Federico Viticci

10865 posts on MacStories since April 2009

Federico is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MacStories, where he writes about Apple with a focus on apps, developers, iPad, and iOS productivity. He founded MacStories in April 2009 and has been writing about Apple since. Federico is also the co-host of AppStories, a weekly podcast exploring the world of apps, Unwind, a fun exploration of media and more, and NPC: Next Portable Console, a show about portable gaming and the handheld revolution.
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@viticci.macstories.net
viticci@macstories.net

A Very Mild Defense of In-App Purchases→

In this part of his post on In-App Purchases, John Moltz sums up my feelings quite well:

What we should be asking is simply whether or not we’re spending what the app is worth. We’ve spent a lot of time decrying the race to the bottom in app pricing. Now we’re complaining because app developers have found a way to make more money.

Not surprisingly, the study cited above says the freemium model works out well for developers. Almost exclusively, of course, it’s all the wrong developers. Because the good ones, the ones we like and go drinking with at WWDC, would rather drag a nail across a Retina MacBook Pro than go freemium.

Exactly. I am complaining because the wrong developers are leveraging In-App Purchases to create “games” that nickel and dime players and keep asking for more money. Funnily, just as we thought the arcade was dead, it’s back and it’s more expensive than ever with mobile games.

My problem is with games designed not for fun, but for profit. Games that are optimized for shady IAP tactics, rather than great gameplay. But I don’t want to repeat myself – here’s what I’ve written about my bias for quality games, Apple and its culture for gaming, and the value of In-App Purchases.

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The Prompt: X→

On the 10th episode of the The Prompt, Federico, Myke and Stephen discuss their awesome fans, Apple and gaming and gold-colored iPhones. They close with Federico’s review of Editorial for iPad, a discussion about creating things on the Internet and Stephen’s super power.

I can’t believe it’s been 10 episodes since we started The Prompt. Support from listeners has been amazing, and I’m excited about the future of The Prompt.

As an aside, if you’re reading this now, make sure to check out the #1 Prompt-related Twitter account, @timerkoalasing. He/she is live-tweeting the X episode as he/she listens to it. I’ll let you guess what his/her comments are like.

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Stuart Hall’s App Store Experiment→

This is an excellent series by Stuart Hall: he developed a 7 minute workout app, and he’s been posting details, numbers, and comments on what it’s like to enter the App Store market today.

Particularly interesting is the switch to a free model with In-App Purchase, detailed in part two:

How does In App Purchase (IAP) stack up against a paid download? For this app it’s been an increase of over 3x from around $22 per day to around $65 per day. The IAP converts at approximate 2-3% of the downloads per day.

[…]

IAP increases revenues - For better or worse for the ecosystem as a whole, it’s been proven over and over again it makes more money.

While Stuart’s story won’t apply to every kind of app category and pricing scheme, there are several data points and charts worth considering. Make sure to check out part one and part two – I hope there will be a part three as well.

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Shared Accounts In Google’s iOS Apps

Alex Chitu, reporting on a feature that I also noticed after YouTube’s 2.0 update:

If you enter the credentials of a Google account in the YouTube app and then open the AdSense app, you’ll find the new account and you can sign in without entering the password. If you remove an account, it will be removed from the other Google apps that support this feature. I assume that most Google apps for iOS will be updated to use this brilliant feature.

Once I logged into YouTube with my account (on an iOS 7 device), I then fired up the AdSense app (that I had just downloaded from the App Store) and my account was already listed in the screen with available accounts. It does seem like the YouTube and AdSense apps are capable of sharing accounts so users won’t have to log into their account every time in each Google app. AdSense didn’t bring up an authorization screen in YouTube – it just recognized the account that I had set up in YouTube.

Google’s documentation for YouTube confirms this, but doesn’t specify which iOS apps support shared accounts:

If you’ve signed in with another Google app on your iOS device, you may see this account listed.

Google’s explanation isn’t clear; the shared account option isn’t mentioned in the documentation for Gmail and Chrome. Upon signing out from the YouTube app, an alert dialog reads:

To sign in again, just select one of your Google accounts saved on this device. You will not be required to enter your password. To remove a saved account, tap “Sign In” > “Manage” > “Remove”.

It’ll be interesting to see if and when shared accounts will be integrated with Google’s other iOS apps. In the past few months, Google enhanced the inter-app communication capabilities of Gmail, Maps, Drive, and Chrome with the ability to open links in other apps, completely foregoing the need to launch Apple apps like Safari, Maps, or Mail.

Furthermore, Google is also providing an SDK for developers to add this functionality to their apps (for web links), showcasing examples of third-party apps that support Chrome. While Google apps won’t have the same kind of system integration that they have on Android, the combination of URL callbacks and shared accounts could help the creation of a “Google app ecosystem” on iOS.

