Experimentation with price

Did some experimentation with pricing on iSkream over the last week. What we found was that when we raised the price up to $1.99 we lost fewer than 33% in sales, and therefore actually make more money selling fewer applications at this higher price. But when we raised the price to $2.99 we lost a large percentage in sales. It would appear we've found the buyer's limit at $2.

Issues with CrashLander Apple example

Many people start with Apple's OpenGL CrashLander source as their jumping off place for iPhone game applications. That's fine, but there are a couple of bugs in the code to be aware of.

First, there is a bug in the OpenAL sound engine wrapper. It's a memory leak. It's been detailed ad nauseum in many blogs, so I'll skip it.

Secondly, the accelerometer sampling rate is 100Hz. Have you ever noticed the myriad of cheap applications that seem to occasionally launch with a non functioning accelerometer? This is why. It seems to hang about 1/10th the time with this rate. Turning the sampling rate down to 20Hz or so alleviates the hangs. It's a strange problem really, clearly not hardware related. Instead it seems related to OS queue overflows.

And finally...
Version 1.8 contains the following code:

if(_position.y + CGRectGetMinY(rect) <= kBaseOffset + (GLfloat)[_textures[kTexture_Base] pixelsHigh] / 2)

The issue with pixelsHigh is that it always returns a power of two. This may work with the small and thin crash landing pad, but people take this code and try to use it as a starting point for their own code. As they add larger images and try to use this code for collision detection of larger images, lots and lots of time starts to get wasted tracking down the problems.

It would be preferable to start people off correctly and use something instead like this:

[self getSize:kTexture_Base].height

Application ranking

A great way to look at your application ranking is to look at MobClix. They track applicaiton ranking by scraping iTunes every day.

For example here is Abby Crabby...
http://www.mobclix.com/appstore/app/295756232

Please don't forget to review iSkream

If you downloaded iSkream, please don't forget to review the application. It helps our rankings.

You can click here to go directly to the Apple iTunes review process for iSkream.

iSkream released

Our first iPhone application was released.
It is available now on the iTunes Music Service.
We put a good deal of effort into a unique look and feel.

Check out iSkream on iTunes here.

iPhone application name squatting

I have been working with the iPhone SDK since the Summer of '08. Did you know there is a name squatting of sorts going on inside the iPhone Developer's Portal? You can go all the way through the development process, application art work and all. Only to discover during the iTMS application process that the name of your application is already taken.

This happened with our application iSkream. It was originally titled iScream of course. We had the application ID, the build target, the Ad Hoc beta program distribution, our artwork, and our website all setup with iScream. At the last minute our application was rejected because the name was "already in use". How could this be? There was no application in the App Store called "iScream"! We had to scramble to get a new name and adjust everything. It turns out people are grabbing up names by submitting applications without a binary.

This realization has lead me to grab dozens and dozens of good sounding applications names. Especially the ones for the two or three dozen application ideas we've kicked around. The problem with name squatting is that there is no visibility, the squatters, myself included, can't be propositioned for the access to the names. Who knows, maybe someday Apple will flush all the applications that haven't submitted binaries and all of us name squatters will be gone.