Riccardo Mori

A few initial thoughts on the new subscription model for apps

June 10, 2016

Software

(These are early observations and first impressions. I may update this post in the next days as the ongoing debate develops.)

I assume you’ve all heard the big news, otherwise The New App Store: Subscription Pricing, Faster Approvals, and Search Ads by John Gruber, and Pre-WWDC App Store Changes by Michael Tsai are two good starting points. In short, the various Apple’s App Stores (iOS, OS X, tvOS) will soon undergo a few significant changes. Gruber:

These changes fundamentally change the App Store, for users and especially for developers.

A quick summary:

App Store review times are now much shorter. These changes are already in place, and have been widely noted in recent weeks. Apple is today confirming they’re not a fluke — they’re the result of systemic changes to how App Store review works.

Subscription-based pricing was heretofore limited to specific app categories. Now, subscription-based pricing will be an option for any sort of app, including productivity apps and games. This is an entirely new business model for app developers — one that I think will make indie app development far more sustainable.

Changes to app discovery, including a smarter “Featured” tab, the return of the “Categories” tab, and, yes, as rumored, paid search ads.

In this post, I want to focus only on the new subscription model for apps. It’s the change that is going to have the biggest impact on me as a user/customer.

I know it’s probably too early to comment on a landscape that hasn’t changed yet, but I believe that in this case the debate might help shape how such landscape changes down the road.

As soon as I learnt about subscription-based pricing, my first thought was I just hope not each and every app developer will merrily jump on the subscription bandwagon, because it’s not going to be sustainable for the users. Michael Tsai writes:

From the developer side, recurring revenue is key, but will customers be reluctant to sign up? Even as someone who likes to pay for apps, I think twice about subscriptions. In a competitive marketplace, will customers find a subscription product attractive next to a competing one that is a one-time purchase? How can a developer figure out a fair ongoing price up front, when it’s not known how the app’s launch will go or what path its future development will take?

Like Tsai, I’m not a cheapskate and I like to pay for software — but I like to pay a fair amount upfront and ‘own’ the software, as opposed to ‘rent’ it for an indeterminate time interval. I was never a fan of the freemium model, but in a few cases it has worked very well for me — the typical example is the free photo app with in-app purchases for filter packs and/or additional features. I’ve happily obliged in more than one occasion, because I felt it was a fair contribution to the app’s development and a thank-you to the developer for delivering a nice product. If the same app shifted to a subscription model, I don’t know if I would completely be okay with it. Another scenario where the freemium model has worked for me — the typical ‘free with ads’ app where you make an in-app purchase to remove the (usually annoying) ads. If the app is worth it, I usually oblige. If an app proposed me to start a subscription to remove the ads, it’s far more likely I would either keep using the app free with ads, or look elsewhere.

Tsai again:

I think the best thing that can be said for subscriptions is that they’re honest and mostly align everyone’s incentives properly. Customers will essentially vote with their wallets, on an ongoing basis. Developers who maintain and improve their apps will get recurring revenue. Apple will get more revenue when it steers customers to good apps. Over time, more of the money will flow to the apps that people actually like and use. My guess is that the average customer will end up spending more money on fewer paid apps. Some apps will become more sustainable, but others will be culled.

I hope developers won’t start abusing this new subscription model. This was another of my first concerns as soon as the news broke. I have 147 apps on my iPhone. I have 178 apps on my iPad. Even considering the overlap of universal apps I use on both devices, I probably have 25–30 apps that are unique to the iPad. If even a small subset of these apps — let’s say 35 — turned to a subscription-based pricing, I just wouldn’t be able to afford it. As James Thomson succinctly put it on Twitter, App subscriptions sound great until users realise they have 100s of apps. I don’t know how well it scales. Devs can’t all make more money.

I’m inclined to agree with what Tsai says above, but there’s something I want to add to that observation he and others have made, that “more of the money will flow to the apps that people actually like and use” and that “people won’t have hundreds of apps anymore, just the ones they actually love and care to support” (I’m paraphrasing in this second instance; it’s something I’ve read in passing on my Twitter timeline and I don’t remember the exact words).

