App Store Customers Are Neither Bad Nor Good by Default

Garret Murray’s most recent post on his blog, the land where posts do not have titles, is about what happened last week with his (lovely) application, Ego. In it, he basically vents about being a single developer caught between a rock (customers angry that something stopped working) and a hard place (Apple’s arcane approvals process). His frustration is completely understandable with regards to Apple, but I think his larger concern is wrong. In the post, he says this:

This kind of thing continually reinforces something I’ve thought about a lot since the App store was released, which sounds horrible to say but it might be true: Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want.

John Gruber thought it important enough to link to the post using that link as illustration, with the title “Are App Store Customers Good Customers?” This time, though, I think the question is already answered: No, not realy. But the App Store doesn’t create Good or Bad Customers, either. Sturgeon’s Law just as well here as anywhere. What the App Store does do is make it very easy for a user to complain when the mood strikes them.

It’s hard not be frustrated when you have to wait for something beyond your control, but the simple facts are these:

  1. Garrett charged money for an application.

  2. The amount of money is irrelevant.

  3. The application sold Google Analytics support in the same breath as support for other applications that have solid developer APIs

  4. In doing so created an expectation that GA support was “stable” and “not likely to break at the whims of Google with no warning.”

  5. You cannot blame any customer for being angry when that happened.

Do I agree that the users leaving many of these comments are probably huge assholes? Yes. Could Apple do more to mitigate the costs for Developers when something goes wrong? Yes. But the frustration that made Mr. Murray write his blog post is the very same kind of frustration that made those customers, assholes or not, write their negative reviews.

More users means more sales means more assholes.

[Sponsor] The Extra Future Amazon Store

In which, among other lovely items, you’ll find what I’m currently reading: Hello Americans by Simon Callow.

This is the second volume of Callow’s biography on film legend Orson Welles (the first being 1997’s The Road To Xanadu) and it is every bit as worthy a portrait of Welles as it’s predecessor. It covers Welles’s life post-Kane, including the hatchet-job that RKO unleashed on The Magnificent Ambersons. It’s tone is one of someone who neither demonizes or worships Welles, but seeks to find the truths of his life.

Sponsorship of Extra Future is available on a first-come, first-served basis. If you’d like to sponsor the site, contact me.

“What’s The Twitshirt Thing?”

Twitshirt launched yesterday (16 April 2009) and provide a service that I’m sure many people would/will give their patronage to: The printing of individual tweets on t-shirts, on-demand. Since the t-shirt is the defining medium of this generation, and vanity publishing is in full vogue, it only makes sense that a business model which combines the two could succeed, and handily. They kinda fucked it up, though.

The problem: Twitshirt did not ask permission to sell the words of the authors of the tweets they printed. The author could opt-out, but that is at best a poor solution. It, without question, should be opt-in.

Today Twitshirt.com is down with a message saying, “We’ve heard your feedback-thank you. We’re reversing the polarity.”

Admitting one is wrong is not an easy thing to do, especially in public. Hopefully a relaunched Twitshirt will do what it should’ve in the first place: ask.

Court Jails Pirate Bay Founders

I’m sure the appeals process will be long:

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were found guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail.

They were also ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.

I feel that their attitude didn’t help them with the judge. Google still indexes millions more torrent files than TPB ever could. Why no attack against them? See also: Wired’s coverage.