302: Artificial Walls
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Welcome to Under the Radar, a show about independent iOS app development. I'm Marco Arment. And I'm David Smith. Under the Radar is usually not longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started. So the thing I wanted to talk through today, and so often I feel like the topics that we discuss on this show kind of start in my head as I have like the title of the show in mind, and then I'm almost like backfilling the topic. And the title I had in my mind was sort of holding the line.

And specifically, something that I've just been thinking a lot about recently is the way in which so much of our work

involves kind of these different axes with which we're kind of build as we're building something there's all these axes that we are comparing ourselves against and so for example it's like are you doing kind of short-term focused or long-term focused would be one kind of broad topic are you building something that's trying to you know have this long-term life that exists for years and years in the app store are you much more short-term focused

Are you trying to – maybe you have another axis that you could be comparing between like just sort of I guess art or artisan-ness or commerce?

In some ways, that is an axis that you could be comparing yourself between. If you're building something that, in the analogy of, say, you were a woodworker and you're in your back garden and you go out to a woodshed and you're making stuff and you're just doing it for yourself and it's fun, it's great. You would be building your app, or in this case, you're building your table differently if you were trying to make a thousand of them and making a business of it. There's these spectrums that we all exist on

And I feel like as we're going through the app process, like the creation process, we are inevitably finding ourselves where we feel comfortable on any of those spectrum, any of those axes.

Because that's the nature of what we have to do. We have to constantly be making choices about what our app is going to do, how it's going to do it, what costs are going to incur as a result, what incomes are we going to generate. And I was reminded of this really specifically recently when I had the big iOS 18 launch last week.

And as a result, whenever we have these launches, I tend to go around and do a survey of essentially my competitors' apps to see if they've come up with something interesting in the summer that I should be aware of, that I need to be, not necessarily I'm going to copy, but that I want to be aware of if something's happening there and if there's an opportunity for me to put my take of that feature into my apps. And what I'm always struck by when I go, so specifically with WidgetSmith, where I opened the other widget apps, so there's a bunch of these apps

that exist in the App Store of a variety of different types and different kind of things. But my goodness, do these apps have really rough first-run experiences.

Something that I really pride myself on is having a pretty solid first-run experience. The first time you come into the app from the App Store, I want it to be great. And I guess they are on the spectrum of the opposite end of that for this, where you launch a lot of these apps, and you will just immediately get the barrage of permission dialogues popping up, like one on top of each other. It's not even the sequence of them. It's just like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

And the first one's like, hey, we'd like to track you. Hey, we want to send you notifications. Hey, we want to look at devices on your network. Hey, we want to look at your location. Whatever it is, they're asking for all the permissions all at once. And I see this, and I'm just like, oh my goodness, this is so...

different than the way that I think about building an app and the way that I approach things and the experience I want to have. If anything, I have the opposite experience where I try very hard to only show up permission dialogues as a result of user action.

And there's things that I'm, you know, consequences to that. Like, you know, I don't, I don't ever show the ad tracking one, but I do, you know, the cookie permission dialogue that you have to show in certain markets. Like I only show that if a user clicks on it, otherwise I don't show them ads like, and that's a cost that I'm incurring, but it's just one of these things that I look at this and I'm like, wow, we are looking at the world in such a different way. And,

And I think it's easy maybe – and you and I, I think, very much – we have strong opinions about these things. We are coming at these things with very particular views. But I'm also struck by how –

Even between you and me, my views on what is acceptable, what is the line that I want to hold, has changed over time. There are things in both of our apps. In this case, it was where when WidgetSmith first launched, I had no ads in it. It was an entirely, I guess what you would call a premium experience that every user had an experience that was the same. And then there was like you had like premium plus that you could go beyond if you were a subscriber.

Whereas now I have ads, and I'm glad that I do that. I think it's made the business much more sustainable. It's had lots of knock-on benefits and things that I can do for the app that I wouldn't necessarily be able to otherwise if I didn't monetize all of the users. But that was a place where the line shifted. And it's just an interesting thing that I want to talk about because I find...