Hype HTML5 Creation Tool Gets New Features, iOS Previews with 2.0 Update

Tumult Hype, a powerful HTML5 content creation tool for OS X, was updated today to version 2.0. Designed to allow web developers and designers to create rich, animated web content without relying on plugins (like Flash) or other native code, Hype – launched in 2011 by former Apple engineers – has always been at the forefront of HTML5 editing software on the Mac thanks to a polished interface, powerful features, support for Apple’s iBooks Author, and compatibility with several web browsers and technologies. MacStories readers may be familiar with our series on Entertainment Ecosystems, which featured animated HTML5 graphics created entirely in Hype by our Graham Spencer.

Today’s version 2.0 is a major update that builds on the solid foundation of Hype to provide further support for modern web standards as well as iOS devices. In terms of additions to the Mac app, Hype now supports web audio through audio actions, a way to stop and play audio depending on a user’s interaction with a specific scene or timeline. Hype now has support for web fonts (via Google Fonts), curved motion paths (for more natural animations of objects on screen), and JavaScript improvements for developers.

On the mobile side, one notable new feature is proper recognition of touch and swipe events: this means that Hype content supports interactions through taps and swipes on a mobile device with the same speed and controls provided by standard clicks and drags with a cursor on a computer. Based on what the Hype team showed in a video and explained in the 2.0 changelog, this should result in more fluid interactions with HTML5 content on mobile devices (not just iOS ones); developers won’t have to write touch-specific code from scratch anymore, as the app will take care of handling the transition from desktop to mobile browsers. Read more

YouTube 2.0 For iOS Released With Picture-in-Picture, Updated Design

YouTube 2.0

YouTube 2.0

Today, Google has officially launched version 2.0 of its YouTube app on the App Store, bringing a tweaked user interface, new icon, and picture-in-picture to the mobile client.

The big new feature of this version is picture-in-picture for videos, which allows you to keep watching a video while browsing or searching. This has been a popular option of third-party clients such as FoxTube for quite a while, and, in Google’s implementation, the player can be dismissed with a tap on an arrow button or a swipe down directly on the video player. Both on the iPhone and iPad, dismissing the player reveals a delightful animation and transition that quickly sends the video down to the bottom of the screen, where you can tap again to enlarge it, or swipe it away to close it.

Overall, the improved animations of the app are much snappier and responsive than version 1.4, and there are dozens of new transitions, translucency effects, and subtle interface hints that contribute to making navigation faster and fluid.

YouTube 2.0

YouTube 2.0

More importantly, YouTube 2.0 packs a tweaked design – starting from the icon – that suggests Google has been getting its iOS apps ready for the major 7.0 update coming to iOS this Fall. The app gets rid of several textures and graphical elements for a more subdued design with a focus on colors (red for selections, gray for the sidebar, whitespace for navigation and search results), transparency, gestures, and animations. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine Google going one step further with this new design and enhancing with iOS 7-only APIs such as blurs and physics effects once iOS 7 is available. The new app doesn’t mimic the look of Apple’s iOS 7 apps, but it does look like Google’s way of easing users into iOS 7’s (fast-approaching) future.

Based on my initial tests, YouTube 2.0 seems to be a powerful and welcome improvement over the old version. The picture-in-picture player is a great addition, and the app has a cleaner, more responsive interface.

YouTube 2.0 is available on the App Store.

App Stores and Discovery→

Benedict Evans:

After the web directory the next stage was the ‘portal’ - a page with someone’s ideas of what might be useful. This is what Yahoo became, and it’s also what the front page of the iOS or Android app stores look like now. The purpose of these screens is not to allow people to discover your app or service - they cannot hope to be comprehensive in that way. The front pages of an app store do not exist to help developers - they can’t. Rather, they exist to help the users - to ease them into the idea of apps. But they can only scratch the surface of ‘discovery’.

Curation by the App Store’s editorial team can’t be enough if it’s not backed by robust search and discovery algorithms that can provide better search results and personalized recommendations. These are topics that I explored in July for the fifth anniversary of the App Store – and, to an extent, they can be applied to other content sold by Apple, like books and video.

Some may argue that Apple’s recent acquisition of Matcha.tv may signal an increased interest in content recommendation algorithms. While I have no doubt that Apple is working on this, it’s important to remember that the same was said for Chomp last year, and that didn’t result in an improved App Store search or recommendation experience on iOS 6. Maybe Matcha’s algorithm is truly different though, and Apple will find a way to use it to improve discovery on iTunes/App Store – but I wouldn’t expect improvements to become apparent any time soon.

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