How many users does Codea have?

Questions
21

@John In light of going back and reading some of your post re: codea not providing a living for multiple people for multiple years. speaking frankly, to me It doesn’t seem realistic to expect one app’s revenue to sustain more than one person for several years. I may be wrong, but based on my general understanding of the workload I estimate to be involved in the development of an app such as Codea I can’t imagine it was more than 1 year of fulltime dedicated work for 1-2 proficient app programmers.

My friends who have done well for themselves in app sales are able to survive as 1 main developer and a few freelance or part time PR/forum moderator etc… and even they live in modest appartments but they get to live a relatively lax self driven schedule and for certain are making only slightly less than they likely would be working for a larger corporation doing work they enjoyed a fraction as much.

There may be many things I do not know, and I am open to having been entirely wrong in my assessment and am open to being set straight if so. I do know there are alot of deep tricky nuances to making a really nice rich software.

I do have some offhand ideas as to ways to generate some new revenue or slightly change the plan or business model to help perpetuate. One thing I noticed worked out quite well for a friend and collaborator who made a very cool music / sound app that he has been sustaining himself with for I believe 3-4 years from the one app… he released 3 sequential versions, and each time he did a new substantial update to the UI and feature set and did a publicity launch as a new version product and people did not seem to mind at all needing to pay the 20 ish dollar price tag again to get the new version because it was clearly a whole new thing. Ive had loads of ideas as to how to improve codea (its how my brain works, I can find ways to improve all my favorite apps constantly) and I also did motiongraphics / audio / interactive media for the world of advertising and television for many years which gained me some insight into what appears to get people to open their wallet.

So my suggestions businesswise that I have seen work out really well in other contexts are:

offer some additional in app purchases in the 4.99 area for add ons of things like maybe additional audio support / synthesis / DSP library which I have seen several requests for on the forum and in my net searches I have found some lua and plenty of C libraries for this that are easily adaptable and have open licenses… audio is a huge room for improvement.

other in app purchases I am certain you could sell in the thousands @ 4.99 would be MIDI/OSC support for hardware control,

a bank of extended GLSL shaders including effects and common useful gaming / 3d (perlin noise, depth of field, more pattern generators, texture generators for common uses, possibly also cubemaps / texture files / HDRI maps, lens flare, glows, etc… Id easlily buy that also, or even work on it for you as a freelance project as I am proficient with GLSL.)

Also extended Shader Lab widgets would be very cool, check out the book of shaders website built in editor widgets, they have color pickers like the ones in the main codea, and sliders that adjust floats a little easier to hone in accurately than the current uniform scrubber (I find myself having a hard time getting to a useful value with the current one, agian would happily pay for a delux shader lab in app purchase)

so far as I know I haven’t seen anything for 3d model import or even simple shape generation for complex meshes, extended 3d mesh easily another in app purchase.

Online cloud space for project backup? subscription? referring back to earlier would easily repay whatever I had paid for a Codea 2.0 app with the above features and other little workflow enhancements (I wish the shader editor preview proportion was draggable, I use ipad pro, support for screen partitioning would be nice too)… etc… etc…

on top of all this I think you could easily make a desktop version of codea for osx and sell for 50-60 or more dollars for the same essential thing ported and marketed as a nice game / app development tool…

Unity community seems like something that may be a place for marketting and selling codea lua unity scripting editor type thing…

at any rate. I love codea and I want you guys to thrive. Its a brilliant tool and anything I can do to help it succeed let me know :slight_smile:

Cheers!
Nico

22

@John Sorry to hear you got robbed… I had just gone through a nightmare of continual bad luck similar. FWIW I tracked down my computer that had been stolen and sold by logging in back end to my mobile me (before icloud) and remote desktop opening up photo booth and snapping photos of the guy who bought it, logging his IP and contact info and sending the info back to him with a cc to the officer assigned to my case. I got the computer back and I aslo had another friend whos laptop got stolen get to buy his back for what the subsequent person who bought it paid for it through them logging into his ichat automatically… so theres hope there is myt point… haven’t known anyone to fully lose a computer to theft yet. somehow they came back to us.

23

@AxiomCrux Apple has making money down to a science. They convince everyone that they can’t live without the latest devices they make. They also hint that you can make a lot of money by selling apps on the App Store. Some people do, but the majority don’t. In order to put something on the App Store, you have to buy a license and then in order to compile it you need a Mac, more money for Apple. And then once you get an app on the App Store, any sales you make Apple gets a percentage of that. Every step of the way, Apple gets money. As for your friends who are doing well on the App Store, do they really think they can survive for a lifetime selling apps. Medical insurance is the main problem for a lot of people who don’t have a business paying part of the premiums. And then when it’s time to retire, are they putting aside money now to be used then.

24

@AxiomCrux You make a lot of good points. I don’t think we ever expected Codea to support multiple full time developers for years at a time but I do think that it has the potential market to support that given the right circumstances.