It's really challenging and it's very interesting to think about how we change our views over time. And in some ways it would be nice if they were stable, but they really aren't. And I think so much of that is because our goals and our desires and our incentives change. In my example of the woodworker, if you're only ever going to make one table, well, you'll make a different set of choices than if you really want to get into the business of making tables.

you're going to need to change that. So if you start making apps that are just hobby things on the side, well, you can make a lot of choices that maybe necessarily aren't building towards the goal of sustainability. But if you hit a point where you're like, wow, actually, I really want to make this, you know, this indie thing, you know, make a run of it and make it my full-time career, maybe you need to reevaluate that. And I think being flexible there is important, but I think also being opinionated is

is also important. I think that's something that you don't want to lose your taste and your perspective on what makes something good at the expense of making it ostensibly better for some other aspect of your app. I try not to pass too much judgment on how other apps make money or how they succeed or how they choose to do things because

There have been all these lines in the past that we've thought, like, oh, I'll never do X in my app. I'll never have ads in my app. You know, I'll never ask people for ratings. Like, all these things that I have now done all those things. Like, I just did an Overcast update two days ago that finally enables the rate this app dialogue.

And there's reasons because my ratings have not been very good and there's not been that many of them. Like in a typical day, I might see a pretty low average of new ratings, but there's only like 11 of them.

And so it's like, well, if only 11 people are rating my app every day, like I think, and I'm not prompting them and all of my competitors have way more ratings than I do, which helps them out in rankings and everything else. I'm like, I feel like at some point, like I'm a fool for not doing this, you know, same thing with ads. Like, you know, I,

I was looking back the other day at Overcast's revenue throughout its entire history per year. Just like what I had in my tax returns at the end of the year, just like net profit, net revenue. It was shocking to see the difference between before I had the ad system and after. It made so much more money after the ads. And before the ads, it was like, okay, this is kind of a nice side project.

Once I had the ad system in place, that took me something like four years to really work out the details of how I wanted to monetize Overcast. Once I had the ad system in place, it went from a nice side project to my job.

And not only was that great for me and my family, but that's also great because it justified me working on it more. You know, Americans have, I think, a lot of American culture, especially has a lot of issues around success and guilt and money and guilt. And those things are oftentimes tied together depending on your cultural upbringing. And.

I had a lot of that. And so for me, like the idea of like adding ads to my app to make more money, like I kind of felt bad doing that at first. And the reason I did it at first was because the money was going down and it was going from okay to down. And so, you know, for Overcast to continue to be something that justified me working on it, I had to figure out a different business model. And I did. And now it's working great.

And that was only because I was willing to step over a line that actually wasn't that important, but that I thought was important. And at the end of the day, like I stepped over that line. I put ads in the app. First, I had crappy Google ads and I had my own great podcast ads. And.

No one has minded. It has not cost me anything. People still regard Overcast very highly. I'm still very proud of it. I keep the ads on myself with the new one. I did not do that with the Google ads, but I do it now with the podcast ads. And I don't see anything wrong with that. It seems like everyone wins. Even people who might not love ads get an app for free that is maintained and updated and continues to live on.

And so I think looking at a lot of the business practices and first-run experiences, I'm more gentle on other people ever since I've gone through this process, like on how I judge other apps, how I judge myself, and how I evaluate my own decisions because –

We have to, at the end of the day, think of these as businesses if they're going to be that role in our lives. Like if they're going to be providing income for us and having to compete for our time with other things that might otherwise provide income, then they have to succeed as a business. And

There are lots of unethical things you can do as a business that I'm not saying you should do. There's a lot of that. But there's a lot of stuff like having ads in your app that just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. Or like the rate this app dialogue. I was so resistant to the rate this app dialogue for so long.

