The 2015 Panic Report

Panic‘s Cabel Sasser has a wonderful rundown of how the year 2015 was for them as a team and for their apps, as well as what 2016 is poised to be like.

In 2015, we watched our processes and systems improve dramatically as our talented team took ownership of parts of our puzzle that suited them best. We got an all-in crash-course on the business and creative challenges of developing a cross-platform video game, something we’ve always wanted to attempt. We saw some experimental notions get put on hold, while others expanded. And we shipped a couple of great new apps and stretched our creativity. It was, all told, a great year.

Coda 2 for iOS and Status Board 2 were incredible updates to the already stellar apps and it’s quite interested to read about how much effort was put into their apps, including QnA.

This might bake your noodle: we shipped 35 updates across all six Mac and iOS apps by the end of 2015.

However, this following bit was really disheartening to read:

iOS Revenue. I brought this up last year and we still haven’t licked it. We had a change of heart — well, an experimental change of heart — and reduced the price of our iOS apps in 2015 to normalize them at $9.99 or less, thinking that was the upper limit and/or sweet spot for iOS app pricing. But it didn’t have a meaningful impact on sales.

More and more I’m beginning to think we simply made the wrong type of apps for iOS — we made professional tools that aren’t really “in demand” on that platform — and that price isn’t our problem, but interest is.

I’m a big fan of their apps. Panic’s apps are “pro” apps that help you get serious work done. Coda for iOS was $10 at launch, but I’d have gladly paid upwards of $50 for it, simply because it helps me earn and/or save far more than that. The unfortunate thing about it is that there are very few people like me out there — essentially the demand isn’t as much as Panic would like.