Whipped Cream Difficulties

I’ll bring the cheese. His Gruberness has already brought the whine.

That’s right, Amazon gave away 101,491 copies of our app! At this point, we had a few seconds of excitement as well, had we mis-read the email and really earned $54,800 in one day? We would have done if our public agreement was in place, but we can now confirm that thanks to Amazon’s secret back-door deals, we made $0 on that day. That’s right, over 100,000 apps given away, $0 made.

There’s two funny things about this. The first one: if you read the entire article, the Shifty Jelly people were fully aware going in that they weren’t going to make any money off of being the “free app of the day”, and had a chance to reject the offer…

In the end we agreed that we had entered the world of Android development as an experiment, and it would seem silly not to add more data to the experiment we were conducting.

And now you’re complaining?

Here’s the other funny thing. I’m one of those 101,491 people who downloaded Pocket Casts when it was free. I’m glad I did; if I had paid $2.70 for that app, I would have been very unhappy. Pocket Casts “works”, in the sense that it manages my podcast subscriptions and lets me play back podcasts.

But it’s buggy. For example, when I first start Pocket Casts, it frequently tells me there’s no podcasts playing. Sometimes that’s true; other times, I quit out of Pocket Casts during a podcast, so I’d expect it to show me the last podcast I was playing. Even better, when I select a podcast from the ones I’ve downloaded, Pocket Casts just displays the same “no podcasts playing” message. Repeatedly. No matter how many times I select a podcast; any podcast, I get the same “no podcasts playing” message. The only way I’ve found around this problem is to actually quit and relaunch the Pocket Casts application.

Good luck, guys. Don’t let the door hit you where God split you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 at 7:43 am and is filed under Android, Clippings, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.