I was wrong | Hacker News Reader

I was wrong

appcubby.com

82 pointssuperchink28 comments

No offense to the OP but the customer reaction seems obvious. I've thought about doing this with my apps before and then thought about how I would feel as a paying customer if the developer suddenly thrust ads upon me and asked me to pay to remove them again (or didn't give that option). If you want to put ads in an app people have paid for the only real solution is to release a separate "lite" version with ads. It might not seem like the best decision for your business but it's better than pissing off the people that cared enough to pay for your app in the first place.

What if you're only going to potentially piss of a percentage of a percent of your users? In the OP's case this seems to be the case.

Depends on how vocal that percentage is. All of the reviews on the App Store are now complaints about ads. Once you've set expectations you can't go back without backlash.

What techniques would you suggest for determining that percentage ahead of time?

It seems like you're still making a lot of decisions without knowing why. You know what they say about assumptions...

Without analytics data you really have no idea if this is a positive, negative, or neutral change. The vocal minority of complainers are loud in the consumer software world. They are one of many signals to help make product decisions, but should not be considered authoritative.

Get real analytics data and trust it within the appropriate level of significance.

Agree. OP is trying to be noble by not having analytics, but then you're making decisions in the dark without data. Either code your own analytics, or pick the best platform for you. "None" is not a viable option.

We're here for you buddy! we started Keen IO specifically to address gaps in analytics for mobile. it's easy to record those user interactions with our iOS SDK. And it's free for small apps like yours. if you want to chat analytics, let me know.

Thanks for sharing your story. I don't think failure stories get shared enough!

I added AirPush to one of my free apps, and triggered a firestorm of one-star reviews. After pushing an update that removed AirPush, several users actually took the time to go back and revise their one-star review up to 5 stars.

Never underestimate the passion app users have about ads. I suppose a lot of us devs have learned this lesson the hard way.

>I don’t have analytics in Timer since I’ve had a hard time finding a good analytics provider that doesn’t do shady things with the data they collect

Check out Parse. They aren't an analytics provider. They provide a generic backend API that you can use with your apps to store and fetch whatever data you desire. For the number of user's you're probably working with, and the number of events you'll want to log, you will most likely stay under their 1,000,000 free requests per month (and if you don't, the $200/mo expense will probably be acceptable to you given your app's monthly revenue).

>If Apple provided a reliable way to determine who had already paid, I would have just automatically disabled ads for people who had paid.

Two things here: first, you should have only shown the adds to new users. That would have been the safest play to avoid backlash from existing users. Second, this is why it's a great idea to track "firstLaunchDate" in the NSUserDefaults in 1.0 versions of your future apps. With that single piece of information you would have been able to target exactly who sees the adds and who doesn't.

Edit: I wanted to add I think you might be making a mistake backing down at this point. It seems that all of the problems you mention in this post relate to some small (yet vocal) percentage of your existing users being upset with the recent changes. That's a temporary problem, and probably not that big of a deal at this point since you've already absorbed the majority of the backlash you're going to get. If you think the changes you made in your latest version are the right direction for your product in the long run, then I'd stay the course.

I don't believe there's a way to detect new users, only new installations, which isn't the same thing. Storing and checking a "first run" date will still result in showing ads to paying users if they reinstall your app or install it on a new device.

Yup, but it's definitely close enough - especially contrasted against the OP's chosen approach of doing no targeting whatsoever.

Also, iCloud's NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore gives us NSUserDefault-like data storage that syncs across the user's iCloud account (iOS 5 and up required). This makes the firstLaunchData approximation very near to perfect.

The iCloud idea is excellent, and it hadn't occurred to me at all. I do believe that one would be entirely Close Enough.

> Edit: I wanted to add I think you might be making a mistake backing down at this point. It seems that all of the problems you mention in this post relate to some small (yet vocal) percentage of your existing users being upset with the recent changes. That's a temporary problem, and probably not that big of a deal at this point since you've already absorbed the majority of the backlash you're going to get. If you think the changes you made in your latest version are the right direction for your product in the long run, then I'd stay the course.

I completely disagree with this. It might work as a business decision but it could cause problems in the future, especially if these early paying customers are vocal or previously bought your other apps. I think if a more popular/downloaded app did this (thrusting ads on paying customers) the backlash would be huge and it would severely damage the companies reputation. Just because you are a smaller business less likely to get press coverage for a bad decision doesn't give you a free pass to make it anyway.