Here’s the thing — Among the apps I’ve bought over the years, a lot of them are quality apps I love and enjoy using, but I don’t necessarily use them all the time. A classic example: photo apps and image editing apps. I have a lot of them, and I don’t really have a preference. I decide which to use mostly following the mood of the moment (in case of photo apps) or the specific function/effect I’m after (in case of editing apps and even photo apps as well).

With these kinds of apps, I like to have lots of options available, and I haven’t minded paying upfront for each of these apps; I haven’t minded paying the occasional extra for a paid update or for the in-app purchase that unlocked more photo filters or editing features. But in the extreme case that all app developers behind these apps moved to a subscription-based pricing, without offering alternatives, I would be forced into a position I really don’t like: having to decide which app stays on my devices and which one has to go. Will the App Store’s infamous ‘race to the bottom’ become the ‘race to stay in your device’s (home) screen’?

Same goes for text editors and drawing apps on the iPad. I would hate to be forced to choose between supporting 1Writer or IA Writer, between supporting Procreate or 53’s Paper or Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro (in case all these embraced the subscription model, of course).

Let’s put this another way: personally, I very much prefer a scenario where I purchase two different apps each priced at $3.99 rather than investing $7.98 for sustaining a single app with a $0.99/month subscription for approximately 8 months.

But back to the point I was making above: there are a lot of good apps I love to use, but some of these I use less frequently than others. If all of them switched to a subscription model, this would cause a ‘survival of the fittest’ scenario on my iOS devices (and on the Mac as well), something I consider a bit unfair for all parties involved.

You see, I very much prefer having 25 different photo apps with maybe a couple of favourites and the other 23 available as alternatives — or as a complementary solutions — or as backup solutions when I don’t like the results I got from the two favourites — rather than a scenario where I end up whittling down my ‘Photography’ folder to three apps because that’s all the subscriptions I can afford. (Again, in the extreme case where most of the developers were to move to a subscription model.)

Then there’s the elephant in the room.

Nick Heer writes:

I’m not sure there’s an easy or ideal way to pull the App Store out of its nosedive into unsustainably low pricing, but subscriptions seem like a good option. They’re clearly imperfect, but they might be a key factor in keeping prices generally low for users as they amortize the cost of development over months-to-years and incentivize regular updates.

One of the main factors causing the App Store’s nosedive into unsustainably low pricing is people who don’t want to pay more than a ridiculously low sum for apps, or who don’t want to pay for apps at all.

As Michael Anderson observed in a tweet, how can people who currently refuse to pay $2.99 for an app suddenly be convinced to pay $12 a year? In this perspective, a subscription model for apps doesn’t exactly solve the App Store’s ‘race to the bottom’ systemic issue. It’s just another option, an option that may facilitate the sustainability of certain apps; an option which will probably facilitate the sustainability of apps made by certain prominent indie developers over other, lesser-known developers. And my early guess is that — if abused — it’s going to be an option that has the potential of driving customers away. Not necessarily cheapskates or people who don’t understand the costs of app development, but also people who (like me) usually pay for apps but are on a budget and can’t afford supporting every app they like. And people who simply can’t justify a recurring subscription for apps they love to use, but don’t use frequently enough.

I hope the spectre of unsustainability in case of a mass-migration towards a subscription-based pricing will be enough of a deterrent for developers so that they choose carefully what to do with their apps and what to offer from now on.

Let me dream of a MacBook Pro SE

June 9, 2016

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Before the end of the week, my current mid-2009 MacBook Pro will finally undergo a minor surgery: I’ll install the Data Doubler and 240 GB SSD I’ve recently purchased from Other World Computing. The internal optical drive started acting up about three years ago, so thanks to this kit, I’ll put the SSD in place of my current 500 GB hard drive, and keep the hard drive internally by installing it where the optical drive used to be. This will hopefully extend the life and usefulness of this trusty machine long enough to help me figure out which Mac to purchase later this year (or early next year), because frankly I can’t seem to make up my mind on the matter.

