360iDev: Brent Simmons on NetNewsWire for iPad and iPhone OS 4.0
The iPhone is home to a lot of great new developers, but it's also the new home for a lot of old-school Mac guys as well; Brent Simmons is of the second kind. His NetNewsWire is a classic Mac app that's been remade for the iPhone, and now the iPad, with the clean, quick simplicity that Simmons' work is known for.
We caught up with him right after his "Best Practices for Content Apps" talk here at 360iDev in San Jose, CA this week, and had a quick chat about how the iPad version of NetNewsWire is doing. Jenny Blumberg of NewsGator's developer support team also joined us. Simmons told us both how the iPad version of his app has made more money than you'd expect, and what he's most excited about from Apple's iPhone OS 4.0 announcement last week. Read on for more.
TUAW: How has the iPad release been?
Brent Simmons: It's been fantastic.
Jenny Blumberg: It's been really good. We had a great first weekend. It was just awesome that we could have it ready for the launch of the iPad.
Did you get a device before? Could you tell us if you got a device before?
BS: If I could talk about something like that, I would. But I can't talk about things like that.
Really? Oh you can't.
BS: I can't.
In terms of downloads, the user base is not nearly as big as the iPhone, obviously, but would you say the time and effort you've put into it compares to the response that you've seen? It seems like there's a lot of excitement around iPad apps, but when you look at the response, sales don't compare to the iPhone.
BS: We're not giving out the actual numbers, but I will tell you this, and I think this is very cool. The iPad app, within five days, made us more money than the iPhone app has in its existence over the last six months or something. And it's only priced double, $9.99 versus $4.99. So, that says a few things. One, I think it's a better app, our app on the iPad. And being there on day one is huge, since everyone's looking for apps. But, yeah, even with a much smaller user base so far, it's just done so well.
And to a certain extent, you've got the recognition. There's some people on the iPad who didn't have iPhone apps, and there's some people on iPhone who didn't have Mac apps in the first place, and you've got the recognition there as well. In terms of effort put into the app, we don't really know yet, because not a lot of people have talked about how much work it takes to make an iPad app, even compared to an iPhone app. In terms of effort, is that equivalent?
BS: There's a lot more effort that goes into it. The bigger screen is more than just size, it's design. In some ways, I think iPad may even be the most expensive to develop for, out of iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
JB: And didn't you just build NetNewsWire pretty much from the ground up for the iPad? It was a complete rewrite.
BS: Yeah. So, the iPad, the app size is almost as big as a Mac, and people expect a lot of what you might get from a desktop app. But the design has to be really top notch, really excellent, because you're expecting that in these cool devices. So, in a way, it's like all the effort of the Mac plus all the effort of the iPhone, all thrown into one.
And the pricing is equivalent, I guess, then. What was your thinking behind the pricing?
BS: Well initially, on the announcement, the iWork apps were priced at $9.99, and we thought well, that sounds like a reasonable line in the sand, so we went with $9.99 for an introductory price, and we'll go up to $14.99. My hope is that people will, and so far my hope is born out, that people will pay the bigger price on the iPad because they're getting a bigger, better thing than the iPhone. That said, there's always that race to the bottom, and it can happen here, too. I hope that we, and other developers, stand our ground, and I hope that we're successful with these prices.
JB: That's what I hope, too. I hope other developers realize that with all the work, it's inevitable that the iPad apps will be priced higher. But my impression was that when the iPad came out and people go to the App Store, and they go OK, I just spent hundreds of dollars on this device, I don't want to spend money on apps now. That's ridiculous! I think the pendulum will swing back, though, once people realize that the really high quality apps are going to cost more money, to take care of that rich environment.
BS: Yeah. And if you have an iPad, that's a high quality device. You want the best stuff on it.
Do you think it's dependent only on developers? Is there anything that, other than buying apps, I guess, that consumers should do, or even Apple -- do you think Apple should go so far as to say, enforce those types of prices?
