February 2013
1 post
Right now, I have a hundred apps on my iPhone and none of them are at version 1.0.
All of those apps started at 1.0. Then one of two things happened. Either the app got a great initial response, and that justified continued development. Or, the first version tanked, and that justified continued development.
Either way, for successful apps, 1.0 was just the beginning.
Unfortunately, most...
October 2012
1 post
Bad news, everyone: it seems Apple stopped selling...
Making the rounds this week is a Pew survey that puts iPad market share at only 52% — down from 81% a year ago.
Back then, 8.1% of the survey respondents had an iPad. Now, one year later, 22% say they have a tablet but only 52% of those are iPad owners — making iPad’s share just 11.3%. This modest gain equals only 34 new iPad owners in the surveyed group of 1069 and is within the...
August 2012
4 posts
Magazine subscriptions are too cheap, yet feel too...
Imagine a cable TV company demanding $1032 upfront to set you up with HBO and ESPN for the year. Or AT&T expecting a check for $960 to activate 12 months of service to your smartphone (phone not included). Or a broadband connection? A steep but somewhat manageable $488.1
That’s life in a world where services are sold by prepaid annual subscription. Seems kind of expensive, right?...
The problem with magazines is in this chart
According to the MPA, single copy retail sales of magazines have been in a free fall for the past decade. During the ten years from 2001 to 2011, newsstand sales dropped a whopping 47%.
But for much of the same period, magazine subscriptions actually made gains. A decline only started with the financial crisis in 2008 as families cut back on frivolous fixed expenses. By 2011, magazines had...
Apple continues to err on the side of insecurity
News about Mat Honan’s hacked Apple ID spread all over the web this weekend, but something about the story didn’t seem right to me. Mat was guessing that the hacker had found his password with a brute force search, but that sounded impractical: Apple is pretty aggressive about locking down accounts that get too many failed login attempts.
Now we know the real reason: Apple tech...
My Apple ID episode from 2008
This entry was originally posted to the MK&C company blog on July 8, 2008. It has been reprinted here as the company blog is no longer available.
Apple just gave out my Apple ID password because someone asked
I tried to log in to Apple Developer Connection this morning to find out that my password had been changed and the email associated with my account was now a yahoo.com address that...
January 2011
1 post
On App Store Payment Policies
We all know that Apple has some pretty fascist payment policies on the App Store:
Apple demands that all iOS content purchases be made using Apple’s In-App Purchase
Processing payments within the app by credit cards or other means is forbidden
Using existing subscriptions to unlock content will become verboten on April 1st.
Especially after that last item of news, one key question...
