On the Motivation for Updating a Free iPhone App

When I sat down to learn iPhone development, I settled on writing a remote control for MythTV as a first product. And thus Remote Remote GH for MythTV or RRgh came into existence. As MythTV users are pretty adamant about not paying for software, I decided not to charge for it, and considered it only a teaching exercise. And that worked out pretty well. I learned a lot and other people have paid me a good hourly wage for writing custom apps with the experience thus gained.


But now I have an app with 76,307 downloads and no revenue. What do I owe the users? Most of them, I'm pretty sure, just downloaded it because it was free, and promptly deleted it—and typically gave me a one star rating, ugh—when it didn't do anything useful without a MythTV frontend. But there are people out there who use it, and I'd like to give them a little goodwill. How to justify it?


1) Advertising for other products.
I can put a splash screen that announces my paying apps. Right now that would be mainly Signal GH, which a great number of MythTV users will find useful, and which I sold a grand total of $10.50 of product just this last week. But I've ideas for other products in the pipeline.


2) Further Learning.
After reading Clean Code I've been scouring my code for ways to improve its readability. The code for RRgh was written when I was just getting a handle on using Objective C 2.0's properties extension, and is a good target for cleaning. And cleaning code is sort of fun in a mechanical washing the dishes sort of way.


3) Just to be Nice.
Hey, I like having users, and it makes me happy thinking they are happy. There were some rough edges around RRgh and I think my users would be happy for me to sand them down.


So I sat down and started cleaning. As I said, my major problem was with inexperienced usage of properties. I went through and made sure I was creating, accessing and disposing all the properties in the app properly.

And then I went after the interface. I had had this idea of having a defiantly plain interface using just standard OS widgets. Turns out people didn't appreciate what I was going for. So, following popular demand, I opened up Photoshop Elements and started drawing a black on black interface for my remote controls. The idea being something that wouldn't be too distracting in a darkened home theatre room, and which would look reasonably tasteful. I used a variety of button shapes to keep things consistently themed, but not oppressively so. Plus I took the opportunity to improve the spacing and sizing of the various controls, in particular, I felt it important to make the Play/Pause button easier to hit by making it a double size.


I also went through the reviews people had submitted. Someone had wanted a record button on the LiveTV remote, etc. Perfectly reasonable and easily done.

Before and After:

Then I took the Object Allocation Instrument to the running code in the hopes of finding code that was leaking. Turns out the system image picker (UIImagePickerController) is hard to dispose, so I ended up just reusing one. Result: the app doesn't crash after setting the logo for a dozen or so networks.


In total, I gave my users about 10 hours of my time sanding down rough edges, and made RRgh a noticeably nicer product. I hope they find it useful.