarker. If you look at the current Bronson reviews, there’s a one-star review from a customer who couldn’t figure out the app. He didn’t write us for support; he didn’t check any online documentation. He’s exactly the kind of user who should have been able to click a button and get a refund.

I hope at this year’s WWDC, we’ll see Apple taking some of Smith’s suggestions to make the App Store experience better.

On Rotation

March 18, 2014 Apps, FDX Reader, Weekend Read

Weekend Read’s support site encourages users to send in feature requests in addition to the usual bug reports. We try to answer every inquiry.

This week, we responded to a plea for landscape mode in Weekend Read by explaining that while it’s not out of the question, we had already tried landscape mode for the iPhone, and found it unsatisfactory.

The user disagreed — and threatened a negative review — arguing we should let consumers decide whether they want to rotate scripts to read them in landscape mode.

This got me thinking about landscape mode on the iPhone, and the apps that support it. As I started going through the apps on my first few screens, I realized that landscape on the iPhone is far from universal.

Portrait-Only Both Rotations
Settings Messages
App Store Contacts
iTunes Camera
Vesper Maps
Launch Center Photos
Phone Skitch
Clock Snapseed
Instacast iA Writer
Trailers Instapaper
Letterpress Kindle
Vine iBooks
Instagram GoodReader
IMDb
Reeder
Poster
Facebook
Twitter
Podcasts
Facebook Paper
Glassboard

Notably, many of Apple’s own apps eschew landscape mode. Just as notably, many reading-style apps support landscape mode. So it’s certainly worth looking at the pros and cons of adding landscape support to the iPhone.

PRO: Lots of other reader apps allow landscape.

CON: We’re different than most reader apps. In Weekend Read, margins matter a lot for dialogue and transitions. We can’t just set every block left and move on. We would need to extensively test which margins look right for which font size. An extra complication is that we’d need to do it for both the smaller iPhone 4 series and the larger iPhone 5s.

PRO: We did landscape mode in the iPhone version of FDX Reader.

CON: Supporting landscape in FDX Reader was a pain in the ass. New developer tools make it somewhat easier, but Weekend Read is a much more complex app than FDX Reader, with many more views.

PRO: With the much-rumored larger iPhones, people might use them more like iPad minis, which are often in landscape mode.

CON: There aren’t bigger-screen iPhones yet.

CON: All new graphics, all new headaches. From the user perspective, it seems like allowing landscape rotation should be as simple as flipping a switch. And in fact, it sort of is in in Xcode. But when you flip that switch, you find that almost everything needs to be rethought and rebuilt, because it was designed for vertical orientation.

PRO: Users could choose even larger fonts. By sacrificing vertical space, we could let the user have letters nearly an inch tall.

CON: The text options screen is actually a good example of what would need to be rebuilt. Here’s the screen in portrait mode:

iphone WR portrait

The sample text lets you see in real time what the font will look like. Here’s that same screen in landscape:

landscape WR

We’d have to substantially rethink this view.

CON: The gestures are built for portrait. On Weekend Read, you can swipe right to get back to the Library. You can swipe left to show the Page Jumper. But in landscape, your thumbs are in the wrong place. It’s not a deal-killer, but it’s a worse experience.

CON: Twice the views to debug. Twice as many things to break.

CON: Very few people are asking for landscape mode. By far the majority of requests are for an iPad version. Allowing landscape rotation on the iPhone would push the iPad version back at least another two weeks.

Ultimately, every choice comes with a cost. Adding landscape to the iPhone isn’t impossible, but it means not doing something else, and right now the many “something elses” are worth a lot more.

You can find Weekend Read in the App Store.

Introducing Weekend Read

February 11, 2014 Apps, FDX Reader, Fountain, Highland, News, Weekend Read

product photoWe have a new app. It’s called Weekend Read. It’s for reading scripts on your iPhone.

It’s free in the App Store.

Up until now, reading screenplays on an iPhone has been terrible. It’s all squinting and pinching.

