I work on an iPhone app called Reps & Sets as a hobby project in my spare time. This week, my partner and I came to the conclusion that there is no future for our app as a paid download, so we have reluctantly decided to make it free.
This was an incredibly tough call, because we have invested literally thousands of hours in developing our app over the years. Giving all that hard work away for free is heartbreaking. But we didn’t feel we had much choice.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
App developers put a lot of time and effort into preventing their apps from being cracked or pirated. But for every coder taking a step toward making an app more secure, there’s someone on the march to crack it. The integrity of any app is subject to an ongoing arms race.
The most popular and useful apps are the most likely to release the cracken (I’m so sorry), so finding out that a bunch of people have downloaded your app illegally can be worn as something of a badge of pride. But that’s cold comfort when you’re losing customers, so let’s take a look at a couple of the most likely app-cracking approaches developers should protect against.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
If you’re developing a Mac app, you’re faced with a major either/or decision: whether to distribute inside or outside of the Mac App Store (MAS). Sticking to the MAS means you’ve got access to tools for licensing, hosting, crash reporting and other necessary tasks. However, Apple’s tools may not be what’s best for your app.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
So you’re going to launch an app for Mac. Congrats! Now you’ve got to figure out an app marketing strategy that will get it to the widest audience possible.
There are many ways to approach the birth of a new product, but even in a field as fast-growing and dynamic as the world of apps, experience has yielded accepted wisdom about the best ways to start and maintain a successful campaign. Here are great rules of thumb for maximizing impact and customers for your app.
Our new App Business section is brought to you by MacPaw, maker of proven Mac apps.
Like death and taxes, distributing your new app through the Mac App Store can seem inevitable. It’s widely considered the easiest way to get the widest exposure for an app, a centralized marketplace for software with a captive audience of buyers.
But ever more developers are looking beyond the Mac App Store (MAS) for distribution options that best serve their app. MacPaw, maker of DevMate, performed an interesting survey of developers to ask if they prefer MAS or another app store alternative, and why.
Android might have more apps and a lot more users than iOS these days, but it’s still trailing far behind when it comes to making money for developers. Last quarter, the App Store made twice as much money than Google Play for app makers.
Windows 10 hasn’t been the hit on mobile that Microsoft hoped it would be, but the company has a new plan to get iOS developers to bring their apps to Windows: poach them at WWDC.
Apple’s analytics tools are invaluable to developers who want to gain better insight into who is downloading their apps and how well they’ll be monetized. They’ve previously been available to iOS and Mac developers, but tvOS devs were second-class citizens, with no analytics tools to draw on.
Now Apple is finally making its App Analytics dashboard available to Apple TV devs as well.
Sloppy coding in some popular iOS games allows hackers to give themselves and others thousands of dollars’ worth of in-app purchases for free.
The hole was discovered by developers at DigiDNA, creator of a backup tool called iMazing that allows iPhone and iPad users to access their devices’ hidden file systems. The developers found that the app backup/restore feature in iMazing 1.3 exposes weaknesses in the way games like Angry Birds 2 and Tetris Free handle in-app purchases.
To demonstrate how easy it is to hack in-app purchases using this method, the DigiDNA team tweaked Angry Birds 2 to start the game with 999,999,999 gems — the equivalent of $10,000 of in-game credits.
If you ever dig into the privacy policies of app developers, be prepared for a shock. This is where they confess their sins: invading your privacy, selling your data, and pestering you with popups and unwanted ads.
As the App Store becomes increasingly crowded and competitive, many developers struggle to make a profit. Some turn their attention to alternative sources of revenue, and the quality of their apps suffer as a result.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are the 10 rules for developers to keep things “classy.”
