This week I finished shutting down my app-detection service, iHasApp. I disabled the signup forms, grandfathered the current users on their plans, sent out emails, and updated the landing page with a message to any new visitors. After all of this, I thought it might be interesting to chronicle what it was, how it did, and how it feels to shut down a project after multiple years of work...
A little over a year ago, I met Jane and Edison. We built a lot of cool stuff together and even interviewed at YCombinator. Since then, we've worked together on the latest versions of SleepBot, and have finally made the final push out the door: SleepBot for iOS...
Two years ago, Big Brother Camera Security was a Top 25 Overall App, and merely two months later it was removed by Apple over privacy concerns. Since then, Big Brother was marked on my portfolio as "Banned from the App Store." Today marks 21 months since that day, and I am finally pleased to announce that Big Brother is available yet again on the App Store...
I spent this past weekend in San Francisco attending YCombinator’s Startup School. There was awesome list of speakers including the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, and Paul Graham--not to mention the impressive people in attendance that I had the fortune of meeting...
Got a call from Apple last night regarding the removal of Big Brother from the App Store. Apparently, Apple believed that I was “surreptitiously harvesting user passwords.” I have sent in a new update without the analytics in question, as well as appealing on the grounds that:...
In my last update to Big Brother Camera Security (Free), I added some code to record common user passcodes (completely anonymous, of course). Because Big Brother’s passcode setup screen and lock screen are nearly identical to those of the actual iPhone passcode lock, I figured that the collected information would closely correlate with actual iPhone passcodes...
I did some data mining related to my iHasApp API project recently. Specifically, on the Top 2000 Free iPhone apps (a whopping 25.28 GB of compressed data, and 1.5% of all available free apps).
By analyzing the app’s iTunesMetadata.plist and Info.plist, you can learn a few things that aren’t available anywhere else. For example (note that my dataset is for Free apps), did you know that:...
Woo! Big Brother Camera Security (Free) entered the Top 25 Free Overall today. This comes just a few days after I released an update for version 1.5--a version which seems to have brought fortune in many forms...
Bump (and others) recently pushed out an update for their iPhone app which allows users to detect their installed apps, and then share recommendations. As with the rest of the application, this new feature is awesome; if not because it will yet again save people time, then because it can detect what apps you have installed...
There are lots of articles floating around analyzing the effects and implications of iPhone app piracy. Two of the most relevant questions for app developers (regarding piracy) are:
Bottom line, developers are interested in how much revenue they are losing due to app piracy. This post is my attempt to throw a slightly distasteful idea into the mix: pirates are helping me make more money...
As a relatively new and independent iPhone developer, I know that my apps don’t have amazing sales or revenue (although I do believe that I manage to beat the median and mean). Yet despite my lack of stardom, I still see relatively stable sales and revenue figures over the course of normal sales days, barring Christmas and rare articles on iOS blogs. But when the new year came around, my iAd numbers made a resolution to lose weight...