Vim hits the App Store

At Applidium we really dig open source software. To celebrate Vim’s 20th birthday, we decided to port this incredible text editor to the iPad.

We could explain why Vim is so awesome, but many people already have :

• Yann Esposito teaches you Vim, progressively
• The awesome guys at Thoughtbot explain why Vim isn’t actually hard to learn
• Here’s a nice article on common misconceptions about Vim

So go grab Vim on the App Store. It also does run on the iPhone, but to be honest it works better on the iPad. Last but not least, feel free to report bugs or contribute on our GitHub page.

Are universal iOS applications the best choice?

More often than not, iPad applications share a significant part of their codebase with their iPhone equivalent. As an editor, should we prefer publishing a dedicated application for each platform, or a universal one?

Advantages of a universal app

• With iCloud and its over-the-air automatic synchronization between all our iOS devices, users won’t have your application twice on their iPads.

• By merging the you minimize the number of app submissions, a difficult moment in which mistakes can easily be made.

Risks of a universal app

• By spliting apps you won’t annoy users from a specific platform with upgrades that do not concern them.

Other leads

• Leveraging iPhone downloads to rise in the iPad App Store rankings doesn’t seem to be possible ¹. Whatever the method being used by Apple, that’s not a good reason to prefer a solution over the other.

• Finally, in terms of earnings, it is rather difficult to make a universal app much more expensive because many users will only use it on a single device. Therefore most people price their universal application as if it was an iPhone-only one (this might lead to a slight loss of earnings though as iPad apps are traditionnaly more expensive).

In the end, both choices seem reasonable : two separate apps will offer more flexibilty in pricing and upgrades, whereas a universal one will be more simple. One should be rather careful when making his decision though, as there’s no coming back.

¹ Cross Fingers, today #4 on the iPhone App Store is only #21 in the iPad one, far behind iPad-only applications.

² Because of the way the App Store works, migrating from two separate apps to a universal one (or the other way round) will indeed break the “update link” with your users. Worse : in the case of a paid application, they would have to pay again.

The AppStore mindset

Here’s an interesting story : as you may know, we’ve built an iOS Google Analytics app for our own use. It’s a rather simple (yet efficient) application that lets you check your Google Analytics stats on the go. So we decided to put it on the App Store, for free.

Here are some comments our app got on the US App Store :

• “Quick access to quick stats. So we have the bait when is the switch? It’s free and no ads? Is my password safe?”

• “Works perfectly for me. I can’t believe this is free!”

We find it really amazing how Apple managed to get its customers to expect to pay for pretty much anything.

On the web, nobody ever asked why Google Analytics itself was free in the first place while it’s a project several orders of magnitude more complex than our app.

Apple pulled VLC off the AppStore

Much to our surprise, we received this friday an email from Apple that said “We regret that the dispute regarding your application named ‘VLC Media Player’ could not be resolved amicably between the parties. We have removed your application from the App Store. For any questions relating to this matter, please contact Rémi Denis-Courmont directly.”

This was a follow-up from an email we received from Apple last October : “On 10/20/2010, we received a notice from Rémi Denis-Courmont that Rémi Denis-Courmont believes your application named ‘VLC Media Player’ infringes Rémi Denis-Courmont’s intellectual property rights. In particular, Rémi Denis-Courmont believes you are infringing their copyright.”

Rémi Denis-Courmont’s complaint came pretty much unsuspected, since we did receive approval from the VideoLAN association before starting the iOS port of VLC. As a matter of fact, some members of VideoLAN even helped us porting VLC to the iOS.

It goes without saying, we still believe the AppStore licence is compatible with the GPLv2 under the which VLC is released. Therefore, together with the VideoLAN association, we’ll do our best to not let this be the end of VLC/iOS.

As a final word, we think it’s pretty sad to deny millions of users the right to enjoy a nice piece of open source software … in the name of freedom.