BS: Well, I think anytime that Apple moves to do something like that, that's almost like manipulating the market too much. I'd be afraid of the unintended side effects of that. The more agnostic Apple is, the more it's a free market.
JB: Yeah, it really shouldn't be driven by Apple. It should be driven by the developers.
So you've had the iPad for about a week now. What do you see in terms of the future of the app?
BS: There's so much we want to do. We had two months, basically, so we were cutting features until the very last minute. Our designer, Brad Ellis from Rogue Sheep, great designer, and he's just full of really fantastic ideas. In designer lingo, they call them sexy ideas. He says yeah, we're going to sex this bitch up, and I'm like yeah, hell yeah.
Anything you can share with us that we can look for?
BS: No, not yet. We'll just have to wait and see.
All right. And what about the iPhone app? Anything specific with iPad that you want to bring back to iPhone?
BS: Just about everything, yeah. The under-the-hood parts were totally rewritten for the iPad. In fact, that had started as a rewrite for the iPhone version, but it ended up running on iPad first. Get that in there, it's going to make performance a hell of a lot better, and fix a lot of bugs. And then step 2 would be to bring a design similar to the iPad design into the iPhone version. So it's kind of two stages. And then to there, we go on to the futuristic stuff.
Any idea of a timetable?
BS: Yeah, let's see -- October of 2009. I'm late.
Well there you go. So, soon, I would assume.
BS: Yeah.
And speaking of updating iPhone apps, 4.0 was announced last week. What was the most exciting thing you saw in that presentation?
BS: The stuff about notifications was really, really cool. The stuff about advertising was very interesting for our TapLynx side of the business.
I was going to ask, because yeah, obviously NetNewsWire's not an app that lends itself, necessarily, to advertising, but does the fact that it's an official solution entice you any more at all?
BS: Well, the free version of NetNewsWire runs ads from The Deck, which you've seen on Daring Fireball and so on, and that's not an official API, just code that I wrote. And I like those ads. I think The Deck is a really great ad network because they really vet every ad before it runs and who's a member of the network and stuff. But, that said, people don't really like ads all that much. Publishers, however, like to make money. So for Taplynx, everybody who's considering making an iPhone app that has some type of application, the first thing they ask is, "How are we going to make money?" And their answer will usually be ads, so it's very interesting.
There's one more thing I was going to ask, and this is just my weird thought from nowhere. Were you ever at any point worried about, with all of the content publisher talk about the iPad, that maybe people wouldn't need RSS content readers any more. If New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and Marvel are all jumping in on making their own apps, does that threaten syndication at all? Or did that not even cross your mind?
BS: No, it didn't, because there's still value to having one app where a whole bunch of your stuff comes in. Maybe you use one or two of those specific apps, but it didn't occur to me that people would stop using an RSS reader. We have some customers with 2,000 feeds -- they're not going to find each one of those feeds as a separate app on the App Store. So I wasn't worried about that. But the TapLynx side of our business is all about building the equivalence of the New York Times and making that easy for people, so I totally want that to happen, too. I think there's room for all of that.
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The iPhone is home to a lot of great new developers, but it's also the new home for a lot of old-school Mac guys as well; Brent Simmons...
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This article makes me absolutely furious watching Brent gloat enthusiastically regarding the iPad app making more money than the iPhone/iPod Touch version ever did. The fact of the matter is that the iPhone version (free or paid) is absolutely terrible and certainly not even worth entertaining the idea of paying for it in it's current form.
While there was nothing impressive of version 1.0 since the catastrophe of version 2.0 released for the iPhone it is ridiculously slow, doesn't retain accurate sync with google reader or the NNW desktop client and has next to no features that would make it useable on a daily basis. It is in stark contrast to the quality of the desktop version.
Brent acting like he is having an epiphany is rather disappointing when the reality is that people are just frustrasted by the lack of iPhone development and have simply moved on to much better solutions like Newsrack.
