The 2015 Panic report

Panic, one of the most respected OS X/iOS developer houses, published their yearly report, this time covering 2015, obviously. This paragraph is intriguing:

iOS Revenue. I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart – well, an experimental change of heart – and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it didn’t have a meaningful impact on sales.

More and more I’m beginning to think we simply made the wrong type of apps for iOS – we made professional tools that aren’t really “in demand” on that platform – and that price isn’t our problem, but interest is.

This obviously ties into the previous news item, and Panic hits the nail on the head. They are, of course, specifically talking about iOS, but the same applies to competing platforms like Android: nobody wants to do anything even remotely resembling serious work on a “post-PC” device, regardless of platform. Both Apple and Google are really trying to posit their platforms for work (iPad Pro, Pixel C), but just as Microsoft is having a hard time scaling Windows down for consumption, Apple and Google are having trouble scaling their operating systems up for work.

It is no surprise, then, that Panic’s upcoming great project for 2016 isn’t a big new application… But a videogame.

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