Now, Apple's own built-in apps on the phone show you. Literally, you can be using an Apple app that comes with iOS, and it will show that rate this app dialogue. And that kind of shows you just quite how much that it is just a pervasive part of the experience, and no one really cares, and it's fine. And you're almost hurting yourself if you don't use it to some degree. Now, how...

How you use it, that's an open question. I put a lot of thought into where I put the rate this app dialogue in Overcast because I don't want to interrupt people while they're trying to do something important. So the way I'm doing it in this first version is I have it show up if you open the settings screen and a bunch of other conditions are met. Things like, do you have a certain number of podcasts? Have you...

been using the app for more than a few days. Stuff like that, so it doesn't barrage you immediately and bug you constantly. Has it shown the dialogue in the last week I set it for? Stuff like that. It's more respectful, but

Over time, I'm probably going to tweak those knobs because they will make a big difference. Like, by only showing it in the settings screen, I'm only showing it to a very small portion of the users. This is kind of my warm-up phase to see how this goes. But over time, maybe I'll add it to a more common action, like going to the root screen. Who knows? And I've learned...

Never to say never. Never to speak in absolutes about what I will and won't do in the future of my app because it's bad for your business. It's bad for yourself. And you're making these grand proclamations mostly to yourself and to restrict yourself. And it's unwise to say that I'm never going to need this thing. I'm never going to do this thing or my app will never do X or Y like that. That is not a good way to run an app business.

Yeah, and I think, too, with that, it's the understanding of trying to, yeah, like being flexible, I think is important. And I think the way, the best way to be flexible is to be thinking through, you know, trying to match your customers' expectations with their experience. And I think in the case of like the ratings dialogue, it's,

So understanding, A, whether they would be offended by it or think it's problematic or those kinds of things. And if they aren't, then go ahead and use that tool to enhance your business for sure.

And then be thoughtful of the way in which you actually implement it. And I think the difference is so often it is easy to think of these things as very binary, whereas the reality is it's like it's everything is a choice and a decision and you can optimize and improve any experience that a user might have. If you think about it, if you consider it, if you really try and make it good, then

and then try and match it to your customers' expectations. And I mean, vaguely, I'm reminded of a thing that's been in the news the last week of there was a wallpaper app that was put out by MKVHD, the YouTube reviewer. And the thing that was tricky is I think he misjudged or the app, his particular involvement, like that app was built, it seems, to

Yeah.

landed in. Maybe they were going for a different audience and that's just why, but it didn't align. But I think what you're saying with the way you're approaching

I'm going to rate this app dialogue is, you know, is if you are thoughtful about it and try and make it as good for your customer as possible. Like it is an it's not this thing that, oh, I have ads. So now my user experience is bad. So it doesn't matter. It's like taking that perspective is very short sighted versus saying, OK, I'm going to have ads. How can I make this a wonderful, beautiful part of the user experience?

And maybe you can't get it as wonderful and beautiful as the other parts of your application, but that doesn't mean that you can't make them better, that you can't have a rate this app dialogue that is more thoughtful, that is not going to interrupt you from doing something that you are trying to do, and then suddenly this thing pops up and it gets in the way. There's a way to do it in a way that is less likely to do that. It reminds me a bit of, and it's like the benefit of that is how, I think I was saying in Widgetsmith, I don't show a cookies dialogue in

without a user clicking on a button. So there's a button, there's a big banner at the top of the app that says manage advertising preferences. I think it's the name of the button.

And I put it there and this is the way it is now, like exactly what you're saying. It's like, I don't know if I'll keep it this way forever, but so far it's been working pretty well for me is rather than showing an ad in a market that requires one of these, I show up, I have a big kind of kind of slightly garish, but not in your way button that says manage advertising preferences. If you click on that, it shows the cookie dialogues and asks you, you know, if you're permissioned for the ad network to do the cookie stuff that it has to do.