I’m less mobile than I once was, so I’d probably be fine with having a modest iMac or a maxed-out Mac mini as main machine, and keeping this MacBook Pro as a secondary, portable solution if need be. At the same time, a laptop can still offer the best of both worlds: when I need to be on the go, I just disconnect everything and take the Mac with me. When I’m back at the home office, I set it up as desktop machine, connecting it to my external display, keyboard, mouse, and external hard drives. So I’m still keeping an eye on MacBooks, especially the Air and the Pro, since the regular MacBook will never appeal to me given that deal-breaker of a keyboard. I’m looking at the Air family to see how long it’s going to last and, in case Apple decides to keep it around as an entry-level option, whether it can offer me enough spec-wise to choose it as my next machine. (I’m more interested in CPU performance, battery life, and ports rather than having a retina display, as incredible as that may sound for some).

A recent rumour, based on leaked photos, hints at a redesigned MacBook Pro which

will have a thinner and lighter form factor
will be equipped with four USB‑C ports
will probably feature an OLED touch panel replacing the top row of function keys on the keyboard

Assuming of course the leaked images are legitimate, my first reaction was that this is not a direction for the MacBook Pro I’m particularly interested in. Having just USB‑C ports might be a step towards versatility for Apple and for some users. For me, it simply means ‘Adapters Everywhere’ which, considering how much Apple charges for adapters, in turn means an unwelcome additional expense. I’m also concerned by the terrible precedent set by the 12-inch retina MacBook keyboard, and of course this is where Apple is going with all Mac laptops if they want to make them thinner. In short, if this is where the MacBook Pro is headed, then no, thanks, I’ll pass.

I’ve grown tired of this kind of hardware anorexia. It’s not that I don’t appreciate thinness and lightness in a portable device. It’s that ‘thinner’ can’t possibly be a design answer for everything. What’s worse is that thinness has become the defining feature, the one that drives everything else, the one that dictates all subsequent decisions and compromises. Why can’t thinness be put aside for once with a supposedly ‘pro’ machine, while performance, connections, and expandability are given the priority they deserve?

With the iPhone SE, Apple has shown that they can revisit an ‘old’ design while delivering a powerful device with up-to-date technology. My current dream is to see something of the kind happen with the Mac as well.

The ‘Special Edition’ MacBook Pro I’m dreaming about isn’t something technically unfeasible; it simply goes in a direction Apple doesn’t seem interested in keeping anymore.

The look — My dream MacBook Pro SE is based on the current 15-inch retina MacBook Pro. Same size, same retina display, same thickness, same Force Touch trackpad (or incorporating any Taptic Engine improvement Apple may introduce in the next months), same keyboard with the awesome and usable ‘inverted T’ arrow key placement:

As for the colour, what I think a Special Edition deserves is black — something like the Razer Blade:

New Razer Blade

Connections — Current MacBook Pro laptops are equipped with a MagSafe 2 power port, two Thunderbolt 2 ports, two USB 3 ports, an HDMI port, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and an SDXC card slot.

MacBook Pro ports

My dream MacBook Pro SE would have more or less the same connections, but two Thunderbolt 3 ports (instead of Thunderbolt 2), and an additional USB port. It could be a third USB 3 port or, if Apple is really considering phasing out the MagSafe connector in favour of USB‑C (another questionable decision, if you ask me), it could be a USB‑C port placed where you would currently find the MagSafe 2 power port.

The brains — The dream MacBook Pro SE would obviously feature a next-generation Intel processor, and a capable graphics card.

Memory and Storage — A minimum of 16 GB of RAM, upgradeable to 32. And since I’m dreaming, let’s say user-upgradeable. Storage: a big SSD. It’s a Special Edition, so let’s say 1 TB.

Battery and a final trick — I’ve reserved the ‘daring and outrageous’ design idea for last. The dream MacBook Pro SE doesn’t have to have this feature at all costs, but I’m sure it would make a lot of people happy. Remember the late-2008 aluminium unibody MacBook? Remember how easy it was to access the battery and the hard drive?

