Windows Store Revenue Split
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
A little competition for Apple is a good thing.
In Q2 2011 the numbers of PCs sold was ~ 85 million [1]. The growth rate over Q2 2010 is predicted to be only 2.3 %
For the same Q2 2011 - 428.7 million mobile devices have been sold, out of which 107 million were smartphones [2]. More interesting however is the growth rate of smartphones sales since Q2 2010: 74%
Now, the total number of Windows computers is bigger than all smartphones combined. However, Windows XP still has over 30% market share and Vista has over 10%. That's pretty bad for Microsoft. PCs aren't selling like they used to and users aren't upgrading much.
If Microsoft relies on tablet sales for increasing the numbers of devices with Windows 8, well you can probably count the millions of iPads sold on one hand (correction: according to Wikipedia since April 2010 that's 39.85 million - pretty good, however a small number compared to smartphones). You can also make a case that Microsoft will do deals with hardware makers, however there are good reasons why Android is so far unsuccessful on tablets and I'm not seeing Microsoft doing a better job.
With iTunes payments I am way up on my spend. I used to spend about $40/mo. With the apple handling magazine apps and all kinds of other payments for games like smurf village I spend easily $180 a month. Maybe the other way is good for developers but it blows for the consumer. Make it easy for me to give you money and I will.
This is far superior to Apple's current policy right now.
There are some pretty extreme advantages to tying yourself into the first-party payment engine. As you've brought up, it's way easier to separate me from my money if all I have to do is type in an ID that's already pre-registered to the device. There is in fact a large incentive for devs to go first-party.
But that's not true for all cases, and the edge cases really make iOS a painful platform to use at times. Amazon can't integrate their book store into the Kindle app because Apple wants their cut. As a consumer, I don't mind giving my CC info to Amazon and signing up for their account, and Apple's policy makes my experience as a user noticeably worse.
The incentives for most developers to go with the first-party payment solution is IMO enough - Apple's enforcement here just seems heavy-handed and unnecessary.
I'm sure the Magazine publishers would love a system where they can use their own payment processor to harvest a ton of details from you and that requires you to phone a call-center that mysteriously drops your call 3/4s of the time in order to cancel, but it's a big step backward for me as a consumer.
I have a low volume app and unless I check the comments I never know if someone had a problem. This is after putting my website in the app and on the app description screen on the store. Basically, if a user finds a bug I'd like to help them through it and/or fix it prior to them leaving a 1 star review that I may or may not see.
I've never invoked that law, but presume it would apply to software.
However its good to know what your legally entitled to, in case you do it lots and the company stops being nice.
Yes, it is the "hacked app store". It downloads the cracked archives from around the seedier parts (anon file dumps). And yes, you could download a nefarious piece of crapware. But that's a chance I take, considering I've only gotten 3 'pirate programs'.
If anything, I'd like to be able to develop with Linux for a jailbroken iPhone (3GS was handmedown and I jailbroke and unlocked it). There's no way at this time i can afford a Mac.
(note: without using a virtualized environment for OSX. I don't have the HD space.)
Centralised package management and updates is the one new feature I most want from Windows 8.
Official support would be nice, but can't developers already implement trials using in-app purchases? Download the app for free to get the trial, then pay to unlock the full version. Many apps are already using this approach.
Say you have an app, Foo. It's a reduced-function version and you want your users to buy Foo Pro. In order to use in-app purchases as an upgrade mechanism, you now have a bunch of customers running with Foo, except with Foo Pro functions unlocked. And you also have a bunch of customers running around with just Foo Pro.
The second part of this mess is that, unlike app purchases, users cannot see which in-app purchases they already own. If they ever get a new device, reinstall the app, etc etc, they have to "buy" the in-app purchase again to unlock the Pro version, and pray they don't get double-charged (it happens). As an app developer this is a support nightmare scenario.
This is not to mention that some users will mistakenly purchase the Pro version (and thus get double charged) when they get a new device, instead of downloading the regular version and "re-buying" the in-app purchase.
Yes, I did not know this. I don't understand the reason behind this rule, but as a user I find time-limited trials annoying. I prefer to have a trial version where I can use all the functionality but with a limited amount of data. For example, a task management app may restrict the number of tasks I can create. This way, hitting the limit is a good indication that the app is useful for me. Hitting a time limit doesn't actually mean anything, while crippling the functionality itself means I can't really try out the app.
> you now have a bunch of customers running with Foo, except with Foo Pro functions unlocked. And you also have a bunch of customers running around with just Foo Pro.
What I suggest is to not have Foo Pro at all. Just one version, Foo, which is free and can be unlocked.
> The second part of this mess is that, unlike app purchases, users cannot see which in-app purchases they already own.
I agree this is a mess, but remember that not too long ago there was no way to see app purchases either. So there is some hope this information will be added soon.
One only has to look at how it works for Xbox Live Arcade games for an idea on how seamless this is. Give the user enough so that just as they are hooked, the trail runs out. One click of a button is the entire upgrade process. No dumping out to a different application (Marketplace) in order to purchase the full game, just a one second click of a button.
I believe that doesn't really apply to Windows 8 because you can sideload regular non-Metro programs all you want, just like on Windows 8. The Windows Store will still link to third party websites carrying non-metro apps.
The only hardware where you cannot do this will be Windows 8 ARM tablets. And since Windows is starting from zero in a market completely dominated by the iPad, I doubt anti-trust will be a concern anytime soon, considering that Apple is getting away with the lockdown and 30% cut of all in-app purchases despite being a near monopoly.
I don't think is set in stone yet. AFAIK, the classic Windows desktop and associated APIs like .NET have been ported to ARM. For example, Microsoft has showed desktop Office running on ARM last year.
There seems to be some internal debate at MS about whether to ship Win8 ARM as Metro only, with the classic desktop included, or even both (i.e. have two SKUs and let the OEMs choose).
Where have you heard this? I've heard speculation but nothing official.
Microsoft's problem is that the Android install base is 8x larger and iPhone is 5x larger (1)
I get that they're trying to create an incentive to developers but the reality in mobile is that if you have limited development resources, you develop for iPhone & Android.
The promise of a little extra revenue when you push past $25k feels more like a favor to their big platform devs than it does a compelling reason for smaller devs to look to the Windows platform.
What's interesting is that MSFT gets how to use killer apps to power a platform - remember when they just flat out BOUGHT Bungie to keep HALO an XBOX exclusive?
That move made the platform.
A touch evil and anti-competitive yes, but come on MSFT get more creative about solving this problem.
(1)http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/11/...
Is he being ironic? I've never used a Windows Phone, so I can't tell.
Gruber has actually been quite bullish on Windows 7 Phone, and I think he's being completely serious about this statement.
I could hack this using URL schemes within a couple hours, but admittedly it was not too much data (1kb? :)). I guess iCloud could make it even easier.
It still is a nightmare, usability wise. When you have an iPhone and iPad, iTunes is terrible enough even without application duplicates (Lite/Full and even HD sometimes).