River of News 1.6 is in the App Store

Thanks, everyone, for the support and kind words.

Release notes:

✭ Press the couch icon or two-finger tap an article to convert it to Readability view. This works even for feeds with partial text! 

✭ New sharing services Readability and Diigo. 

✭ New preferences in the app. Choose your font, change title sizes and be sure to try out the gestures. 

✭ Bugs were harmed in the production of this release. 

Submitted

River of News 1.6 has been submitted to Apple for review. This part of the process is so aggravating but it is what it is. Reviews are averaging 10 days. In the meantime, here is a screenshot to whet your appetite.

Apps have become the music business

I began this blog with a post revealing my app store sales and my plan to be an indie app developer. It was just over two years ago that I released River of News. It's time again that I show my sales to give the picture of the full lifecycle of an app.

I don't think I'll be retiring soon.

Selling in the App Store is a tough business. I have some idea of how rankings translate to sales and I estimate that only a few hundred apps make enough money to support even a single developer at market rates. Maybe I'm way off and the number is 1000 - but I doubt it. That's out of 650,000.

Selling mobile apps has become like the music business. There are a very small number of creators earning the majority of the revenue. Most of the people in the business are selling their product below cost in the hopes of hitting it big or because they monetize it in ways other than direct sales. It's not a coincidence that iTunes is the storefront for both businesses.

Apple is a brilliant organization. This must be how they want it. They've seen Amazon. They know how they could drive sales towards the long tail and that's not their business. They want low prices, high volume, and a small number of big hits.

This is the spot where I'm supposed to list the ways that Apple could serve me better. I'm not going to do that. Apple doesn't owe my anything and I'm not foolish enough to believe that I know better than the company that is on the most successful five year run in the history of business.

I'm one of those people who uses the App Store to generate revenue in ways other than direct sales. River of News has been a very effective marketing tool for my consulting business. It's landed me interesting projects working with smart people. I work from home and bill at a rate higher than I made when I was salaried. Life is good.

This has been a roundabout way of explaining why River of News has languished. The consulting bucks have been good and I took them while they were there. I enjoy the hybrid business model of my own products plus consulting. But I'm trying to achieve a better balance now. I'm investing time into River of News and I want to create the feedback loop where that time generates more revenue and justifies more time.

I'm sorry that I've disappointed people who wanted more. I hope you feel you've gotten your  $3 or $4 of value out of it. If not, well, there is more to come. Maybe I can win you over, yet.

A new version of River of News is coming

It's been too long!

I'm excited to be working on River of News again. A lot of people have asked why I disappeared and I'll write about that in another post. This one is about the product.

Version 1.6 is nearly complete. The big feature in this release is Readability integration. Readability is dear to my heart because their goal is to "deliver a great reading experience wherever you are." I've been using their tools forever to reduce clutter and make the web better. Apple likes them, too, because Readability's technology is the basis for the Reader function in the Safari.

First of all, you'll be able to send your articles to your Readability account to read later on any device. This is a win by itself and you should check out the Readability service if you aren't using it. It's free and the apps are very well done.

But what I'm most excited about is the ability to insert the full article in your River of News stream, even for blogs that that only provide partial text. For example, let's say you subscribe to the always interesting LifeHacker. It looks like this:

The feed only shows a little bit of text. To read it you have to go into the browser and then back to the feed. It's a lot of changing screens and ruins the River of News concept.

With the upcoming version you can press the couch icon at the bottom of the article or, even better, do a quick two finger tap and a moment later it looks like this:

It's a great feature and I love it. Coming soon.

Retina tease

Version 1.5 of River of News is just about ready to be submitted to the App Store. I wanted to give you a teaser shot of the gorgeous new retina graphics.

You can also see the much nicer feed icons. With this version you'll get icons for more of your feeds and they'll be higher resolution and support transparency.

River of News updated in the App Store

Version 1.4.1 is live in the App Store. It contains bug fixes and stability improvements. Thank you for your patience.

I've also got a feature update coming soon with a little sneak peak to the left.

Updated and on sale

This week, River of News was updated in the App Store to version 1.4. I'm very happy with the iOS 5 rewrite. This is the best River of News, yet.

Below are highlights.

✭ Rewritten to take advantage of iOS 5
✭ Better scrolling and responsiveness
✭ Tweet with new iOS 5 interface
✭ Many bug fixes and stability improvements


I've put the app on sale to celebrate. River of News will be on sale for $1.99 (or international equivalent) through Friday. Tell your friends. It's 2 bucks! McDonalds charges more for an iced coffee.