Weekend Read takes screenplay PDFs, Final Draft and Fountain files and reformats them to look terrific on your iPhone.

Weekend Read is only for the iPhone.

Why only the iPhone, and not the iPad? Numbers.

chart

Our sophisticated market analysis revealed that there were zero good apps in this category.

New yet familiar

If you’re acquainted with our other apps, you may be saying, “Well, it sounds like they took the ‘reader’ part of FDX Reader and the PDF-melting parts of Highland and put them together in one app.”

You’re right. That’s exactly what we did.

But we didn’t stop there. We built in search, new fonts, Dark Mode, a new page jumper, character highlighting and full-screen mode.

We added Fountain and Markdown, including images.

And because a reader needs something to read, we beefed up Dropbox support and gave users a hand-curated (and continually-updated) list of For Your Consideration scripts and Project Gutenberg titles.

The Weekend Read library holds four scripts at a time. If you choose, you can unlock the app to store hundreds. It’s a single in-app purchase.

The present and the future

(updated 2/12/2014) We launched yesterday afternoon. The response has been terrific. We shipped more copies of Weekend Read in twelve hours than we did of FDX Reader in its whole life.

We didn’t nudge people to leave reviews on the App Store, but a lot of users chose to. Thank you.

A couple of common questions on Twitter:

“Why hasn’t someone done this before?”

We actually tried to. The hardware just wasn’t fast enough.1 So we owe a huge debt to Apple and all the clever silicon engineers who make it possible to build apps like ours.

“Can you make an Android or Kindle version of Weekend Read?”

Unfortunately, no. Weekend Read relies on a lot of special iOS 7 stuff, and shares quite a bit of code base with Highland for Mac. We’d have to start from zero to make an Android version, and that would pull us away from all our current products.

“Could you add notes?”

We could. At a certain point, we had to decide where to stop for version 1.0.

Every feature you add has the potential to increase complexity in a way that compromises the purpose of the app. So I want to make sure that if we add notes, they feel just right.

“Will this free-then-upgrade business model work?”

We’ll see. For me, it was important that users have the chance to try Weekend Read with their own scripts. Happy users are likely to keep using Weekend Read, and many will eventually decide it’s worth it to pay for the bigger library.

But if they don’t — if they keep deleting files to stay under the limit — that’s okay too. My goal with Weekend Read was to make the experience of reading scripts on the iPhone better. Emotional profits are worth something, too.

Speak up

We already have David Wain, Rawson Thurber and Dan Etheridge singing Weekend Read’s praises, but I’m actively seeking one more blurb.

So if you like the app, tweet a blurb with the hashtag #WeekendRead. Over the next few days, I’ll be picking out my favorites to add to the official App Store description.

To celebrate Weekend Read’s launch, we’re also offering Highland at 50% off through Friday. Now that you have an app for reading Fountain files, it’s time to start writing them.

  1. The iPhone 4 is still debatably not fast enough. One advantage to making the app free is that users can decide for themselves whether the lag is acceptable. ↩

Topping the charts and racing to the bottom

June 4, 2013 Apps, Bronson, FDX Reader, Fountain, Highland

Next week is WWDC, the annual developers’ conference at which Apple reveals all the shiny new goodness they have planned for app makers. Like everyone, I’m anticipating new looks and new APIs. What I’m not expecting is what I’d really like to see: some major changes to the App Store.

As someone who sells apps, I’d love near-real-time sales reports, link tracking and better management of promo codes.

But what I want most is for Apple to get rid of the charts.

The App Store’s best-sellers lists hurt shoppers, developers and Apple. The charts create a vicious circle that encourages shitty business models and system-gaming. They’re a relic of a time when data was scarce. They should go away.

Marco Arment thinks so too:

Abolishing the “top” lists from all App Store interfaces and exclusively showing editorially selected apps in browsing screens would do a hell of a lot more than trials to promote healthy app economics and the creation of high-quality software.

