askadeveloper_logo

We did it!  We finally were able to pull through and post Ask An iPhone App Developer on back to back weeks.  Hopefully this turns into a trend.

Thanks to all of you who provided questions for our iPhone app developer last week.  Just as promised, here are our three CollegeKidApp.com wristband winners: Andrew, Scott, and John.  Congratulations to all three of you!  Our winners have been contacted and will hopefully be receiving their prizes in a timely manner.  If we keep receiving the same kind of positive feedback that we have been receiving over the past few weeks, we may just keep doing these little fun giveaways within the column.  As of right now, however, the wristband fun is over.

And now on to the questions…

Andrew asks: “How do you decide the price of your app? There are so many great apps that are free and so many bad ones that are priced. If it was my app, and it was really good, I would price it at $.99. And I’m talking about the really good apps that don’t have ads. As and extension to my question, why would you decide to make your really good app free? And I’m not talking about it being good because you spent so much time on it, but because it’s an actual good app.”

This is a great question where you’d find a multitude of different answers depending on who you ask.  When we looked into pricing Battery Go!, we looked at utility applications as a whole and felt like $0.99 was the fair market price for what our app did.  We also knew that it would be a fairly competitive market, expecting lots of battery apps to follow, so we didn’t want to price ourselves at $1.99 or 2.99 where other apps could come undercut our price and steal sales.  As for free apps with ads, a lot of our research showed that this just wasn’t a viable way to make money and cover our costs unless we were to be a top downloaded free app and even then, we’d have to stay there for a while.  This just kinda seemed far fetched, so we went the paid route for our app.

Scott asks: “Can someone please explain why no one has as yet made an app to increase the sound when an email arrives instead of the inaudible default sound.”

Yeah, I think the primary reason behind this is the fact that developers just can’t play around with the device sound settings for another app on the device.  To do something like this, we would need to create a whole new mail client, which may be tough to get past Apple as this app would directly compete with their mail app, and then just make the sounds louder.  It would be a rather large project to undertake in the hopes that enough people want a small feature such as a louder default e-mail noise.  We wish we could just go under the hood of the built in mail app and change the sound, but we can’t do that with the current SDK.

John asks: “Is there a better/different development environment than the supplied xcode/interface builder?”

Not that we’ve found.  We were fairly novice when we started, so we just went with what everyone was telling us to use.  Having worked as a team on three apps that are currently in the store, we have grown to love the current development environment.  Our programmer did seem to have a bit of a rough time with interface builder at first, since he’d never used anything like it, but he’s learned a bit more about it and really enjoys using it now.

Erik asks: “Could Battery Go! be used to calculate the amount of battery power left on an iPod, or do the variables differ from device to device?”

We get this question all the time and really wish we could accurately throw this sort of information into Battery Go!.  The problem with the iPhone (or any other cell phone for that matter) is that battery calculations go all nuts when you start throwing things like WiFi, Bluetooth, games, etc at it.  We could have thrown information like this into Battery Go! and made adjustments to our calculations based on these features, but it just wouldn’t be accurate enough for us to ship out with confidence.  Early on in the development cycle, we decided that we wanted Battery Go! to be the easiest battery app to use, understand, and integrate into your daily phone usage.  This does mean that we had to cut back on some features, but we felt as if we were providing an accurate app which gave the best estimates available to users.

Casey asks: “What’s your opinion on “lite” versions of apps?  Same idea but a different twist are ‘normal’ and “pro” versions of the same app.  Is it an easy process to offer a trimmed down version along with the full featured version?  Do you find it a cost effective model to try and entice cheapskates?  If you’ve talked to a developer that offers apps like that, does it seem to work?”

To tackle your first question, it really isn’t that difficult to throw together a Lite app once you’ve completed your normal version of the app.  We have a Lite version of Battery Go! sitting on a computer that took about 4-5 hours to throw together, we just ran into some other issues that kept us from letting it see the light of day.

As far as to if they are successful or cost effective, I think a lot of the data I’ve seen definitely validates the usefulness of such apps for developers.  They seem to help grab potential sales and they definitely gain awareness for your paid product.  That being said, I think there is a problem with the current App Store set up where you see Lite editions of paid apps taking about 40 of the top 50 positions on the free application charts in the store.  I really think we need to see a demo mode or something, to separate great free apps from free demos in the App Store.  It’s just too cluttered right now in the way in currently is.

That’s it for this week.  Keep the great questions coming!  Remember, they can be about anything iPhone app related.

Have a question for our iPhone app developer?  Send it to: tyler [at] appadvice [dot] com with the subject line “Ask An iPhone App Developer” OR just leave a comment below.