Let Them Eat Cake
Anyone who follows me on Twitter has no doubt noticed my ire towards any US-based company who treats everywhere outside the US as unimportant. Apple is one of these, and it really pisses me off.
I’d like to develop applications for the iPad. I personally am lucky enough to work for a large company based right next to the US border, so we were able to get some of these devices. Others are not so lucky. They’ve waited, understanding that their US competitors would have a roughly four-week lead on them. Now Apple has decided that their competitors will have an eight-week lead.
At Kobo, our iPad app was developed entirely on the Simulator. When we installed it on the iPad proper, we found quite a lot of differences. The available memory we could use prior to getting low-memory warnings was about level with the 1st-generation iPhone, for example (about 5MB). We certainly hadn’t expected that at all. There were also differences in the use of UIWindow and scale transformations— what worked on the Simulator did weird & wonderful things on the device, and we had to rewrite everything not to use transforms, but to do all the calculations ourselves and use frames for all our animations.
Do you write an iPad app using the simulator? Are you based outside the US, unable to get a device because you’re an independent developer lacking the means to travel & obtain one? Are you competing with a US company? Has that company been able to fix their day-one bugs while you’re still using guesswork? Or have you simply not released your app, waiting for a device in order to make it good?
If you answered yes to the above questions, then congratulations, you’ve lost the first-mover advantage in the market, and now you’ve lost most of your opportunity to make up for that. Two months is a LONG time. If your potential customers got a competitor’s app on day one, and a week later that competitor’s app was working great while yours was either faulty or just not there, then chances are your customers will have completely adapted to the other app by the time you can get yours fixed/released.
Yes, those are your sales going down the toilet. Trust me, it happened to me with Outpost. We were beaten to market, and while we had some very good features, that delay meant that by the time we’d been able to update the app (three times in all) to handle all the real-world usage scenarios which caused stability problems, we’d lost out since most of our target market had adapted to use Groundwork or another competitor. It’s a lot harder to convince someone happy with and used to a competitor’s software to move to yours, especially with no obvious preview capability (as was the case at the time).
To my mind, Apple’s decision to limit international availability to ‘none’ in order to keep US availability at 100% despite knowing that, for example, there were 250’000 pre-orders through Apple Germany already, smacks of Marie Antoinette’s (alleged) famous declaration. Everyone else can just use something else. We’re alright over here, thanks, and we’re far more important. God forbid a US citizen goes to buy an iPad but can’t— that sort of thing only happens elsewhere.