MacBook A1278 access door 1

MacBook A1278 access door 2

MacBook A1278 access door 3

All 3 photos © iFixit

Imagine something like this in my dream MacBook Pro SE. An easy-to-access panel that lets the user replace battery and solid-state drive without having to use a screwdriver. The access door mechanism and the separation from the rest of the chassis could be made more subtle and tighter, so that they would be barely noticeable when closed. In my dream configuration, this can be a totally optional feature, but again, I believe a lot of Mac users would love it.

I don’t see any particular technical hurdle that would prevent Apple from building such a machine. This ‘MacBook Pro SE’ would also probably have a better battery life because it would contain state-of-the-art Apple battery technology in a case that’s as thick as the current retina MacBook Pro.

But Apple won’t make such a machine because by their standards it’s not sleek enough, not forward-looking enough, not thin enough, and so on and so forth. But I think that, as a final testament to a classic MacBook Pro form factor before the next anorexic models come up, it would be one hell of a performer, making a lot of pro users really happy, yours truly included.

→ Accessing Siri through text

May 16, 2016

by Riccardo Mori

Briefly

Rene Ritchie suggests expanding Siri’s capabilities so that you can ask things using text instead of voice in situations where you can’t talk to your phone or it’s simply frowned upon. He writes:

No matter how enabling and useful Siri is, though, there will be times when it’s simply not possible or socially acceptable to talk out loud to our phones or tablets. In those situations, being able to type “Cupertino weather” or even “Text Georgia I’ll be late” would be incredibly useful.

While I think it’s useful to be able to edit your voice requests (maybe Siri interpreted your command correctly save for a name, for instance), I don’t understand the practicality of the examples Rene makes. If you’re in a situation where you cannot or should not talk to Siri, and have to physically interact with your iPhone anyway, isn’t it just quicker to check the weather directly or text Georgia directly, rather than text to Siri? I’m not against the idea, per se, I’m sure it can be handy in certain circumstances and with more complex commands [1], but for simple things like texting someone, sending a tweet, setting an alarm or reminder (again, when you can’t use voice input with Siri), I find that it’s just faster to do that by accessing the relevant apps directly.

1. For example: At 2:45 PM, text Georgia I’ll be on my way. ↩︎

Different expectations

May 12, 2016

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

A few days ago, I received an email from an acquaintance I had previously helped with minor computer-related issues. He’s in his forties, like me, but he’s not a geek or a ‘power user’. He’s just a regular person who had to learn to use computers at work, has become increasingly proficient over time, but has maintained — to use his words — a ‘pragmatic approach’ with technology and devices: he uses them to get stuff done and that’s it. He doesn’t obsess over platforms, apps, nerd stuff, etc. though he likes to keep moderately up-to-date with what’s happening in technology. Things move faster and faster in tech today — he writes — so it’s always useful to know what people around you talk about.

George (let’s call him George) wrote me essentially to vent his frustration after attempting to go iPad-only for everything he does — work and leisure. Now, he doesn’t paint a detailed picture of what exactly went wrong with his attempt (or ‘experiment’ as he calls it), but there are a few observations he makes in his email that I think are worth considering. Most importantly, I think it’s worth sharing his point of view because he’s not a tech geek, and because his attitude towards platforms and tools felt quite unbiased to me.

George’s idea to go iPad-only came to him because it was time to upgrade his MacBook Pro, and after reading many contributions from tech writers who have enthusiastically embraced the iOS-only, iPad-only route, he was wondering if perhaps he could do the same. From what I understand, George is a Mac user, has had experience with Windows PCs, has never used a tablet (apart from playing with various devices in stores or asking friends to let him try theirs), and owns an Android smartphone.

He purchased a 9.7‑inch iPad Pro, and the first days of exploration — he writes — were exciting. Thanks to online reviews and friends’ recommendations, he quickly populated his new iPad with the essential productivity apps we all know about, plus some fun games and photo/video apps for entertainment. Soon, however, the frustration began, and I appreciate the candor of this first negative remark George wrote: From what I’d heard, I honestly thought iOS was smarter than that. Note that he’s not actually making comparisons here, he’s not saying that Android or Windows are better. If there’s a comparison, it’s not with products from the competition, but with Apple itself: Some things felt unnecessarily disjointed, sometimes I found hard to believe this [iOS] comes from the same people who made OS X.

