Why the Cat’s out of the Bag.

If you keep up with any tech news, you probably heard the announcement that Twitter is acquiring Tweetie and the developer, Loren Brichter, is going to continue working on the app for them. They will change the name to Twitter for iPhone and make it free. This is really great news overall and congrats to Twitter and Loren. An official client is something Twitter always needed.

But this news changes things for us. We probably won’t be able to charge for the app anymore. Who’s going to pay for a Twitter client when “Tweetie” is free? We are a very small team and can make things work. We put 2.5 months of hard work into this app and feel really good about where it’s going. The last thing we want to do is just give up, but we need questions answered before we can continue moving forward.

Concerns with Moving Forward.

Our biggest setback is not knowing what Twitter’s plans are for their new app and how it relates to 3rd party clients.

1. Will the official Twitter client gain access to private APIs that others can’t access?
2. Will it get a higher query limit?
3. Will it be the only client to have true push notification?
4. Will they eventually kill all 3rd party iPhone/iPad clients to prevent confusion between their app and all the rest?

What are their intentions? If it’s just to provide an official free client for users, that’s great. But we need to know if they’ll continue to welcome and encourage 3rd party clients to keep going. They also need to give us a fair chance to succeed by not giving their official client an unfair advantage when it comes to accessing the API. There are so many unanswered questions right now. We are aware of their dev conference this week, Chirp. We aren’t attending, but hopefully good news will come from this event.

I have to say, even though the Twitter news sounds bad for 3rd party client developers, it made me more excited about finishing our app. We just need some assurance from Twitter that their intentions with this acquisition are good and they will continue to welcome and support the 3rd party clients.

Now that the cat’s out of the bag, we are really curious as to what your thoughts are on this situation. Let us know in the comments!

You guys have been quiet for a while. What are you up to?

For the past two and a half months or so, we’ve been hard at work on app #4. This is an app that we’ve been wanting to do for the longest time, but always put it off knowing it would be a huge project for us. We decided it was time to give it a shot. This app is currently being developed for the iPhone and an iPad version is also in early design stages. Our #1 priority is finishing this app for the iPhone and there’s no ETA yet.

The iPad was announced back in February. Other companies seem to have had plenty of time to release iPad versions of their apps. What’s the hold up?

As excited as we were about the iPad announcement, there were many reasons why we didn’t drop what we were working on to get an iPad app ready for launch. The biggest reason is the fact that we did not have a device to test on. A big part of our apps is the overall experience of them. We would not develop and release an app without being able to use the app as a normal user before selling it. What looks good in simulation doesn’t always work out well on the actual device.

The second reason we weren’t going to develop for the iPad early is because we had no idea how well the market would receive this device in a new category. We hoped/expected it to do well and initial numbers are very positive, but why take a risk when we can develop a new app for an already established market? It was an easy decision. Develop app #4 for the iPhone. By the time we are done, we’ll have plenty of play time with the iPad and have a better idea where the market is headed.

I have Pastebot running on my iPhone and iPad. Why can’t I sync both of them to my Mac?

Pastebot Sync was purposely designed to be very simple. We wanted it to be free and not create a lot of support requests. The less it does, the less issues it can have. That’s one of the reasons why the Sync app only supports one device at a time. The other reason was that most people only had one device anyways. If they had multiple, they probably only used one as their main device. With the release of the iPad, this changes things a bit. I think it’s safe to assume that anyone who buys an iPad already owns an iPhone or iPod touch. We are working on an update that will make the sync process with multiple devices a little better.

When will we see Weightbot/Convertbot/Pastebot made for the iPad?

We understand that our apps are not a great experience on the iPad right now, but it’s no surprise as they were designed for the iPhone. Since our apps have a custom interface, they take a lot of time to develop. We can’t say that all three apps will have iPad versions someday, but the one that makes the most sense right now is Pastebot. So if we develop iPad apps for our current apps, the first one will most likely be Pastebot. No official announcement on this because we still need to finish app #4.

