I Eat Ewoks

iApp Pricing

So, iOS app developers, I felt I should share my pricing rule. This is a hard rule designed to save my bank account, and it’s worked rather well. I have a top price per platform I’m willing to toss at software. Anything over that it simply out of consideration.

For the phone, it’s $10. Nothing on the phone is worth more than $10 because the interface prevents me from getting more than $10 worth of enjoyment/productivity out of it. The iPad is $20 (and that includes universal apps). The desktop is around $60, though technically unlimited and practically I don’t break $30 that often at all (and even that is rare).

I share this because there are some companies, like Omni, that seem to feel they can charge desktop prices for software on the iPad when even Apple is capping out at $10 for their apps.

No. Not biting. Even if it’s world-changing, I’m not buying into it because I simply will never get that much out of it.

I may be the exception, but among those I’ve spoken with about this, it feels more like a rule (even if but a local one).

So, there’s the guide. Make your money on volume, folks. With millions of units out there, the biggest problem is just making something that stands out enough to win for a week or more.

Hey Designers?

Please stop using hexadecimal color codes when talking to developers. We stopped using those in the late 90s.

With CSS we’re using rgb and rgba to give us our colors using the same channel values as most graphic programs (each channel ranging from 0-255). This applies to software for desktop and mobile devices as well.

When I, as an iOS developer, get a hexadecimal color code for text I either wind up converting it channel-by-channel to decimal or doing something like 0x33/255.0 instead to get the value I need.

I hate it. You hate it. It’s not needed.

Let’s use 0-255 per channel from now on, okay? Me hard-coding 120/255.0 is a little more forgivable, and in CSS rgba(0,120,0,1) is a little easier to read anyway.