And the interesting thing by doing it that way, the consent rate that I have for places where I show this is something like 95%, 96%. Last time I looked like it is shockingly high as a consent rate. And I think part of that is becoming from

I'm not interrupting them. It's not the fifth screen they've seen after a big barrage of privacy prompts. They're able to say, I've shown respect to you. And then as a result of that respect, maybe you are more likely to trust me and to consent in this case to the ads being shown and the required cookies and things that have to be said as a result.

And the result of that is a better user experience, and ultimately, I think, a better experience for me, because I viewed this as something that was an opportunity to be improved and to be optimized and to match with my users' expectations, that I'm trying to be a user-centric developer in that way. And I think it shows, and I think people appreciate it. In lieu of an ad this week, similar to what we did in the last episode, we are not going to have a traditional ad. Instead, we're going to talk to you briefly

about Relay's campaign for St. Jude. So every September, that's what Relay's been doing for, I think this is the seventh or eighth year

of this campaign. And we talk about, it's a thing that the network does to, you know, essentially to give back, to raise money for a good cause. And at this point, I suspect if you are listening to this show, you probably listen to some other shows on Relay or you listen to ATP. And so you've probably heard the spiel about St. Jude, how they do all this amazing work to fight childhood cancer and related illnesses. And they do it in a way that means that parents don't have to

pay for any of the care that their children are receiving and all those wonderful things. So I'm not going to go through those at length. You've heard it all before. And if you've reached the end of September, you know, as we're recording, this is right at the end of September and you're not, you haven't, you haven't donated then. I mean, in some ways there, there's not a lot that I can say to convince you most likely. And if you have contributed, that's great.

Instead, I thought it might just be interesting just to have a brief, more philosophical discussion or think about just the role that charitable giving has, at least the way that I view it in my life. Because most people listening to this, I think, are software engineers, which means that we're good at making software. That's what we can do. But charitable giving, in many ways, I view it as it's a way for us to affect the change we would love to see in the world that we are not able to affect ourselves.

You know, I'm good at making software. I'm not good at treating cancer in a child who has it. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a nurse. I'm not a researcher. Those aren't the skills that I have. But I would love to affect the change in the world that there are fewer children who suffer with cancer and fewer parents who worry about the, you know, paying for the care that their children need in a terrible situation like that.

And so I can't do that work myself. But what I have is the ability through my work as a software engineer, that's given me resources, and I can give those resources to people who can make that change. And it's one of those things that I think I find very freeing in some ways is the ability to use money that I make from the thing that I'm actually good at to affect the change that I would like, that allow other people to do their jobs and support them in doing that. And I think that's something that St. Jude

Absolutely does. There's a group of really skilled, thoughtful, engaged people who are very mission-oriented and getting rid of childhood cancer. And they've been working at this for years and years, and they're doing a great job, and that's why we support them. And if you would like to effect that change in the world, then by all means, please go to stjude.org.

stjude.org slash relay to do that or if there's other changes you want to make in the world that you're unable to do find other causes to support but I think it's just one of those things that's good to have a thought about the reason we give and the reason we give is because we want to change the world in ways that are big and small powerful and you know sort of narrow but whatever it's something that any of us can do regardless of our given vocation or skill set wow well you put all of our ad reads to shame with that one good job

I don't know. All right. So you mentioned a few minutes ago MKBHD's new wallpaper app. I think it's called Panels, right? Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that because this has been kind of – I've seen so much sub-mastodoning about this app over the last few days. And at first I'm like, why is everyone talking about wallpapers and why are they so angry about it? It took me a while to figure out what was going on. But I'm glad that we brought this up because –

This is a good example of a lot of people misunderstanding success and being, I think, very envious of it in a very, I think, petty and unwise way.

MKBHD could make an app like this that by all accounts was seemingly not an amazing app. I didn't install it. I don't know. But certainly, as you mentioned, I saw there were complaints about it taking too much tracking data with its ad network. And he has already said he's going to look at that. So, okay, fine. A lot of people, though, were like, well, I can make a wallpaper app. Or I did make a wallpaper app. And I'm not charging $50 a year or whatever he's charging for the premium stuff.

