AppViz 3 is a major rewrite of a product loved by many developers. Most parts of the app are completely new, but we know that two new features will be particularly contentious: cloud storage and a subscription model.
We’re developers selling a tool used by other developers. We know we can’t bullshit you with marketing buzzwords and a bunch of hand-waving. This post will explain exactly why we’ve introduced these features and let you draw your own conclusions. At a minimum, it will provide insight into the challenges and how we approached their solutions. If we’re lucky, you’ll agree with our pragmatism and continue to support our efforts.
tl;dr We’re not trying to screw you.
Learning from our past…
A product like AppViz should be easy to build, right? It just downloads a bunch of numbers in tab-delimited format, crunches the data and then reports it in graphs and tables. If only that were true.
We all know that the pace of iOS development has been staggering. In just five years, we’ve gone from the first apps on iOS 2 to the radical redesign of iOS 7. The iPhone itself has gone from being available in just the US to selling in a total of 100 countries. We’ve seen a completely new iOS device called the iPad and spectacular hardware improvements across the board. Mac developers also got to join in on the fun at the end of 2010. Publishers started selling iBooks like we sell apps that same year.
All of this, and it’s pretty incredible that many developers are just now celebrating their wood anniversary.
And through it all, Apple is using a time-honored development process: they’re making it up as they go along. Throughout those five years there have been a huge number of changes to the data coming out of iTunes Connect:
- Changes to the formats and columns in existing reports
- Changes to the data values in the reports
- New kinds of reports, like financial and earnings reports
- New kinds of data, like new regions and sales types
- New offerings like iAds, Newstand and iBooks
A lot of this data doesn’t come in a nicely formatted file; the only way to get it is by scraping a web page. If you’ve ever done this, you know how fragile it can be: a web developer that makes a simple change to a <div> can ruin your finely crafted parser.
We also all know that Apple never gives away details of its future plans. When things like new regions are added, you’re lucky to get a couple of days notice. And even when you do have some advance notice, like knowing that Mac apps will be added to the reports, you still don’t have any details until they show up on Apple’s server.
At which point, you have a huge problem: every customer needs a new version and they need it now. It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday or you’re on vacation. You’re under the gun to write some new parsing code, get it tested, and deployed as soon as possible.
If you’re still thinking about how easy it would be to write your own app to track reports, let me share a little of my own experience. Much of the work in the new financial reporting and reconciliation module is based on an internal tool called BeanCounter. I thought this tool would be fairly easy to write: all I had to do was replicate the stuff I had in our Excel spreadsheets.
After six months, I had pretty much covered all the edge cases and weird report formatting issues, but still had to manually download the reports. In fact, this final hurdle of scraping web pages is what eventually led to the partnership between the Iconfactory and IdeaSwarm. So yeah, even developers with over 35 years of professional experience fall for the “this should be easy” naiveté.
Cloud Storage
I’ll be honest. I wasn’t wild about the idea of storing iTunes Connect credentials and our data on a remote server. We live in an online world where security breaches are just another piece of daily news. I knew it would be a lot of work to keep my data safe.
Unfortunately, there’s no API for iTunes Connect (even though we’ve been asking for years.) We’d love the chance to use something like OAuth instead of raw credentials. Unfortunately, that rapid pace of change I mentioned above pretty much precludes a stable API to access iTunes. As a pragmatic developer, you have to go with what you have, not what you want.
The reality for us and many other developers is that our product team keeps growing. Having sales and other financial data locked away on my laptop became more and more of a problem. The information coming from iTunes Connect helps run our business and I needed to share it with employees and partners. If you’re managing iTunes Connect information for some or all of your paying clients, you’ll have a similar problem.
Likewise, there are some kinds of data management that I don’t want to do. For example, adding events in the product details or reading reviews. Those tasks are better handled by a product manager and a person doing support. Again, the focus has shifted from the data itself to the people who manage it.
If you’re going to share data, you need to think long and hard about who’s going to have access and how it’s stored. In our case, there are two kinds of information that need to be protected: your iTunes Connect credentials and the report data that’s collected using those credentials.
