The 2014 Panic Report

All sorts of interesting stuff in this year-in-review post by Panic’s Cabel Sasser, but this stuck out to me:

This is the biggest problem we’ve been grappling with all year: we simply don’t make enough money from our iOS apps. We’re building apps that are, if I may say so, world-class and desktop-quality. They are packed with features, they look stunning, we offer excellent support for them, and development is constant. I’m deeply proud of our iOS apps. But… they’re hard to justify working on.

Their unit sales are roughly 50-50 Mac/iOS, but Mac apps account for 83 percent of their revenue.

Games are a different market, but for other apps, I think iOS apps are more like websites than Mac apps. People expect them to be free to use. There are exceptions of course — successful paid websites and successful paid iOS utility apps — but as a basic rule of thumb I’m pretty sure I’m right.

★ Wednesday, 7 January 2015