He certainly appreciates how single apps work, and he agrees that his experience within various different apps was satisfactory, but what frustrated him most was integration, or lack thereof, and the unexpectedly meandering ways and workflows to accomplish tasks. I thought things would be more transparent and, I don’t know, simultaneous? Instead it all feels very much sequential, always in and out of apps. Open this app, then jump to this other app, then jump back to another. And yes, I know you can use split-view, it’s useful sometimes, but do you honestly think it’s intuitive? I loved the Mac back when I switched from Windows, because I could find my way around very easily. Sure, then you discover you can do a million things if you master the Terminal, and you discover ‘tips and tricks’ you never imagined. But the basics… I never needed to read a single page from a manual. While on the iPad I could do certain operations simply because I knew where to look.

Also, you’d think ‘normal people’ would be happy not to have to deal with a visible filesystem, but George thinks differently: I deal with all kinds of files all the time. On my [Mac] notebook, I just drag them wherever I need to, it’s all very direct, in front of you. On iOS, it feels like you’re constantly telling someone else to move and handle stuff for you, it’s like telling your car what to do (accelerate, turn here, go there) instead of just driving, you know what I mean? Tap, tap, tap, tap, it feels you’re jumping through hoops for things that take 1/4 of the time on the Mac.

By reading my articles, George knows I’m more or less on the same page, nonetheless makes a few defensive remarks that are worth sharing: Look, I know that work can be done on an iPad. There are people out there who managed to do just that. Maybe it’s a matter of patience and a matter of investing a certain amount of time, but I don’t understand the hype. I don’t get why this is supposed to be ‘the future’ or a better solution than the computer. I mean, I can learn to become efficient on the iPad more or less to the point where I am now with Macs and PCs… although there are certain things you’ll always do faster on the computer… but at the same time I wonder why I should bother. It’s not that I don’t like new things, but here we’re talking about working with something. And my impression is that to switch to iPad-only, I have to take three steps back in order to make one step forward, while I just can keep moving forward by staying on the Mac. I may be totally wrong, but it doesn’t really feel like ‘progress’, this re-learning of workflows to maybe one day be as efficient and productive as I already am now.

George, predictably, has returned his iPad. He told me that maybe he will get a more affordable model down the road and use it for more leisure than work — but now he has to get back to his plan of upgrading to a new MacBook Pro, and doesn’t have the budget for two new devices.

Maybe some tech-savvy people or iOS power users have been reading George’s observations and shaking their heads. I decided to bring his point of view to the foreground — with his permission, of course — to illustrate that some tech writers/journalists don’t really have a clue when they talk about ‘regular people’, and don’t realise just how much their perspective is altered by tunnel vision. Some of them don’t seem to get the simple fact that just because they achieved the ‘freedom’ of being able to do everything with just an iPad or an iPhone 6s Plus, it doesn’t mean everybody else can do the same (or feels the need to). Some of them don’t seem to get that not everybody is as enamored of technology as they are, that there are people out there who don’t spend hours rearranging the apps on their iPhones, because they don’t care and also because — as I’ve found out — some of them don’t know how to do that.

When you write entire paragraphs nitpicking certain UI choices of an iOS app, or discussing how some colour hues are less distracting and contribute to a more ‘delightful experience’, remember that there are people who miss certain fundamentals because of poor discoverability of certain features at the system level. Just this morning, while running an errand, I caught a conversation between university students on the bus: believe it or not, there was a girl who didn’t know what 3D Touch could do — and she had an iPhone 6s! Her friends were evidently showing her how to ‘pop’ and ‘peek’, because she kept saying something like It would have never occurred to me to try such a thing!