Having been through the App Store experience with Bronson Watermarker, Highland, FDX Reader and two variations of Karateka, I think Arment’s on the right track. But editorial curation is only part of the solution. Apple can and should use sales data to help steer buyers towards apps they’ll like. It just has to be smarter about it.

How charts hurt consumers

Since most people are app-buyers, let’s start there.

These lists — a sidebar in iTunes, a tab on the App Store — show what’s downloaded the most. But let’s not mistake downloads for popularity. These are apps that people may have downloaded, used once, then deleted. What you really want is a list that shows what apps that people like you are using and enjoying. That’s the kind of information that companies like Amazon and Netflix are terrific at leveraging.

Apple makes some attempt at this in their Genius tab, which tries to find correlations based on what other apps you have installed, but I’ve never found it useful. Just because I have one to-do app doesn’t mean I’m looking for five more. (In fact, I’m probably less likely to buy another to-do app if I have one I’m using regularly.)

Consider Netflix. Netflix will show you “What’s Popular,” but it’s not a ranked list. Rather, it shows you things you might be interested in, either because of overall popularity or its own internal algorithms that calculate your preferences. Search for flashlights on Amazon and it will show you flashlights sorted based on whatever formula their data suggests will most likely result in you buying a flashlight.

That’s not how the App Store does it. Apple shows you a list of what freemium games teenagers downloaded. It’s not showing you the best games, or the most-liked games. It’s showing you what’s at the top of the charts — and because these games are at the top of the charts, they’re likely to stay there.

How charts hurt developers

The most popular paid apps are almost always the cheapest apps, which fosters a race to the bottom. Yes, you can set your price higher — and maybe should — but since the charts are one of the only ways to get visibility on the App Store, there’s a strong incentive to go low for exposure.

Let’s say your app is priced at $10, and you sell 100 per week. Cutting your price to $5, you discover that you sell 200 per week. Cutting your price to $1, you sell 1000 per week.1 In each case, you’ve made $1000. You’re making just as much money at each price point, but the $1 app would chart much, much higher in the App Store.

For that reason alone, you might pick that price even though you now have ten times the customers to support. By pricing it for the masses, you’re dealing with the masses.

Apple has tried to address the situation by adding a third list, Top Grossing, which should in theory reward the apps that sold fewer copies at a higher price. In reality, the Top Grossing iOS apps are the games with lots of consumable in-app purchases.2

Partly because the top-sellers lists are public information, developers feel themselves pushed to keep lowering their prices for fear of a competitor undercutting them.

That happened to us with Bronson Watermarker. We started out priced at $9.99. Three weeks later, a near-clone entered the App Store at $4.99. Does that mean we were priced too high? Or were they priced too low?

We ultimately raised our price to $14.99, while they’ve essentially abandoned their app, so my hunch is they discovered there wasn’t enough money to be made at their price.

But what if cutting the price isn’t enough to climb the charts? Developers can use outside services like Chartboost:

However, when you combine volume with time, then that’s where you start cracking the secret formula. If you can get high volume of installs over a short period of time, your app gets noticed and starts climbing the charts.

Most people don’t realize there’s a whole parallel industry devoted to the App Store charts. Apple could get rid of it by removing one button.

What would go in place of that “Top Charts” button? Maybe “Favorites,” with a custom-generated list of popular and well-liked apps tailored to the user. Maybe promote the “Staff Picks” section to its own spot. Hell, let’s dump “Genius” and put in both.

Should developers get to see the best-sellers chart? I think not.

I know it sounds weird to argue for less transparency, but I’d rather have more data about how my own apps are selling than a ranked list of everyone else’s. Charts encourage developers to focus on competitors rather than customers. So get rid of ’em.

I doubt Apple will announce anything like this at next week’s WWDC. But I think developers would get more out of this change than anything Apple will introduce at the conference.

  1. I’m making up these numbers. In reality, I’ve found price elasticity to be all over the place with the apps I’ve sold. ↩
  2. On the Mac, Top Grossing does favor more-expensive apps, although Apple’s own software dominates the top of the list. ↩
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