
The 2014 Panic Report - jmduke
http://www.panic.com/blog/the-2014-panic-report/
======
sedev
I wince a little when I read the section titled "Low iOS revenue." The iOS App
Store's race to the bottom on pricing (and the parallel problem in
Androidville) are very hard on developers. Panic reports that their unit sales
are nearly even on iOS and OS X - but that the _revenue_ is on the far side of
an 80-20 split, that they make more than four times the revenue from a desktop
sale than from an iOS sale! Even if you assume, very generously, that an iOS
app can use a smaller project scope and only take half the investment of
company time, that's still a heavily skewed ratio. It's a bad situation for
developers that can't absorb losses or make their money via IAP (and I'm not
sure how long the IAP route will be around, considering the _utterly vile_
marketing practices some entities are using to juice up IAP revenue).

The problem is that this is not that Apple, Google, or consumers are _doing_
something to development houses. It's an emergent feature of the market and
the incentives, so there's no simple way to make it _reliably_ financially
viable to develop for mobile (subscriptions and IAP are not simple and don't
fit all business models).

I hope Panic can afford to stay in the business of writing iOS apps. Their
apps are great. But the money those apps are making them, isn't great.

~~~
lordbusiness
Indeed. Increasingly I'm viewing iOS apps as value-add only, that is to say
apps attached to a given service or other offering, designed to augment such a
service.

I am sure people will cite a zillion examples of businesses that make their
living from iOS apps, but increasingly this appears more like winning the
lotto, akin to 'making it' in Hollywood, than as a viable business model for
all comers.

The reliable way to make a living as an iOS developer is to develop for a
bigger company that needs an app as a side-show.

~~~
themartorana
We are a no-debt, always-profitable iOS/Android game company with 6 employees
that runs in a bit in constant fear. Our games are "free to play", ad-
supported, and have IAP only to remove ads.

We have nearly 7000 daily downloads, something like a 15% 30-day retention
rate that absolutely blows the doors off of our competition, and _still_ make
very little of our revenue off of that IAP. Even some of our longest players
continue to look at ads, because $1.99 seems too steep to them. The best
business advice (and scummiest feeling advice) we get is that we're not
milking our "whales" properly.

We survive, basically, because of volume - to make it in our business you have
to have at _least_ 50,000 daily users. And that's a minimum.

We'll continue to make games as long as we're profitable and can pay
employees, but the 30% to Apple/Google, the incredibly low "ARPU" (avg revenue
per user) and high costs of doing business have us constantly looking to where
we might be able to leverage some of the tech we've built in other markets.

------
wwweston
Perhaps the most interesting part for developers currently targeting or
considering targeting Apple's App store:

"We had a very long, very torturous situation with Status Board almost being
pulled that we’ve never written up out of sensitivity to our relationship with
Apple. I only mention it here because it proves that it is possible to fix
these awkward rejection situations without Apple suffering negative PR in the
public eye — we did that 'offline'. But it took an absolutely massive amount
of mental energy and time to work through — positively Sisyphean. I would
never want to do it again — I’ve run out of patience, I guess. I can say for
certain that the 'bad PR' version of the app dispute process is monumentally
more effective. Which is a shame."

Apple's process is a favorite punching bag, of course, and for good reasons.

But I find it so common that 'bad PR' disputes that gain traction (or from
parties who can easily command an audience) are more effective that I'm
honestly have trouble thinking of exceptions to contrast Apple with.

Anyone know of some?

If not, what does this say about the limits of businesses to address systemic
problems?

~~~
serve_yay
I have seen some bloggers theorize that these problems are bubbling up more in
recent months because of some kind of internal conflict within Apple. It does
seem rather schizophrenic, with one team releasing a bunch of features in iOS
and the SDK, only to have the App Store team disallow the features' use.

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terranstyler
Obviously "Panic" is a well-known company for developing IOs applications and
for at least 145 people on HN this is common knowledge.

Is there anything special about this company?

EDIT: Although the people downvoting (currently -1) this won't read this edit
anymore, the question was (and is) meant serious.

~~~
netnichols
Panic is actually more well known as a company that makes Mac apps. Many would
call them the preeminent developers for the Mac platform (along with Omni). So
think of it like this...

A hugely popular (for its market), established, independent, and profitable
software company gives clear and transparent insight into how the past year
has gone for them and their products.

------
jfernandez
Amazing transparency! Imagine if the whole industry behaved this way, we'd all
be better for it.

Maybe a minor point to some here, but I'd love to know more about the QA
process changes they're hinting at.

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akramhussein
Really great apps and bar is being kept high which is always great for the s/w
industry. If I could achieve just 1% of what Panic has I'd be proud.

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benologist
I hope this is the year Panic upgrades Transmit to have a retry button for
failed uploads - it's especially painful that entire syncs and batch uploads
have to stop or be accepted as incomplete if a single file fails.

------
mappu
USA-based company releases a closed-source SSH client and remote file manager.
Sorry, i'll pass.

~~~
post_break
But look at how pretty they are.

