The 2014 Panic Report

09 Jan 2015 • panic.com

To be honest, I was pretty nervous to be pulling Coda from the Mac App Store. But when we finally did it, I felt an incredible, almost indescribable sense of relief — mostly because as we began to wrap up bug fix releases, we were able to immediately post them to our customers within minutes of qualifying them. My god. That’s how it should be. There’s just no other way to put it — that’s how you treat your customers well, by reacting quickly and having total control over your destiny. To not be beholden to someone else to do our job feels just fantastic.

Every time I think seriously about getting into iOS development I read something like this and shudder and change my mind. As a web app guy I’m very accustomed to pushing fixes instantly to all customers just by redeploying the server code. Pushing a new binary (with a nice auto-updater built into the app) would be “ok” I guess. My non-Apple Store Mac software notifies me of new versions all the time and downloads and installs them easily enough. But having to wait days/weeks for the monolith that is Apple to approve my update - with the risk of random or pseudo-random rejections? No thanks.

The results were interesting. We sold a couple hundred fewer units of Coda post-App Store removal, but revenue from it went up by about 44%.

Now, two explanations for that: in addition to keeping the 30% that would have normally gone to Apple, we also returned Coda from its sale price ($79) to its regular price ($99) alongside the release of 2.5. Even if those factors hadn’t been in play, though, I don’t think the decline in Coda revenue would have been as dramatic as we originally feared it might be.

Good for Panic. Can you imagine a day where all popular and well known software has left the App Store and the store is full of nothing but cheap junk on one side and innovative new companies that no one had heard of yet (because they need the exposure) on the other? I’m not saying we’re headed there but I can certainly imagine it.

I hope someone at Apple is imagining it too.