I'm trying to meet you halfway here but you aren't finishing the argument or following logic, surprising for a programmer.
Are you saying that rewriting the iPhone version which was (undisputedly) riddled with bugs should allow him reimbursement? I'd go the other way and say he should have never released it without better beta testing.
As to the reskin, I am well aware of ui design, and again, I already stated that charging again could be agreed upon, not every app should be universal.
I still stand by the fact that for the iPhone to iPad changeover, the majority of the heavy lifting is already complete, so say, arbitrarily, 30% has to be redone for the iPad...how does that translate to charging two or three times the price? Logically it doesn't. You absolutely cannot convince me, or anyone with any experience, or a brain, that starting with a blank screen is the same as starting with an iPhone app to port. So where is that 3x price coming from?
The issue with this dev is that they left a buggy version in the iPhone, whilst racing to be first with a ridiculous price on the iPad. Now this magic rewrite is supposed to be applauded? I don't know about other nnw users but I see the app I paid for still showing all the bugs it did prior to his iPad app, unfixed...so I'd be very very wary about trusting post purchase support on the iPad one. Furthermore, the 'article' mentions the ad supported trial version, something unsurprisingly missing from the app store while the ten doll ark version was there from day one. I guess he knew that putting a trial would give iPad users a chance to see the bugs without paying first. I'm sure he's applauding himself, as he seems to in the 'article' plenty, for his 'marketing strategy' of no trial at launch, pushing the iPad app out now atherosclerosis than fixing the one customers had paid for, etc...but at the end of the day a $15 rss reader is relegated to obscurity by other cheaper, better, more supported apps.
Sorry for the typos, touchpad typing at its best.
Corrections are dollar and rather.
I've read Brent Simmons' blog from time to time, and recently he had a lengthy post about the efforts he was going through to optimize the performance of NetNewsWire, which ultimately required him to scrap the entire underlying data persistence model he was using (via Apple's CoreData framework) and switch over to a much more lightweight SQLite database. The performance improvement, as I recall, was at least 100 times faster than the old code when dealing with the extremely large sets of data that Brent mentioned some of his users happen to work with (2,000 feeds translates to a LOT of news records to manage).
To say this kind of change is non-trivial is an extreme understatement. It's not just a matter of changing the persistence layers. Now he has to write code that will properly move over all of the records from the old method of storage into the new one, so that users don't lose their already-read marks, their favorites, etc. There's unit testing, regression testing, and beta testing. This one performance improvement probably translated into several weeks or even months of work, and of course this is just one feature among many that he's been working on to improve the iPhone version.
So yeah, he's got every right to charge what he does for his apps. He puts a lot of time and effort into making quality products that are easy to use and give a good user experience. Effort and care of that level cost money, and it's only fair to pay him what he thinks is reasonable so that he can make a living off the work, stay in business, and keep making more products / improving the ones already out there.
So he didn't do that for his existing customer base on the iPhone? That would be the afore mentioned lack of support and bug fixing. Or he did the rewrite for the iPhone clients, which would mean the work was done before (under the bonnet) and he's triple charging for a reskin? Which is it?
April 14 2010 at 12:01 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHe did the rewrite for the iPhone clients, which he will get NO reimbursement for from existing owners of the app, since all iPhone updates to existing owners are always free.
As far as him "just writing a new skin and charging triple for it," I have to ask if you've ever written commercial software before. I do it for a living, with user interface design and implementation as my specialty, and it's been my career for over a decade. I can tell you with absolute certainty that porting an application to a new platform with new UI functionality, even if your core code remains the same, is not simply a matter of changing out a couple of UI classes in your IDE, doing a recompile, and boom you're done in a few hours.
