The App Store mindset

March 3, 2011

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

January 10, 2011

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.

Six AppStore pitfalls

November 25, 2010

Six AppStore pitfalls and how to avoid them: this is the presentation we gave at the AppStudies conference this monday. For those who couldn’t be there, we’re making our slides available online. We’re talking about internationalisation, updates, and AppStore reviews.