I wince a little when I read the section titled "Low iOS revenue." The iOS App Store's race to the bottom on pricing (and the parallel problem in Androidville) are very hard on developers. Panic reports that their unit sales are nearly even on iOS and OS X - but that the
revenue is on the far side of an 80-20 split, that they make more than four times the revenue from a desktop sale than from an iOS sale! Even if you assume, very generously, that an iOS app can use a smaller project scope and only take half the investment of company time, that's still a heavily skewed ratio. It's a bad situation for developers that can't absorb losses or make their money via IAP (and I'm not sure how long the IAP route will be around, considering the
utterly vile marketing practices some entities are using to juice up IAP revenue).
The problem is that this is not that Apple, Google, or consumers are doing something to development houses. It's an emergent feature of the market and the incentives, so there's no simple way to make it reliably financially viable to develop for mobile (subscriptions and IAP are not simple and don't fit all business models).
I hope Panic can afford to stay in the business of writing iOS apps. Their apps are great. But the money those apps are making them, isn't great.
The problem is that this is not that Apple, Google, or consumers are doing something to development houses. It's an emergent feature of the market and the incentives, so there's no simple way to make it reliably financially viable to develop for mobile (subscriptions and IAP are not simple and don't fit all business models).
I hope Panic can afford to stay in the business of writing iOS apps. Their apps are great. But the money those apps are making them, isn't great.