I would say in it’s current state Codea is probably around 2 - 2.5 years of full time development (one developer). Add in the Craft update and you can raise that to 3 years I think. You have to take into account the sheer amount of times things have been refactored, rewritten, thrown out, patched up and bug fixed. It’s a continuous process to keep Codea in a working state, supporting the latest OS updates and keeping up with UI trends as well as adding newly requested features.

You are absolutely right that audio has been long neglected and there are definitely a bunch of niche features that we could be adding. One of the issues is our philosophy of making all features available to all users. We’ve avoided putting in paid APIs so that sharing remains open between all users. The concept of paid upgrades though is something we have been considering, especially given the radical changes coming in iOS 11.

We are currently looking into giving the shader editor some love especially with the Craft update supporting modular shaders, lighting and physical materials.

Now that code downloading is no longer as tightly restricted it may be worth looking into an OSX version of Codea with tight integration. It’s important to remember though that OSX already has an enormous amount of free coding software and that our existing (active) user-base will not be enough to drive sales alone to make the development time worth it.

PS: I tracked my Macbook down using Find my Mac and the police were able to get both our Macbooks and my iPad back. Unfortunately they securely erased my MacBook before it was retrieved as well as dropping it causing significant damage to the casing. :slight_smile: :expressionless:

25

@dave1707 not one of my friends believes they will make a lifetime living from one app… but if you reframed your previously posted 750k through 6 years all going to one individual. those are real scenarios. two different friends survived maybe 3-4 years from their one medium level successful app. one friend made maybe 4-5 of the most succesful music apps in the early days and made a quick mil within a year or two, and has been surviving on it for maybe 10 years.

I have medical insurance and its worthless honestly… I am even diabetic and the person who totally needs it, but Ive paid more in bs charges and thousands of dollars of WTF nobody told me in advance about that (was just some diabetic learning group meets, thousands of dollars for real in CO PAY?? why do I even have insurance??)

but I don’t know what it is like without it other than my prior girlfiend had to pay about 15 grand the one time she got jaundiced and stopped in for tests, but they put her on a long payment plan and it probably was less monthly than I pay for my insurance…

26

@John “modular shaders, lighting and physical materials.” SAY WHAT?? where can I find out more? and hey at least you got it back and pretty quick! we are 3 for 3 on expedient mac theft return to owner! woot for that! bet if it was a PC it would never have made it back, not sure why, but my PCs and friends PCs that got stolen never made it back… I guess maybe becuase by the time they get stolen you can buy a new one for half the price thats about the same spec… :stuck_out_tongue:

27

oh and @dave1707 I have to say I don’t know too many 30 somethings thinking too deep about their retirement yet, but for certain I think the same thing that makes someone able to make a successful app and company also tends to lead them to build a healthy buffer of savings. I myself learned my lesson over many huge paychecks for freelance gigs of a couple weeks or months that then had to sustain me for many months while I overindulged in writing music and buying myself toys… luckilly it was always easy to liquidate the synth toys for 15% loss from original price by selling them on facebook or forums… one thing that rocks about being a synth nerd… I always have something I could sell off within a day or two to get me out of financial jeopardy somewhere :wink:

28

@AxiomCrux I’ve been working on a new update for Codea for the last year or so. The update is called Craft and you may have seen it floating around on the forums or in the sticky thread at the top.

For the latest media and updates you can check out my twitter feed: https://twitter.com/johntwolives

29

@John #CodeaCraft looks amazing, though it took me a while to get through your retweets in your feed and find a post on it a few pages down. The other thing that looked awesome is #AssetForge from one of your retweets. So as far as I can see this Craft looks like it has a fair bit of really nice new 3D centric capability, and in the interest of rounding out the Audio abilities I would like to offer you up my skills as a DSP programmer if you are interested. I have been working predominantly on DSP synthesis freelance projects in the past few years. I have 3 products coming out this month from different hardware manufacturers that are entirely built around my DSP effects code that I did in assembler for the FV-1 DSP chip, and have a really solid plan for a very flexible yet easy to learn synthesis / DSP library that I have been refining for a few years before implimenting that actually fits perfectly with the lua mentality and spirit of open ended flexibility using the least number of elements to achieve the most possibilites.

the three products coming out this month are the Folktek Alter 1 and 2 effects modules and the Cooper FX “Outward” guitar pedal. I am very proud of how they came out and you can find demos on youtube and instagram by googling them. Also you can check out my instagram.com/macromachines account to see some of my current development (if you don’t have/use instagram I highly reccomend, its been the best social network promotion for me by far, much better than twitter for me)

30

Just to throw my 2 cents into the ring, I’d happily cough up $5 for Codea 3. Considering the fun and actual utility, it’s nothing to me. Eating a pot noodle for lunch 1 day out of 3 years rather than buying a burger? I can live with that!

I remember when buying in to become a Mac developer cost more than a new Atari ST.