Apple announced multi-tasking today. Does that mean Pastebot will finally run in the background?

We were hoping for good news regarding multi-tasking. It was great news for us as users, but not so great for Pastebot. While Apple’s multi-task implementation is smart, it doesn’t support the ability for Pastebot to grab what you copy in other apps in the background. If you really want Pastebot to import clippings in the background, tell Apple. The good news is going between Pastebot and the app you are copying from should be a better experience.

That’s about all I can think of for now. If you have other questions relevant to this topic, feel free to ask in the comments. We’ll do our best to answer some of them.

The new site is a little rough around the edges, but like our software, it will improve over time. Our goal this time around was to keep things simple. Easier for us to maintain, and easier for our customers to find what they need. We hope we’ve succeeded.

Bye Bye Getsatisfaction.com

We’ve had numerous complaints about how confusing getting support through getsatisfaction.com was. Well we are ditching it and trying a new support approach. Our support section is modeled closely after the support section within our apps (at least after the updates). The most common questions we get are clearly listed with answers and then the option to get more help or send us a suggestion is at the bottom. These forms send emails directly to us, only organized and filtered so we can manage them better. We’ll see how this works out over the next few months. We’ll continue to answer support questions on getsatisfaction.com, but we won’t send our customers there anymore.

Our Mailing List

If you scroll to the bottom of our website, you’ll notice an input box to subscribe to our mailing list. All this does is add your email address to a secure database so we can send you an email when we have big news to share. You won’t receive weekly or monthly emails. In fact, you may only receive 1-2 emails a year. Add your email address to be notified when we have big news to share. We will NEVER share or sell your email address with anyone.

If you do want more frequent updates (like when we post on our blog), you can subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, or become a fan of Tapbots on Facebook.

That’s about all the info we have for you. And let us know what you think (the good and the bad) about the new site in the comments!

The Data

When Convertbot launches, it grabs the latest currency conversion data from our server. Using the headers that Apple includes as part of every HTTP request and a couple extra ones that we throw in for reporting purposes we are able to see unique requests by OS and device version through each day of June. The average number of requests per day is ~3250. The number of iPhone devices is about 6 times greater then the number of iPod Touches. I also filtered out anyone not running Converbot 1.3 and then normalized each day’s numbers so that each day adds up to 100%. The reason I filtered out anyone running an older version is because those folks aren’t likely to be impacted by changing Convertbot to 3.0 only.

The Graphs

The data seems pretty clear. Prior to June 8th we have a fairly low adoption rate of ~3%. Starting on June 9 this jumps up to 6-8%, which can be directly tracked to the developer release at WWDC. Starting on June 17th we get a huge jump as all the non devs start upgrading. We’re currently running at an overall 75% upgrade rate which is pretty insane considering the number of devices and the fact that its only been 5 days.

Overall Upgrade Rates

This graph adds up both the iPhone and iPod devices and just measures overall upgrade rate for both devices.

iPhone Upgrade Rate

Given how many more iPhone devices there are vs iPod Touches it isn’t very surprising that this graph looks fairly similar to the Overall graph. The iPhone upgrade rate is a bit higher then the overall rate, currently sitting at 79%.

iPod Touch Upgrade Rate

This is somewhat more interesting and shows the impact of that annoying $10 fee that Apple charges for upgrades. While the iPhone upgrade is almost 80% the iPod Touch has just passed 50%.

Conclusion

It’s somewhat early to draw an overall market conclusion from our single sample. It’s pretty clear that at least our customers are upgrading to 3.0 at an incredibly fast pace. We’ll be keeping an eye over the next couple weeks and will update this post as needed with newer numbers. As I said before we don’t currently have any plans to make Convertbot or Weightbot 3.0 only, though they both have been submitted to Apple with some minor 3.0 bug fixes (which are still pending approval). However, our third app will be 3.0 only, as will anything else we do after that. So if you haven’t upgraded yet, what are you waiting for?