The iPad gives a screen area four times the size of the iPhone, but still restricted to a touch-based interface. You can't just move the UI from the Mac version to the iPad, nor can you simply run the existing iPhone app UI on the iPad in pixel-doubled mode and have a good user experience. You have to spend significant time re-thinking the whole UI with such a larger area to work with. You have to determine the most efficient layout that lets users find what they need quickly, while staying out of the way when the user just wants to focus on whatever the main task of the app happens to be.
Then you have to implement the whole damn thing, test it out, get feedback, and more likely than not go back and re-do a bunch of things. Lather, rinse, repeat. All of this costs time and money, and your user base for the iPad is obviously going to be a lot smaller initially than the base for the iPhone.
Brent then had to do some math to figure out what he would have to charge just to break even on all of that work (and yes, he DOES get to charge for the under-the-hood optimizations originally done for the iPhone app, because as already noted he's going to make NO money on that effort from any of the existing owners, ever). He had to look at his known purchase rates on the iPhone and Mac versions, the expected size of the iPad market, and the cost of future updates and bug fixes (since they're always free to existing owners) among other factors. Based on those calculations, he felt that $10 to start was a fair price as the "opening day special", when he knew there'd be a surge of purchases, and $15 as the long-term price (when purchase rates will have fallen off sharply).
The race to the pricing bottom on the iPhone has made making a living off of apps a struggle. Developers are trying to reset that baseline with the iPad, and I say good on them. I have no problem paying a fair price for high quality software when I know I'm going to be using it regularly, and these guys have every right to make a profit doing this so that they can KEEP doing it.
I have a request to every single person on these boards who bitches about the price of apps and how they're too expensive, even at $5 or $6. Quit your day job, make an app for the iPhone or iPad, and see what kind of price you can sell it for that still lets you pay the mortgage and all your bills, eat decently (not even well), and still leaves some money in the bank account for other things (like, say, a new computer every few years or the latest iPhone / iPad model to test your app on). If you can do that with an app that ISN"T ad supported but is $2 or less, I'll happily apologize.
I love love love my iPad…Searching for best utility apps on the iPad. College Guide for iPad is a family friendly app if you have college age kids planning for college or grad school. Check it out…was a pleasant surprise the amount of information it has. Information ranges from campus security to enrollment and admissions. Great app!!!
April 13 2010 at 4:50 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI have tried every RSS reader listed in these comments (and more) with the exception of reederapp, but my favorite hands down is NewsRack. It's fast, smart, very clean and visually beautiful to use. I was a NetNewsWire fan for a long time, but then I found NewsRack and it was over...best in class.
April 13 2010 at 3:37 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyReeder www.reederapp.com pisses over every other rss reader i've tried on the iPhone and that includes Netnewwire and Newstand.
April 13 2010 at 3:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCongratulations Brent I'm glad it's been a success for you.
Try to ignore the dyspepic comments. Some people always try to externalise their internal inadequacies.....
Wow. How does pointing out flaws lead you to psychoanalyze those who have valid complaints. Again I never said anything was owed. I do think $15 for a newsreader is over the top and it's clear they were capitalizing on first day sales. I recognize they had to reskin their app. If they decided to rewrite it I'd guess that's due to all the bugs of the original version which many paid for.
April 13 2010 at 3:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyIn my opinion, they broke the best free RSS app, and have yet to fix it.
April 13 2010 at 1:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI don't have a problem with paying for an ipad version and iphone version. They are completely different products. I don't see people complaining when they have to pay for a mac version and iphone version. Each different platform requires a lot of time in development, why should users get all of the platforms for what they paid for an iphone app. If you want to run the iphone version of your app it will run just fine on the ipad. If you want a better experience specifically made for the ipad than you can choose to buy it. I wish my car upgraded and fixed itself continually without having to eventually buy a new one but it is unrealistic to expect that. I wonder why people think they deserve that with software...
April 13 2010 at 1:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWhat kind of idiot in their right mind actually pays $15 bucks for an RSS reader, much less expects people to pay that? Gimmie a break.
April 13 2010 at 1:40 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHot Apps on TUAW
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