‘Ringtone Apps’ – Some Alternative Marketing Routes

I think I can safely say that at least some of the ideas from my ‘Teh App Store Sux’ piece yesterday were on the right track, since they agree with the points made far more eloquently — as long as you skip the kindergarten economics — by Jesse Farmer at 20bit.com. Relying on the App Store as a means of marketing your iPhone app — rather than simply as the distribution method — is a mistake. It’s not even a mistake which the notoriously inept music and movie industries make. Developer should look outside iTunes for customers. To that end, I’ll put forward another couple of possible solutions.

• Jesse Farmer

There is a rapidly expanding roster of 3rd party sites dedicated to iPhone applications. They fall broadly into two categories: the review sites, and the list sites. This latter group plays a role roughly equivalent to that of Versions Tracker and MacUpdate for desktop apps (although it should be pointed out that both now boast their own iPhone catagories). Several weeks ago we featured the Fresh Apps website, which uses user feedback to rank applications. Other sites such as AppSafari do something similar. These sites — and the many others like them — could provide an addendum to the App Store’s own (broken) rankings, if only their profiles could be raised to the point where they permeate into the public’s consciousness. This isn’t going to happen without the support of both the media and developers, but I’d suggest that doing so would be more productive than waiting for Apple to fix the problem on their own. After all, if you think you know a better way of ranking App Store apps, who do you think is more likely to listen to you, Apple or one of these sites? (Yes, I know that a lot of the necessary information, such as number of downloads, is only available to Apple, but I think we’ve already agreed that this alone is a poor method of ranking these apps.)

• Fresh Apps
• AppSafari

Okay, now let me make with the crazy. One of the problems which is continuously returned to is the lack of ‘try before you buy’. On the one hand, the developer can do something about this themselves by providing a limited demo version of their app. This has the dual advantages that the user gets to see whether it’s right for them before paying actual money, and as a side effect, since these demos are likely to be free, potentially gives the developer exposure in the Top Free Apps chart. There are, of course, down sides to this approach. There’s a fine line between restricting the demo to the point where users can’t really tell if it does what they want, and providing something so full-featured that they have no incentive to upgrade to the full paid version. Having the app expire after a limited trial period is one option popular on the desktop, but it’s currently unclear how this would go down with iPhone users, or whether Apple would even allow it. The FairPlay DRM used on apps — which is the same as is used on rental movies — does allow for expiration after a certain amount of time, but Apple has not (yet) made this type of control available to developers. Again, it’s uncertain how users would respond to it.

But I promised you crazy, so here goes. How about giving users the option to try applications, not on their phones but on their desktops. The iPhone SDK currently ships with a simulator which uses the similarity between the Mac and iPhone versions of Cocoa to test apps without needing to upload them to a device. It’s far from perfect, mostly because many of the iPhone-specific functions are missing, but it gives a vague idea of how an app works. Wishing for Apple to integrate the simulator into iTunes is pointless, but if someone where to produce a similar application — maybe designed to better emulate some of the features missing from Apple’s version — for which developers could provide special non-iPhone ‘preview’ applications… If this parallel ecosystem was supported by some of the 3rd party app rating sites mentioned above, it may at the very least spur Apple into addressing the bigger problem.

Finally, on the subject of App Store dross, I really wouldn’t like to be Ethan of Ethan Productions, who the EdibleApple guys rip a new one. The post just goes to highlight how the application approval process has nothing to do with quality.

• EdibleApple