And they just cannot believe this. The thing is, people are not buying MKBHD's wallpaper app because they love every single wallpaper in it and they find $50 a year a reasonable price to pay for wallpapers.

They're buying it because they like Marques Brownlee. Like they like him. They like like it's they're buying it based on brand and celebrity and style and fashion. And like it's all these other factors that we app developers are often not only unaware of a lot of times, but often actively disdainful of.

And I think that's unwise for a lot of reasons. First of all, I wouldn't slag this guy in public for taking advantage of what he's built over time to have this amazing empire of work and fame and brand recognition and people recognition. He's built this up for a reason. People like him a lot. I like him a lot. I love his work.

People like MKBHD, he has worked to build that up and he is now broadening. He's kind of spending some of his celebrity cred that he's built up to go into other areas to have different brand partnerships or merchandise deals or whatever it is. That's business. That's part of that business too. Imagine if I made Overcast and I never promoted it on my podcasts.

Because I like, would that feel bad that I'm like unfairly promoting a podcast app? Do you think some overcast users use it just because they like me? Yes, of course they do. Why would I not use that? It would be, and no one would be benefiting if I, if I like silently released an app under some other name and didn't use my name at all, who would that benefit? No one. It doesn't matter. Like, and so I feel like people who are getting all upset about MKBHD's wallpaper app, it's like,

It's mostly just jealousy that they have to work a lot harder to get people to care that much about their app. And yeah, that's true. That's part of business.

You have to use what you have. You have to use the assets you have. You have to use what you've built up and what you have access to. Some people have already built up audiences. He didn't like have this audience just bestowed upon him. He built it up. He worked on it for years and years and years. Like he works his butt off to build that audience. So of course he's going to leverage it into something else if he can. We all would do that. I've done it. You've done it. Like we've all done stuff like that.

That's just part of business. And I don't think it's wise to look at what he's done and say, well, my wallpaper app, it's ridiculous that he can charge more and his wallpapers aren't as good as mine or whatever people. I've seen so many bad takes about this. It's pretty remarkable. But it's mostly rooted in, I think, unproductive avenues of thought that like,

Yeah, he can do that because he's him and he's built up a lot of stuff that all of us haven't. Like if your wallpaper app can't charge 50 bucks and have a lot of ads in it and succeed as well as his, it's because you don't have his audience.

You can try to build that. There's nothing stopping you from trying to do the same thing. And for him to not use his audience and his brand and everything would be needlessly stupid. Why wouldn't he do that? I think it's important when you're looking around the app store, why is this other app succeeding in ways that mine isn't or that I think I can't?

I mean, some of those, the answer really is you can't. Like, you know, like sometimes I'll see another podcast app and it'll have just like

tons of you know reviews and installs that really don't match up to its representation in market share numbers when people measure it in other ways things like you know downloads from big hosts they'll sometimes release their stats of what their client apps are and stuff like that and like you see these apps are like not even on the chart like they're so low not on the chart but how do they have all those installs and how do they keep outbidding me for search terms and the answer usually is venture capital money like that's

they raised a lot of money and they're spending it on user acquisition. Some, some of those things are legitimate and some of them aren't right. Like, but they're doing it and that's how they're able to outcompete me in certain ways.

And at first, a long time ago, I would get mad. I'd be like, man, they're just burning money. Like, how could they? Then I started buying search ads and burning my own money. And I'm burning a lot less money than they are. Then there's people below my status who were like looking at me saying I'm the one burning the money on my search ads. And I'm outbidding them on – you know, I'm driving up my search ads. And then they can't bid on the same keywords for as cheaply or whatever. Like –

It's kind of a ladder. And there's nothing stopping me from trying to go out there and raise venture capital money to try to buy more users and try to acquire growth in much more expensive ways than what I can afford with my current structure. Nothing's stopping me from doing that. Those people who did that, who went out and went through the startup train and raised money and are burning it like crazy to acquire more users...

