Simplicity Wins in the Top 25

Most of the Top 25 free apps on the App Store are games. But what kind of games are the winners?

You'd think that the Top 25 free Games would be high quality, high production value, immersive, made with love. Things like the airplane fighting game Skies of Glory:



Or how about Skater Nation, where you get to skateboard, grind, and jump like the pros?



You'd think these games would be the winners. But you'd be wrong. It turns out the games in the Top 25 is mostly simple, OK quality stuff. FallDown (at number 9), makes you move the ball down the screen faster than it scrolls the background. A great iPhone developer could write this game in a few days:



Another incredibly simple game in the Top 25 (at number 20) is Traffic Rush. All you need to do is keep cars from crashing on an intersection. Once again, super easy to write - a good programmer and a decent graphic designer could crank this out in half a week.



So why is it that these simple games win, and the high-dollar productions lose, at least in terms of number of downloads? I believe it's the iPhone audience and how these devices are used:

1. iPhone users are casual gamers: this is no PSP Portable. They just want to waste some time on a subway ride, and don't care for learning the ins and outs of an airplane fighter game.


2. Anything that takes more than 30 seconds to learn falls by the wayside.


3. Each level should take no longer than a subway ride. Gameplay that develops over blocks of 10 minutes and longer is a non-starter.


4. Startup time is a huge issue: It easily takes 20 seconds just to load Skies of Glory. Unacceptable to most users, since they know that their gameplay could be interrupted at any time by a call or text message.

The take-away? Simplicity wins. Dumb it down, make it load fast, gratify immediately, keep the gameplay fast-paced, keep each level short. And they will come, download, and play.

The Mother Lode of Data on the Mobile Internet

Browsing the Internet this morning, I found this Morgan Stanley report on the Mobile Internet. Depending on which version you look at, you'll find hundreds of slides packed with data and insights on mobile internet usage. I recommend you at least flip through the this short 92-slide version.

Here are some of the highlights - this is the data I found most interesting.

iPhone Growth

The growth of iPhone + iTouch outpaces that of Netscape, i-mode, and AOL. It's more explosive than anything we've seen so far.



iPhone and iPod Touch are growing at the same rate This slide was meant to demonstrate the explosiveness of the iPhone platform, but another thing it demonstrates is how iPhone and iPod Touch sell around the same number of units, and have done so consistently even through the introduction of the 3G and 3GS.

Web Usage

Unproductive sites are increasing their addiction levels. Online global time spent is trending heavily toward Facebook and YouTube. MSN and Yahoo are shrinking away while Google (probably the most work-related of all these sites) is holding steady. I wonder about the effect of all this on global GDP.



Google now makes $20 per user per year in ads. I still remember when my friends were asking "Who clicks on all those ads anyway?" Somebody does. Google's annualized revenues per user have increased from $10.22 / year in 2005 to $20.06 in 2009. That's a large chunk of the total ad revenue per user on the Internet, which is $46.41. Wow.



PS: Morgan Stanley has done an outstanding job in assembling all this data. I just wish they'd hired a graphic designer for their slides - they do look a bit busy, especially pasted at small sizes.

The New Consensus: It's Android vs. iPhone

In our YCombinator Demo Day presentation, we had a slide about how we'll also build reMail for other platforms, starting with Android. This was 9 months ago. Members of the audience were puzzled: "Why would you build on Android, not Blackberry or Windows Mobile?".

I'd reply "I think the war was going to be iPhone vs. Android". It seemed like a reasonable bet at the time. Google has deep pockets and great engineering talent. Turns out the only thing missing was the right device.

Now, of course, there is the Droid, which sold more than 800,000 devices since its launch. That's a huge number. My roommate just got one the other week!

And attitudes have changed. Fred Wilson says that Android will be to the iPhone what the PC was to the Mac. In many conversations in the past weeks, no one took offense with "it's iPhone vs. Android".

Android still has a long way to go. I'm confident they will get there. Usability and stability need to improve, developer tools need to get a big speed bump, and I'm a little worried that by the end of 2010, we'll have too make device configurations to develop for and test on. But the speed at which the Android team cranks out iterations is very high.

Armed with a G1, I've fired up my Eclipse this weekend and started toying around again with Android apps. I have some ideas about what I want to build. I'll keep you posted.

Joe Hewitt quits working on the Facebook iPhone App

Joe Hewitt, the creator of Facebook's iPhone App (the most popular free app on the iPhone platform) has just quit the project (TechCrunch):

"Two years ago I jumped headfirst into the iPhone ecosystem, investing my entire career in Apple's devices, their operating system, and their SDK. After witnessing the way Apple treats its developer community, I no longer feel that 100% is the correct percentage of my career to have invested in their platform."

At reMail, we heavily use Joe's spinoff project, Three20. Three20 is essentially the "missing library" to iPhone development - it has all the sweet UI candy that a developer would want: Styled text, tabs, picture galleries, the good stuff.

