We wanted to hear from developers what it’s like publishing their wares on the new Mac App Store.
So we talked to Aayush Arya of Caramel Cloud Software, a brand-new software company based in India. Caramel Cloud just published Notificant, a reminder app that lets you send notices to an unlimited number of Macs. So it’s like Growl, but for multiple machines.
Q. What’s the story behind Notificant?
A. While I was working at Robosoft, one of the things that frustrated me was that I could not access several websites due to restrictions placed on the network. Given how much time I spend researching (read: wasting time) on Twitter and elsewhere, I really longed for a fast, efficient way to send links back to the Mac at my house, so they would be on the desktop when I got back. I used email for this at the time but it was very limited, by its very nature, and it resulted in a lot of useless clutter. I am also an awfully forgetful person and I wanted an app to remind me of stuff to do on my Mac’s desktop, which I spend most of my day in front of. And that was the birth of Notificant (which at that time I had dubbed “Notifi”).
Q. How long did it take to build?
A. It took us four months to go from concept to final product, and then a couple of days to get Apple’s approval (yes, it was that quick). When Apple announced the Mac App Store, we were nowhere near ready to ship the final product by January 20 (which is the date we’d expected the Mac App Store to be released). But we tried our best, and I had an absolutely crazily talented team to work with, and we got it done, even when the eventual deadline ended up being 15 sooner than we had been gunning for.
Q. Have you ever developed a Mac software before? How do you think the App Store is affecting developers and apps?
A. I have never developed any applications before, Mac or non-Mac, unless you count the ones we made in high school to exercise our skills (and mostly just to gain bragging rights in the classroom). I think the Mac App Store presents a challenge for existing Mac developers, because there is no provisioning for transitioning existing users over to the new way of doing things without making them pay again for the privilege. There are also some issues surrounding piracy being much easier when there is only one global security blanket covering all applications in the store.
For new developers, however, or for existing developers releasing new applications, it represents a tremendous opportunity. We would have launched our application using traditional methods of distribution even if the Mac App Store hadn’t come about but it made the whole process a lot easier and faster for us. It does restrict a lot of your freedoms and could use improvement in certain areas, but for the most part, we are glad to be on it.
Q. Would you consider developing apps for outside the App Store?
A. The future is long and we cannot predict with certainty what we might want to do a few years down the line but we have no short term, or even foreseeable long term, plans to do any development outside the Mac and iOS App Stores. Not while we are developing on Apple’s platforms, at the very least.
Q. After seeing the prices on the App Store, how do you feel about setting the price for Notificant at USD4.99?
A. We are really happy about the price. We want every Mac user to use Notificant and benefit from it and therefore did not want to price it out of anyone’s reach, but we did not want it to be at $1 or $2 either. We are charging a one-time fee for the app itself and the web service backing it up is made available free of cost, but we are paying monthly fees to keep it going. We think we struck a good balance there, but we’ll have to wait some more to see how it all shakes out.
Q. How’s the first weekend sales like?
A. One of the things we could not do before the launch because of our mad dash to the finish line was marketing. The first time anyone heard of Notificant outside the company was on January 6 itself, and maybe on January 10, for most of the current customers. So the launch day and weekend sales were nothing to write home about, but we came into our own as soon as the weekday kicked off, thanks to some great coverage by various publications. We’ve made our entry into the Top Paid applications list on the American, Canadian and French versions of the store and hope to make it to the Top 10 eventually.
Q. How did you promote Notificant?
A. So far, the only promotion we have done is through Preshit and my individual Twitter accounts and the company’s official one, alongside the blog post announcing Notificant. Besides that, we have reached out to and been contacted by various publications and some of them have resulted in news blurbs and reviews, most notably on The Loop, MacStories, The Next Web and Smoking Apples. We have not done any paid advertising so far but may look into the possibility in future.
Q. Is there a promo code program for Mac apps like with iOS apps?
A. Not yet, there isn’t. We expect that Apple will add it eventually.
Q. What made you decide on a career change from writing about Apple to developing apps?
A. I first thought of starting a software company when I had just gotten out of high school. I was really good at programming, but I was poor at mathematics and science, both of which were required subjects to take up any software-related course in college. So I dropped the idea. Then when I started writing for Macworld, I started getting the itch again and I began to research ways to get into it.
The one big push was the launch of the iPhone, as you might expect. That, and the launch of the App Store, really took my aspirations sky high. Eventually, I got myself inducted into an established software development company in India called Robosoft and worked there for three months as an intern. Then I left them to start on my own. That was five months ago and here we are today.
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