I shouldn't look at them with disdain because like I could do that too. And they put in the work and they did it. I chose not to, but they put in the work and there's nothing stopping me from doing, from taking the same path. So there's oftentimes a lot of these kind of artificial walls we put up in our mind. This kind of theme of the episode of just like, oh, we're, we're not going to do that or we can't do that. Yeah. But usually the answer is we can, now we can choose not to.

That's a different story. And there's lots of reasons why you might choose not to go down a certain path or take a certain strategy or action. There's lots of that. And certainly we talk about that a lot. But you can't besmirch people for taking a path that was open to them. Yeah, and I think in it, there's also this aspect of just making sure that we are making – I mean I feel like one of the most recurring topics on this show is about being intentional about the choices we make about our products.

And making sure that we're not doing things because we saw someone else do them, because you think it's just somehow absolutely the right idea, the wrong idea, whatever it is. You're making an intentional choice based on a clear-eyed understanding of what your goals are and how your goals are best achieved. That is fundamentally the goal. And whatever the app, you look at a competitor, you look at how they do it.

It's important to just understand their motives, their desires, their end result, where they're trying to align their app and all the different axes they can build it on could be very different than yours. Like if their goal is just market share, they're going to approach that very differently. The best way to get market share is usually to buy lots of ads to promote your product. Like that's just the nature of that business. And if that's what you want, well, then that's what you need.

But if that isn't the case, then also make sure that you're aware that if you see someone who seems to be succeeding, make sure you try and understand why they're succeeding. And is it for other reasons than just, oh, quality or who made the best app? Well, that's not really the race. The race isn't who made the best app if you're trying to see who has the most number of downloads. It's going to be who's spending money on advertising, who has the best marketing plan, who has all the other kind of things going on.

in the creation process and i think that's something that i sometimes see when i look at these apps and i see and i see things that are like i wouldn't do it that way as long as you know and that's fine there i'm not making you know making my apps in my way but i also now have the maturity to look at it and be like yeah i can see why they're doing it that way i can see what that's gaining them what that's you know what benefit that's uh allowing them

And if I can look at something and know why they're doing it, now I have the ability to decide if that suits me, if I can learn from that experience. And if I can't, then great. If it's not something I want to do. But I think being clear-eyed about that is very helpful. I think what you're saying there is great. In a sense, it's like we all have different abilities. We all have different skills. We all have different –

sort of advantages that we have and we want to play all of our cards as best we can and i think in that process the kind of development that you and i intend to you know we're advocating for is one that is thoughtful still that you aren't just oh i'm going to go i'm going to add ads to my app great i'm just going to check every box i possibly can for everything that i could possibly try and collect about my user to just maximize that well if i'm going to have them i may as well have everything awful

It's like, you don't have to build it that way. Most of these choices have a lot of gradation between, you know, existing and not existing and existing in thoughtful ways. And so we would just, I would just sort of encourage us all to hold the line on the things that are important to us, but be flexible about where that line is and how we apply it to ourselves.

Yeah. And if the path you want to take is to do none of the things that will kind of boost your visibility or market share or success, you're going to have a hard time succeeding. And a lot of apps are made for reasons other than that. A lot of apps are you could be perfectly happy to to have an app that does not have commercial success, but is instead useful in other ways. That's fine. I have apps like that.

But if your goal is commercial success, you got to play the game and you got to use what you have. And one way to do that is to start a YouTube channel for 15 years and build up a massive audience and then try to make an iOS app. A different way to do that is what we're doing. There's lots of ways to do it. There's a lot of ways to succeed if you aren't too precious about saying, I'm never going to do X or people who do this are somehow bad or wrong. I think you have a lot more paths available to you. Thanks for listening, everybody. And we'll talk to you in two weeks. Bye.