While I'm sad to see Joe go, I don't think that iPhone is a bad platform to develop on. As a developer of a slightly less popular but very useful App, I understand Apple's need to maintain some control over the platform. Yes, the review process might take some time and can feel unfair. But:

1. The documentation is excellent
2. The support is excellent: I once received almost real-time email support from an Apple person about a minor debugging issue. There are forums where you can get support for your issues. If you found a problem, or have a feature request, you can file a bug
3. The tools are excellent: If you've ever played with Instruments (comes with Xcode), you'll know what I mean
4. Free developer events: I just attended one in San Jose and found it very useful, both for learning and networking
5. Review times are getting shorter: it used to take 3 weeks, and it's now more like 9 days

That being said, I do hope that Apple will eventually take some bold steps to cut review times further, or drop the review process entirely for something smarter. A better review process would benefit both users and developers.

More about this on TechCrunch here.

Seven Qualities of Successful iPhone Apps

If you're a mobile developer, I highly recommend this blog post and video about the seven qualities of great iPhone apps: Delightful, innovative, well designed, integrated, optimized, connected, localized.

Most of these seem pretty obvious, and somewhat soft and mushy, but I think the video gives some good examples. Also, the lessons apply to non-iPhone platforms as well.

Unfortunately, you need an ADC login to get to the blog post, but that's free and you don't need to pay the $99 toll.

With reMail, we're aiming to check all the boxes. Our next stop is being localized (I'm still looking for volunteers to do our Spanish and Italian translations.)

Introducing the New reMail

Today, we're launching the new reMail for the iPhone! It's a completely new product.

reMail downloads all your email to your phone and lets you search full-text at light speed.

All My Email On My Phone? Really?

Yes, reMail downloads all your email to your phone. It will let you read and search all your email when you're offline. Just let reMail run overnight to complete the download. reMail needs less space than you think: 100,000 emails take only 500 MB on your phone - only 6% of the capacity of an 8 GB iPhone (the smallest iPhone you can buy).

This Will Save You Money

My family lives in Switzerland and I live in San Francisco. One thing I've found very frustrating whenever I travel to see my parents are the insane fees that AT&T charges for data roaming: For Switzerland, AT&T charges $19.97 per Megabyte. Check out this SMS I get the moment I turn my phone on the tarmac in Switzerland.

Now, with reMail, I don't have to think twice about searching for meeting times or flight reservations. When I'm abroad, I just download all my email over Wifi and have data roaming turned off.

We put together this page that contrasts data roaming prices with AT&T and T-Mobile Germany with the cost of reMail.

reMail Searches Full-Text

Another crucial difference between iPhone 3.0 Mail and reMail is that reMail searches full-text.

The built-in header-only search is frustrating, because so many times, the words I'm searching for don't appear in the To, From, and Subject lines. If the words you search for aren't in the headers, reMail will find the email, iPhone Mail will not. reMail is email search you can trust.

What happened to reMail Search Beta?

We launched reMail Search a few months back, it was a server-based product. Searches were being done on the server, and you had to give us your email password. It turns out people are very opposed to sharing their email and password with third parties, especially a small startup.

So we built the new reMail. Now, everything happens on the phone. reMail downloads your emails directly via IMAP. No more reMail server.

What reMail Users Are Saying

We have beta tested the app with a lot of users, and they are loving it:

• “This app is awesome! I use reMail constantly all day. It's so fast!”
  — Sachin Agarwal, Co-Founder, Posterous
• “I am loving reMail!”
  — Richard Price, CEO, Academia.edu
• “Complete Berlin trip organized via emails found by reMail. No printed reservations and tickets needed!”
  — Bernhard Heinzel, Beta User
• “reMail is a super useful app and search speed is incredible.”
  — Dan Veltri, Co-Founder, Weebly

Get it Now

We hope you'll love it too. Get it now. It's $4.99 on the App Store until Sep 1, and $9.99 thereafter.

Update: Coverage here and here.

iPhone 2, Week 2

Last week on the way back from Chicago, my beloved iPhone 1.0 slipped out of my pocket in a taxi cab. Calling the cab company didn't help: Apparently, people don't return iPhones to their rightful owner.

I already had withdrawal symptoms after 2 minutes without my iPhone. Thus, I bought the iPhone 3G the next day. Some observations:

1. Oh, the wait! Yes, it took me 3 hours to get the phone. I was in this line. I thought it would take about an hour, but that's how they get you: You've already waited so long! Why not wait an another 15, and another 15, and so on.
   
2. Oh, the slowness!: Yes, typing is slower. Is that the end of the world? Not for me.
   
3. New Headphone jack: Love it.
   
4. Apps: I use Instapaper, and the Google Search App, and Yelp. It's easy to see how 2 years down the road, some immensely useful apps could be built.

So, is it worth the upgrade? Probably not.

iPhone, the Second Coming

I'm probably the last one to pick up on the rumors that a new version of the iPhone is coming: The online store says "currently unavailable", Wired has the scoop, and everyone seems to think that a new version will be out on June 10.


They better be prepared: Everyone without an iPhone at Xobni is considering getting one. Even my friends are ready for iPhone 2.0, as they refuse buying any 1.0 products. Apple could sell millions of these devices by just slapping "2.0" on the existing model.

These folks sure have learned how to hype up new products.