Quick Update

To answer some of the questions that have been asked in the comments. The Convertbot 1.3 update rate is ~87%, if you add in folks running 1.2 that goes up to ~94%. There are a few folks still running the original 1.0 version which I find quite interesting. If you add in the folks running all the older versions we are looking at 70-71% as far as the conversion rates to 3.0 goes. And for those folks running the older version the OS 3.0 conversion rate is only ~37%.

The Past (aka The Start)

Around the start of August of 2008 Mark and I were wrapping up a project at Oakley. We were chatting about something insignificant when I asked Mark, “Want to design an application for the iPhone? I’m thinking of doing a Weight Tracker”. I was thinking a simple application with a good feature set, a nice clean look to it. Well, Mark’s beautiful design had other ideas. After about 2.5 months of nights and weekends and about 70 custom classes we finally released Weightbot 1.0. The rest is history.

The Present (aka The Exciting Part)

We’ve been juggling day jobs with Tapbots for almost 9 months now. As of now that’s no longer the case. This month, Mark and I both gave our respective notices and we’re now going to be able to give Tapbots 100% of our energy. I think it’s nothing short of amazing that we are able to support ourselves with $0 investment (other than time) and all of it $1-$3 at a time. Weightbot sold 100k copies in its first 100 days, Convertbot is selling at about twice that rate. To say we’re excited about the future is an understatement. We’d like to thank all of you guys for getting us to this point.

The Future (aka The Big Plan)

So starting May 1st, we are both 100% focused on making the best iPhone software we can. We are putting some finishing touches on the 1.3 releases of Convertbot and Weightbot and hope to have them both over to Apple by the end of this week (just in time for the ADAs). Sometime in May we’re going to start on our 3rd application, we haven’t decided exactly what it’ll be, but the front runner concept should be really cool.

Longer term we aren’t looking to get any VC funding, grow to 100s of employees or get bought out by some big corporation. We may get help with support, testing and/or marketing, but development and design is going to just be us two for the foreseeable future. We think that’s the best way to keep the quality of our applications at the level that everyone expects. Our goal is to produce about 4 applications a year. We aren’t going to shovel out crap-ware to cash-in on our names. We aren’t going to write the next Office or Filemaker. We are going to write simple but incredibly polished applications that are created specifically for the iPhone/Touch devices. Two guys, lot’s of passion and a lot of hard work, that’s the Tapbots way.

A. Create a quality product
B. Price the product properly
C. Market the product

It’s the AppStore’s twisted version of the Project Triangle. Each of the corners of the triangle has an effect on the other two. Let’s focus on Price and Marketing.

With a low Price per unit you can’t afford to spend as much on Marketing per customer. I doubt very much that a $0.99 is going to spend tons of money on a Google Adwords campaign or big expensive banner ads. However, at low Price points, you don’t have to Market as much, since customers are more likely to purchase your product just to try it out. At higher Price points you can afford to spend more to Market to customers, but conversely you have to Market more since its going to take more convincing for people to purchase.

I consider the Top 100 list a form of advertising. You are virtually spending money by pricing a $2 app at $1 to get on that list, whether its worth it or not depends on your app. It is somewhat different than most forms of advertising since your ad money is going straight into the pockets of the consumers (or I suppose never leaving their pockets) instead of some middle man.

I don’t feel sorry for any developers on that Top 100 list, chances are even at $0.99 you are making at least $500-1000 per day and that’s pretty good money. There’s not too many other places where you can take an investment of a few hundred bucks and some time and turn it into that kind of money. I’m guessing the median income for an AppStore app is under $20/day, if you are significantly above that there’s not much to complain about.

So stop crying to Apple to change their model and just keep coding. The only thing you can expect Apple to do is to try to maximize their profits. If Apple thinks that the Top 100 list gets them the most money, well then its not going to change regardless of how much you want it to.