Shifty Jelly, the small indie studio behind the Pocket Casts podcast app, writes about app development and Android versus iOS.
Commenters cite its 'Why Android first?' post on sales, and its Amazon app store complaints. They called the app good but worried about its acquisition.
Accidents happen. Partners cheat. Here is a simple example from Shift Jelly about Amazon App store and their free app of the day.
http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rotten-to-the-core/
> All we got was about 300 emails a day to answer over the space of a few weeks, that left us tired and burnt out. For all we know most of the people who wanted our application, now have it. To add insult to injury Pocket Casts relies on a server to parse podcast feeds (allowing instant updates on your phone), and all these new users forced us to buy more hardware just to meet demand. Hardware that we are going to have to support indefinitely at our own cost.
Can you fault Shift Jelly for not being able to see through this?
This strikes me as potentially bad news. PocketCasts is a great little app, with the characteristic advantages of being produced by a small indy outfit with no agenda beyond selling a good quality product for cash. I'll keep an open mind, but it's hard to imagine it maintaining its current user-focus and content neutrality while under the thumb of content-producers.
[Edit: there's a blog post on the topic from ShiftyJelly: https://blog.shiftyjelly.com/. It's a little misjudged in tone, maintaining their jokiness which has been enjoyable in other contexts but feels more like misdirection when a user is hoping for information on the future. Perhaps mildly reassuring though]
|Now maybe Amazon will eat their promotional costs themselves here.
You hit the nail on the head. If the account of the pocketcast devs is correct, in order to be featured as Amazons "free app of the day," you eat all costs as the dev. I would expect they are doing the same thing here.
http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rotten-to-the-core/
Well considering that one of his major competitors has claimed 5x higher unit sales on Android vs iOS (and the Andriod price was $1 more at the time) [1], I think you can draw your own conclusions.
[1] See: https://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/
given their history with paying developers that are the app of the day on their store[1], I can see them finding a loophole to avoid paying devs who collect payments with coins.
[1] http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2011/08/02/amazon-app-store-rotten-to-the-core/
Pocket Casts actually wrote a great blog post about this: http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/
Because some niches are really poorly covered on Android, apps that fill those may have greater success than they would on iOS.