Instapaper 1.3 submitted to App Store
It will probably be available within a week.
New in Instapaper 1.3 (Free and Pro)
- Continuous updating: Articles are now downloaded one-at-a-time until there aren’t any more. No more “Update again for more…”.
- Text-only option: Dramatically improves update speed by downloading only text versions. This is the new default, since the speed improvement is so huge and most users only use the text version. You can change it in the Settings screen.
- Slightly larger default font in articles.
- Smaller font in title screen to fit more characters.
- Bugfix: Rotation no longer resets the scroll position to the top. Sorry about that.
- Many minor interface behavior improvements.
- Instapaper now crashes less frequently when reading large pages. The root of the problem is a memory leak in Apple’s WebKit component, and the same problem plagues Mobile Safari, but I’m working around it as much as possible. I feel your pain on this, and I appreciate your patience as Apple and I find solutions.
New in Instapaper Pro 1.3
In addition to the updates above, Instapaper Pro customers receive additional improvements for version 1.3:
- Tilt scrolling: Now much smoother, works in landscape orientation, and shows position indicator.
- Dark interface mode: Upgraded the previous “white text on black background” mode to an optional dark mode for the entire interface. Great for reading at night.
- New font picker: Now with a live preview and far more available sizes. In the Settings screen.
- Larger reading area: The top bar has been removed from the reading view, increasing the reading area by 12%.
- Disable-rotation option: In the Settings screen.
- Text zooming in Web view now goes to 500%.
The future
Thank you to all of my customers so far. Your enthusiasm is encouraging, and your feedback is invaluable.
This is only the beginning for Instapaper. There’s a large roadmap of great features and improvements planned for the website and iPhone app over the next few months.
Thank you for your support.
On App Store pricing
Over the weekend, two authors wrote great posts about the sad state of App Store pricing:
- Andy Finnell: How to Price Your iPhone App out of Existence
- Veiled Games: A New Hope (in response)
Andy Finnell attempts to persuade app developers to raise prices and make $9.99 the new starting point. It’s a great post, and developers should strongly consider his message.
Veiled Games’ response, which plausibly could represent the average developer response, made some incorrect generalizations:
- People aren’t willing to pay very much for iPhone apps.
- If you charge more than $0.99, a lot of people will complain.
- Very few apps are priced at $9.99 or higher. Of those, nobody’s selling in any volume.
Well, guys, I’m a developer and my app sells for $9.99. It’s not a blockbuster hit, and it hasn’t made me a millionaire, but it sells at a healthy rate considering that I only spend a few hours per week on it, I haven’t spent a penny on promotion, and I haven’t released a new version in months (although I’m about to). A few people have complained about the price, but their numbers pale in comparison to the people who email me to say how happy they are with my app.
Selling an app for $9.99 isn’t impossible, but you can’t expect just anything to sell for that price. Here’s a combination of my anecdotal evidence and some general hunches on how to do it:
Offer a free version. It’s tough to ask someone to pay more than $2 blindly without any way to try your app. Make a free version that doesn’t suck, but leave enough great features or content as paid exclusives, and make sure the free app tastefully tells its users that the paid version exists (and why they should buy it).
Deliver real value. Solve a problem that a lot of people have — not just geeks like us. Make people love your product so much that it will be worth more than the cost of two sandwiches. This will not be easy, and it will take time.
Respect yourself. Have pride in your work, and don’t deliver crap. But respect the value of your time. Make it worth your while. Don’t bother making software that won’t pay you a price that’s worthy of your efforts.
Never pander to cheapskates. You’ll get emails, blog posts, App Store reviews, Twitter statuses, and comments from cheapskates complaining about the price. (If you don’t, your price is too low.) Ignore them. If you pander to them, they’ll keep complaining until your price is $0, then they’ll complain about the color scheme. You will never satisfy everyone. You don’t need to. There are plenty of people out there willing to pay reasonable prices for apps of value, but like happy blog readers and intelligent YouTube watchers, they tend to be less vocal.
