The Rise of the Premium App

Yesterday I paid $2.99 for an iPhone app called Reporter. I came across it because I follow Nick Felton. He is a bit of a rock star in the design community for his personal Annual Reports, which are absolutely beautiful. Reporter is an app that Nick used to compile his own Annual Reports and now is it available for you to download.

3 bucks.

I had heard about Reporter a week or so ago and became excited about it because I trust that Nick Felton wouldn’t make an app that sucks. So, there was a bit of trust already in place. When I went to the App Store I was very briefly taken aback by the price. We aren’t used to paying for apps (yet). But it took me all of about 3 seconds to hit that $2.99 button.

I downloaded the app and it is quite beautiful. Very clean and well designed. It didn’t change my life but it’s a nifty little app. I opened it again today and played around with it. I think it’s the sort of app that will only become valuable once you engage with it over a period of time.

The point here though is that I paid 3 bucks for an app and I didn’t regret it. I very quickly forgot about the 3 bucks. I wouldn’t pay 3 bucks for just any app but there was a layer of trust already established by just being familiar with Felton and his level of craftsmanship. And even if I never opened the app again, I don’t regret it. In fact, I don’t really care about 3 bucks. I am meeting someone for coffee today and I will easily drop 3, 4 or even 5 bucks for a hot drink that I will piss out of my system in a few hours.

Doug Sjoquist has a great blog post about the perils of comparing the price of an app to the price of a coffee and it’s very, very insightful. While I don’t disagree with Doug, I think there is more to this unfolding story. His assertion is that when we pay $4 for a drink at Starbucks we know exactly what we are getting. An app is a crap shoot, and most people don’t like to play craps with their own hard-earned money. Although, that problem could be solved once an app maker can repeatedly release amazing apps. Sort of like a movie studio, but with apps. Apple has done this with hardware products and built up enough trust, which took all of two decades, that people line up on tile floors in malls all over the world to pay a few hundred bucks for a product they’ve never even touched before.

I believe we are on the verge of a new way of thinking about apps and how we pay for them. Maybe we don’t pay for apps because we don’t really even know what a premium app looks like yet. Maybe we app developers are too busy throwing apps together over a weekend and flinging them into the app store for free, hoping that they will catch on. In some ways I fault the major app players for making everything free and being funded by venture capitalists until they get a ton of users and then gently insert advertising into the experience while we aren’t looking. There must be a better way.

I’m working on it.