If by "open and freely accessible" you mean there should be no rules of the road, then I suppose yes. Personally, I'm glad CF is pushing back on this naive mentality.
It’s not a good look when your technology is replicated for a fraction of the cost, and your response is to smear your competition with (probably) false accusations and cozy up to the US government to tighten already shortsighted export controls. Hubris & xenophobia are not going to serve American companies well. Personally I welcome the Chinese - or anyone else for that matter - developing advanced technologies as long as they are used for good. Humanity loses if we allow this stuff to be “owned” by a handful of companies or a single country.
I have been approached by a number of companies over the years about selling Just Landed, including some household names. The trouble is, almost none of them wanted the app – they just wanted me as an employee. These weren't companies I could get super excited about working for - especially since I love being an entrepreneur and working for myself. Of the few who did want the app or the tech, their quality bar/taste wasn't a good fit, and I worried how they would treat my users. It was never about the money. Time is my most valuable resource.
Lots of people have asked me this, or suggested it. I have been approached by a number of companies over the years about selling Just Landed, including some household names. The trouble is, almost none of them wanted the app – they just wanted me as an employee. These weren't companies I could get super excited about working for - especially since I love being an entrepreneur and working for myself. Of the few who did want the app or the tech, their quality bar/taste wasn't a good fit. It was never about the money.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that Google and Apple are actively deceiving developers. However, they do have a strong incentive to keep things the way they are, and to keep the end user ignorant of how the app economy functions.
You might be surprised to know that many customers on the App Store, and even some members of the press, seem to think that apps being featured by Apple have been bought by the company. I would get emails like: "how have things changed for you since Apple bought your app?"
If people knew how bad the app economy has become, there'd be far fewer app developers than there actually are, and the device makers would have a serious PR problem on their hands.
In the end though, I do believe that the short-term thinking I alluded to in my post will soon come home to roost. I do hope that Apple and Google course-correct before we end up in a situation where indie apps are a distant memory. It's in their long-term interest to keep the App Store diverse and the app economy healthy.
You got it. To profitably support commercial power users I would have had to change the business model to a pay-as-you-go subscription model. I considered doing this in a way that wouldn't shut out my casual users (for whom I created the app in the first place, and who are still the majority), but I had serious doubts about the willingness of taxi and limo drivers to pay for Just Landed on an ongoing basis.
The proliferation of half-decent free flight trackers (albeit without the unique airport pickup focus), the other systemic problems mentioned in my post, and the increasingly common cannibalization of utility apps by Apple's iOS itself, led me to the conclusion that such an endeavor was likely doomed to fail.
Just because you can find passionate users doesn't mean you've found a good business, and that was the case here.
Creator of Just Landed here. Actually, I have been approached by a number of companies over the years about selling Just Landed, including some household names. The trouble is, almost none of them wanted the app – they just wanted me as an employee. These weren't companies I could get super excited about working for - especially since I love being an entrepreneur and working for myself. Of the few who did want the app or the tech, their quality bar/taste wasn't a good fit, and I worried about how they would treat my users. It was never about the money. Time is my most valuable scarce resource.
Thanks for the clarification. I use PageSpeed via a couple of App Engine apps that have it enabled directly from App Engine's admin dashboard. I never had to change any DNS settings to get it to work. Does this shutdown also mean that PageSpeed will no longer be offered for App Engine apps? Do I need to take any action to avoid a service interruption for my users?
Yeah, I'll probably swap our download button for an App Store badge when we next update it. Sadly it's unlikely that I'll ever build an Android version – can't make the economics work.
It's true that Just Landed hasn't been updated for a while. That will change later this year. We've been working on Patchmania (http://getpatchmania.com) for 2 years, which launched recently.
Honestly, if you're reacting to the video showing iOS 6 I think you're probably focusing on the wrong thing.
Developer of @justlanded here :) Thanks for appreciating our landing page – @partlysean did a great job on it. We also recently released Patchmania which has a neat landing page you might like: http://getpatchmania.com
Honestly, because we're an app company rather than an e-commerce or SaaS company, a lot of the effort we put into these pages is largely for the benefit of the press (who often research apps on desktop). The vast majority of end users discover our apps through the App Stores themselves, so we put even more effort into our icon, screenshots, app preview, description, keywords etc.
As for conversion rates, sadly Apple hasn't opened up any analytics to developers for their actual App Store product pages (even though they announced they would a year ago at WWDC), so what users are doing when browsing the actual stores is largely a black box - we have no idea how many people view our app store previews or screenshots etc. or even where they came from (many deep-linking schemes we've looked at are pretty brittle or don't work at all).
Conversion rates on the website landing pages are pretty good - there's not much else to do on those pages than download the app, and chances are you came there with that goal.