Have reasonable expectations. Do the math to figure out a fair price point or decide if an app is worth making. How many copies are you likely to sell? Well, break it down. How many iPhones exist? If you’re selling an app that only a certain group of people can use (e.g. users of a certain website), how many people are in that group, and how many of them have iPhones? Of your potential, what percentage are likely to hear about your app (maybe 5% if you’re really good)? Of those, what percentage will actually choose to buy it?
Achieving all of this and selling at a reasonable price will naturally be harder for some types of apps. I don’t think many people are going to pay $9.99 for a tip calculator or unit converter.
Games are a special case. You can sell a game for $9.99, but it’s much harder than selling a good app: games don’t solve most people’s problems, get them laid, save them time, make them money, or enrich their lives. Most have little lasting value: once you’ve beaten them or gotten sick of them, you rarely play them again. And the game market is absolutely flooded with cheap or free competition. But there’s nearly infinite demand for new games, and the potential market for a good game is much larger than the market for a good app. You can sell a great game for $9.99, but the bar is pretty high.
I suck at ending articles, so I’ll leave you with this: There are a lot more people than you think that will pay reasonable prices for good software, but most of them don’t leave reviews or send emails. They quietly buy the app and you never hear from them. These people are the market, not the complainers and whiners.
People have always been willing to pay money for valuable software, and users of the iPhone platform are no different. It’s not some crazy new voodoo platform where nobody will pay for anything. Treat it like any other software market, and you’ll see that it responds in the same way.
TUAW Friday Favorite: Instapaper for iPhone/iPod touch
Thanks, TUAW!
(And sorry to Levi in the comments — I get a lot of email and can’t respond to all of it, but I diligently read and consider all of it, including yours. It’s flagged in Mail for a response, but it takes me a long time to get to all of the flagged items.)
Seven Must-Have Offline Apps For Your iPhone/iPod Touch
Thanks for the mention, ReadWriteWeb.
One correction:
The Instapaper bookmarking tool for iPhone lets you bookmark up to 10 web pages for offline reading. As any iPod Touch user knows, mobile Safari’s tendency to auto-refresh pages means you can’t open up web pages and save them for later reading offline. If 10 pages isn’t enough for you, you can buy the Pro version for $9.99 which uncaps that limit while also adding other features like tilt scrolling and an adjustable text size.
I’m not sure how this idea has spread, but I’ve seen it reported on a few different sites. Instapaper Free is not limited to 10 articles.
There’s no limit of how many articles you can store with Instapaper Free (until you start hitting technical limitations such as memory capacity, of course). There has never been such a limit.
As I have previously discussed in depth, I never want to impose artificial, frustrating restrictions on Free that make it a bad product.
gris: ThingsWeCantDo
From the Google Reader iPhone Sync application available to jailbroken iPhones via Cydia:
Tilt Scrolling
As seen in Instapaper Pro. But I thought of it before they implemented it ;)
Why Not?
I have working code for tilt-scroll on a UIScrollView in portrait orientation. The problem is that UIWebView is not a UIScrollView, and in fact provides no method for programatically getting or setting the content offset / scroll.
I thought so, too, even for a few weeks after the Instapaper app’s initial release. But it is indeed possible to programmatically get and set the scroll position on a UIWebView. You just have to be creative and make do with the (very few) methods that UIWebView provides.
It’s a shame, though, that it’s not a proper subclass of UIScrollView. A contentOffset property would be a lot easier. There’s an Apple Bug Reporter feature request (#5912563) open for UIWebView to get contentOffset, but I’m not sure whether it’s a priority.
InformationWeek: 13 Free Apps For iPhone, iPod Touch
It’s the electronic equivalent of your magazine “to be read” pile — but it doesn’t clutter up the coffee table in your living room.
InformationWeek includes Instapaper in its top list.