We’re using 256-bit AES encryption for the iTunes Connect credentials. If you’re storing passwords with 1Password, you’re using the same encryption. We’re not going to divulge where the keys to decrypt this data are located, but we will say they’re not stored in source code or any other location on the server’s disk. They’re very hard for an attacker to access.
As far as our report data is concerned, we store it on Amazon S3 using Server Side Encryption (SSE). Access to this data is secured using SSL over a low latency connection to an Amazon server which uses AES-256 encryption. Amazon uses this same service for their own business-critical operations.
Passing data to the AppViz server before handing it off to the application on your Mac also has some big benefits for the user experience. Remember how frustrating it was when AppViz 2 couldn’t download your data because of some change that Apple had made on their site? With this new architecture, any changes to the data parser can be made directly on the server and minimize the downtime for all customers. There are monitors in place that let us know when reports aren’t importing correctly.
Finally, storing data in the cloud also allows us to offer new and exciting products. Personally, I’m dying to see things like:
- The contents of the Dashboard module in an email as soon as the reports are ready to download.
- Reports available on the web so that people don’t have to install an app to just read the basic information.
- An iOS app that lets me keep an eye on the business while I’m on the go.
(Note: these are just ideas, not a promise that anything is going to get implemented!)
Private Storage
Still, with all of that said about cloud storage, there are still a lot of developers who are truly independent: one person with one set of reports. And these individuals love to be in complete control of their privacy and data. We want to keep these customers happy, too.
To do this, we’re planning on adding “private storage” to AppViz by the end of the year. This mode will offer the same resiliency to Apple’s changes since report collection and parsing remain on the server. The difference is that no reports or credentials will be stored after the data is exchanged. Now that our goal of implementing a robust download pipeline is accomplished, this secondary mechanism can be started.
When using private storage, iTunes Connect credentials will be passed to the AppViz server to initiate the connections at Apple. Data from those connections will then be collected and passed off to the application running on your Mac. After a successful transfer, the report data will be deleted from the server. No record of your credentials or data will be left behind.
Hopefully, you’ll agree that this is the best compromise between a constantly shifting data source and your own privacy.
Subscriptions
As a developer, you know that you spend a lot of time up front building a product and then amortize those costs over the years that it’s for sale. That initial hump can kill you, but long-term earnings make you do it over and over again :-)
Unfortunately, AppViz is not one of those products. It has huge ongoing costs based purely on maintenance. To give you an idea of the scale, there have been 32 releases for AppViz 2 over the past two years. That’s over one release per month and includes a lot of non-trivial work:
- 67 new App Store countries
- Financial regions going from 7 to 25
- iAd support (with many releases to track changes on the web pages)
- Report download changes (3 separate releases for changes in April 2012 alone)
- New Newstand categories
- New iBooks support
- Rankings download changes
- Rate limiting for rankings and reviews downloads
- Adapting to changes on financial pages
- New categories on iOS and Mac App Stores
- Increased rankings from top 200 to 300
In the same time period, there was one release to support Mountain Lion, Gatekeeper and Retina displays.
The increase in the size of the development team is the best metric to show how maintenance has become such a huge cost. Initially there was one developer working on AppViz full-time: now there are three.
So, why don’t we just charge for more of the upgrades? AppViz doesn’t fit the “new features, paid upgrade” model. How would you feel if an upgrade fee was required to download and parse reports with a new region? Or if support was added for a new product category like Apple TV that you’re not using? My answer is that I’d feel like I was being held hostage: the app is broken until I upgrade or I’m forced to pay for something I don’t use.
For AppViz to be a viable venture in the future, the cost of the app must reflect the costs of this ongoing maintenance. In our view, subscriptions are the best fit.
Summary
There you have it, a couple thousand words to explain what used to be a huge “WTF?” Hopefully, this comprehensive essay shows that we’ve thought about the problem and have come up with a solution that’s both pragmatic and viable. If you still have questions or concerns, the folks at IdeaSwarm would love to hear from you.