+1 for using a plain text file and not some fancy to-do list/Basecamp-type app to define and triage their week-to-build-and-ship priorities.
More proof that polish and UX is vitally important for iPhone and iPad apps. The average user doesn't care how you wrote the program - they care how it feels to use.
For UX and visual inspiration for good-looking iPhone and iPad apps:
Since iBooks is free and comes with (I'm guessing) most of this content for free, and is heavily promoted by Apple, this just goes to show what you can do if you find some extra value. Is it the cover art that people like so much? I can't imagine that the reading interface could be much better than iBooks, and iBooks has search.
Does anyone know what the differentiator for this app is (over iBooks)?
Our whole app is based around making it really, really easy to browse and download all kinds of books, with custom collections bringing out specific topics and authors.
With iBooks you have the same content, but it's hidden behind the paid books, and there aren't any good ways of discovering new things to read.
I also made an app just to see what would happen, and the app performance was pretty bad. The equivalent of this app sells at a reasonable rate on the iPhone (perhaps $15 a day). The iPad version has sold so far at about $2 a day. So the iPad market at the moment is still populated with early adopters who care about design and looks, and the mums don't seem to haven't really arrived yet.
If anyone else has other iPad numbers, I think it would be interesting to extrapolate these numbers and see what the top apps are earning.
Sorry, this app is not very good. No landscape mode support (only portrait). No search function. There may be 23,000 free books in here but it's impossible to tell because there is no way to browse by author or title. You can only browse from pre-selected categories like "Adventure", "Fantasy", "Horror".
The covers look pretty and the way you can browse categories is nice, but I wish you would focus on real functionality like "search by title", or "search by author", instead of just making it look pretty. It's a freakin' book app after all... 99% of the user's time is going to be spent reading, not staring at pretty covers.
This seems like an 80/20 rule. Why spend 80% of your time designing the interface that users will only use 20% of their time?
That's the point of the article- those are known tradeoffs we made.
Search is important! That's why it's going to be in the first update. However, it's not core to the app. We can draw out 90% of peoples' searches in collections, categories, and authors. I know we have 90% coverage, because I have the stats from our iPhone app. We get blasted with a bunch of one stars from people who want search. We get a lot of five stars from people who like browsing normally. We ship an update, we get a lot of five stars from everyone.
The reason we spent 80% of the time designing the browsing interface interface is because it isn't the 20% interface. It is the 80% interface. Most people don't spend lots of time searching, they search a couple times for things they specifically want, then they browse the rest of the time.
This might not be the case for you- but, in the first version, I don't care if you like it. I don't care in the first version if anyone specifically likes it. I care that we build an app that satisfies 80% of people based on known priorities and known stats, and then and only then do we start building the features that everyone else wants.
Very well said. Now that you are #27 you can add the extra features needed to keep the app at the top. The important thing was getting it up there and on people's iPads in the first place.
Also for iPad and iPhone apps sometimes interface is more important than functionality. The majority of users want apps that look pretty.
Apologies, my review may have come off a little harsh. I'm not in the habit of giving 1 star to apps that are included launch day when I know the developer didn't have a physical iPad to test on.
In fact I haven't rated your app yet. What I usually do is wait a week or two until the first update before reviewing/rating.
Of course, not all customers know or even care how the software development lifecycle works.
No worries at all- you're right! As a user, there's a ton of problems with the app, so if you want to search it's totally a one star app right now. I'm was just trying to point out the reasoning from a business/product perspective, which is usually the context of HN conversations.
If you emailed our support email I'd apologize for not having book deletion, and that we know how dumb it is to not have it, but we wanted to be careful in our first update without iPads to test on. Here, I'll explain the actual reasoning behind not having stuff.
Definitely check out the app in another week or so, though, we'll be rocking through the problems in the app in short order. We already have the code written in our iPhone app, it's just a matter of creating the interfaces.
It talks about how the made the app, but not how they made the #27 app, which would be more interesting.
The iPad store has so much stuff in it that I don't now how you would get noticed. Once you are in the leader board, it's a different story, but getting there is hard. Did they get a link on some high profile website? Or is it just that "free books" is a pretty good title (even though it really costs $2).
They made the #27 app by having an iPad-tuned app ready on launch day (which by definition will be the day with the fewest competing apps in any category) that probably came back at or near the top of the search results (I think we can safely assume there were a lot of searches for "free books") and whose App Store marketing text and screencaps probably looked slightly better than the other apps in its category (since on launch day there aren't enough ratings to to help distinguish the wheat from the chaff -- appearance is all a buyer has to go by).
There isn't really any lesson to be drawn from this aside from the short-term benefit of being first to market in a category. And even if you find that lesson valuable, it's already too late to apply it.
Curious. The iPhone version indeed appears to cost $1.99, but the iPad version is free: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n7x2p/free-is-free .. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I've downloaded it - thanks!
We figured that Apple would throw huge mounds of traffic at the free section of Books via iBooks. And then, if all goes well, by being in the Top 5 we'd be able to snipe off their traffic to iBooks, then make money with in-app unlocking of audiobooks and possibly some publisher sponsorship.
By already having the content ready to go we had a pretty huge opportunity to be up there with Amazon and Apple, and, if we can't convert, we can always toggle over to paid.
Aha! I thought it was a bug of some sort because I'm in the UK on the UK store (where iPad apps aren't officially launched yet, but you can still search for them). Sounds like an interesting plan.. and another interesting blog post ;-)
Nice work, but if I understand the article correctly, they basically modified the iPhone app with the similar functionality, not created the app from scratch (as the title might suggest).
More proof that polish and UX is vitally important for iPhone and iPad apps. The average user doesn't care how you wrote the program - they care how it feels to use.
For UX and visual inspiration for good-looking iPhone and iPad apps:
http://wellplacedpixels.com