I thank George for sharing his thoughts with me, and letting me share them with you. It’s always refreshing to read feedback like his, to be reminded that before the same devices and user interfaces, there is a wider gamut of reactions and approaches than tech geeks and power users anticipate. Last December my dad, at the young age of 72, bought himself his first smartphone (some big-screen Huawei — he needed a big display to read things more comfortably, and needed a dual-SIM device) and in the past months I’ve listened to his observations as he was learning to use the smartphone. So many things you and me take for granted were a bit of a struggle for him, and it wasn’t really a matter of old age or inexperience. Some of his remarks were thoughtful and well articulated. For instance, one of the first things he told me was that when he explored new apps: I don’t understand what half of the pictograms do. I have to find out by trial and error, and I’m not always sure how to ‘undo’ a mistake. Speaking of Android’s Back button: Are you just going back with it, or can you also use it to ‘undo’? Another criticism he still has (and it’s not Android-specific) is that many apps’ UIs tend to feel ‘crowded’ even on a 5.5‑inch phone.

These are just little examples, but I think are fairly indicative of the gap between tech people and regular people’s habits, needs, problems and viewpoints — and also of the gap between what tech people believe regular people do with their devices or need from their devices, and what regular people actually do with their devices and expect from their devices. No judgment here, just food for thought.

“And that’s what we’re about”

April 22, 2016

by Riccardo Mori

Briefly

Steve Jobs MWSF 2000 The Big Picture

I was watching Steve Jobs’s keynote at Macworld Expo in San Francisco in 2000, important because it’s when Jobs introduced Mac OS X, its architecture and Aqua interface, when he introduced iTools (basically iCloud’s great-grandfather), and when he announced as a ‘one more thing’ that he wouldn’t be ‘interim’ CEO anymore at Apple but would take the CEO role in a more permanent capacity.

There’s a bit of this keynote I’d forgotten about, though, and I think it’s just as important. At the end of the event, before the ‘one more thing’, when Steve is wrapping things up, he talks about ‘The big picture’ and about what makes Apple Apple. I have transcribed that bit and decided to publish it here because I think it’s still relevant:

I want to zoom out and talk about the big picture of how we see all of these things play together. You know, I remember two and a half years ago when I got back to Apple, there were people throwing spears saying “Apple is the last vertically integrated personal computer manufacturer, it should be broken up into a hardware company, a software company, what have you,” and— it’s true, that Apple is the last company in our industry that makes the whole widget, but what that also means [is that] if managed properly, it’s the last company in our industry that can take responsibility for customer experience. There’s nobody left!

And it also means that we don’t have to get ten companies in a room to agree on everything to innovate. We can decide ourselves to place our bets like we did for USB on the original iMac; hardware — let’s build it in; software — let’s build it in; marketing — let’s go evangelise it to the developers and tell our customers why it’s better. And let’s not wait three years for an agreement — and now Apple is leading in USB. Desktop movies — let’s take our hardware and put FireWire ports in iMac, let’s write applications called iMovie that take advantage of QuickTime and allow us to do these things, and let’s go market it, so people can understand this and see how easy it is to use. There’s no other company left in this industry that can bring innovation to the marketplace like Apple can.

So, we really care deeply about the hardware, we think this is where everything starts, and we got again the finest hardware lineup in Apple’s history. We’re so proud of these products. But we also do software at Apple. Again, we own the second-highest-volume operating system in the world and one of only two high-volume operating systems in the world. We make a lot of other software: Mac OS X coming, iMovie, et cetera. And the greatest thing is when we put them together, and we integrate them, like the examples I just gave you, like iMovie and the new iMacs, seamlessly integrated into desktop movies. Another example is AirPort, where we could seamlessly integrate this whole new wireless networking technology into our OS, so when you plug in an AirPort card in your iBook you don’t have to spend half an hour flipping settings. It just — boom! — pops to life and works.

This is the kind of innovation we can bring through this integration. And now we’re adding Internet stuff. We got our first four iTools today, that wouldn’t be possible if we couldn’t take unfair advantage of the fact that we supplied OS 9, the client operating system, and so that our servers and our clients could work together in a more intimate way than anyone else can do. And so we’re gonna integrate these things together in ways that no one else in this industry can do, to provide a seamless user experience where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And we’re the last guys left in this industry that can do it. And that’s what we’re about.