I understand your perspective, but: the OP stated that he only sold the app for .99 cents before making it free during the summer. So 2 of 7 months before becoming free. But apps usually get at least 10x more downloads when free. So to calculate what percentage of his user base might be affected by the additions of ads when they have already paid: 2 / (2 + (10 * 5)) = 3.8% of his user base. That's his historical user base, not his retained user that is still using the app. OP's estimate for user retention is 3%. The number of his total users that will be affected is: 3% of 3.8%. 0.11%. If this app was downloaded 10,000 times since launch we are talking about 11 people - half of which have already posted their negative reviews to iTunes and the other half... doesn't really care either way.

As an app developer myself, I do care about my users. If a significant number of people will be negatively affected by a change I'm considering, I simply won't do it. It's just about where you draw the line. Is your stance that if even one person is affected in this way then it is unacceptable to make the business decision to shift to ads?

I think it might be a good idea for this developer to disable the ads for now and then develop a promo code system. Then the paid customers could be asked to sign up by email, possible sending their receipt for a promocode to disable the ads when he puts the back in.

I've just started using Parse for analytics, error/crash reports and promo codes. Seems to be working well although I haven't started analysing the usage data systematically yet but I have found a number of errors I wasn't aware of from the error reports.

Http://iTunes.com/apps/fastlists

Promo codes have gone out to a couple of bug reporters (who weren't expecting them) and friends and family. When I've stabilised all the bugs and added a sync system I'll send them out to reviewers too.

New version in review should fix most of the errors (only one of which I have received user feedback about despite having a report a bug option in the settings and promising to provide freebie upgrade for users that report bugs).

I recently added in-app purchases and ads (iPhone only for ads so far). I had one bad review for offering 'Privacy' as an in-app purchase that would disable the anonymous logging and I've renamed that item. Otherwise no complaints. I did grandfather existing (free) users into unlimited items and readable email as I didn't want to remove existing features from people while imposing (high) limits on new customers that require in-app purchase to lift or remove. If the existing user installs the app on a new device they will have to buy (if they complain nicely they might get a promocode).

> Developers dream of that kind of tap through rate because it generally means more revenue, but I wasn’t charging for the ads, so the tap through rate didn’t impact my bottom line at all.

Why include advertising if you're not charging for it?

Good on ya, mate. Not only issuing an apology, but taking positive steps to make things right. If only more people had that strength of character.

Now if I could just get you to reconsider releasing GasCubby for Android... :)

I totally get the annoyance of previous paid users. But man, the irrational nature of human psychology around price and paying for things beggars disbelief. For anyone that owns an iPhone 99¢ is truly a pittance.

People's feelings about what is fair totally overwhelm any sense of proportion or of what's at stake in a given situation.

I have added ads to formerly ad-free apps, but I always, always make the ads conditional on whether the user is a new downloader or an updater in these cases. This is not that hard to do, and it is not worth upsetting existing users to get those extra ad impressions.

I'm confused as to why he'd do this. It's trivial to set a flag saying if they launched it or a date first installed. Why give ads to people who paid?

On the other hand, I feel for the dev, as the reviews are also absurd. The ad took up 1 of 15 timer spots. It was hardly obtrusive. I know the feeling though. I've had tons of 1 star reviews in a free app I put ads in (only to new free users mind you) just because it has ads in it. IT'S FREE you entitled jerk. Yet nobody pays the .99 to remove the ads.

as a user who paid for this app, I'm quite frustrated with the update. this greedy decision takes up screen real estate which I used for one additional timer and the grid layout was one of the main reasons why i paid for the app.

i just hope he reverses all this changes as i'm not paying for additional sounds, themes or whatever other vanity ad-hoc app.

> had a hard time finding a good analytics provider that doesn’t do shady things with the data they collect

And where did his ethics go when he decided to stick ads in the app?

"Ooops, I sent paying customers ad impressions. Hrm, that doesn't seem to work." How coy.

Really? Putting ads in an app is somehow unethical?

Of course it is.

It's not just "putting ads" it's linking with 3rd party ad libraries that can do whatever the hell they want under the umbrella of this dev's app. How is this even remotely better than letting some other 3rd party gather app's usage data? It's absolutely the same shit, only sideways. If he had a problem with latter, recognizing a problem with former should've been a no-brainer. Except if there wasn't some money involved.

Of course? Really? Maybe if you think there is a problem with the analytics then it is a problem, but there are clearly lots of people who don't have a problem with the analytics. I personally don't have a problem with either as both a user and a dev. To say that ads are unethical without even any discussion strikes me as absurd.

you can not please everyone. some users can give you a one star review simply because of a minor bug or missing feature.

do what is good for your business.

as a side note, appboy does some great analytics without using udid

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