Note: The iBird Android apps are now working and in the Google Market. If you have a support issue please go to this page and fill out our support form. Contact iBird Support If for some reason you can’t use that form you can try support at ibird dot com.

You’ve heard the stories.

• The Brittany Spears concert sells out in 10 minutes and the ticket master web site crashes.
• President Obama implores the American people to let “your Member of Congress” know they want  a “balanced approach to the budget” and at least nine Web sites for House and Senate leaders go down.
• Target’s web site comes crashing down as Missoni-loving fashion devotees scramble to buy the high-end Italian designer’s clothes for a song.

While this drives us crazy there is one positive side effect; someone did something right to cause all the attention.

I Want My iBird NOW!

Those of you who tried to upgrade the iBird Pro for Android in the Google Market on Wednesday felt the pain as the database took a ridiculously long time to synchronize.

I’m writing here today to apologize for this unintentional faux pas and to let you know we are doing all we can to fix the issue and explain what caused it.

The reason for this, to cut to the chase, was the was much higher demand than our server could keep up with. Why? Well this particular update to iBird made it compatible with a large number of Android tablets launched in the last year. Up till now the app only worked well on smartphones with small screens.  This version also contained brand new high res 720p illustrations and photos. These made the database about twice as large as the previous version. So unbeknownst to us the number of customers who had new tablets and wanted to update was huge so within a few hours of the apps appearing in the Google Market our web server slowed to a crawl. Updates of the database, which normally take no more than 5 minutes to an hour and a half were taking several hours.

At first we thought something was wrong with the program. Which was a shock because we’ve spent the last 8 months testing this app over and over until we were sure everything was working great.Whats that saying about an ounce of prevention?

Not.

Unpublish iBird from the Google Market

The only thing we could do at this point was to plug the dike meaning put a stop to the number of people getting caught in this mess. So we unpublished the Pro and Lite apps. We didn’t remove Yard since we had not updated it but its not designed yet for tablets.

No Excuses

Which just goes to show you why software is such a tough business and so many companies find themselves stuck in this situation. Now I know there are those of you out there that feel there is no excuse for this kind of problem and all I can say to you is the world is not perfect and neither are we. We just didn’t anticipate that so many people would want to download iBird at the same time. After all this is not an app that people can’t live without. Or maybe it is? Some of the emails we got: “When are you going to get things fixed so I can update my iBird? This is horrible–I am about to go on a birding tour and I had planned on showing everyone how good I am at identification. Now what am I gong to do? My reputation will be ruined.”

Hence the double-sided coin of pain and pleasure alluded to in the beginning of the story: people love our app more than we ever imagined. Which feels great. But at the same time people have become so dependent on iBird that there’s this huge pressure to keep it running perfectly all the time.

The Android Arms Race

While we are addressing disappointment let me get this out of the way.

iBird is not going to work perfectly on all tablets.

Yep you heard that right.

Why?

A myriad of reasons. For one with the introduction of the tablet the app has become much more complicated.  In this current 2.0 update we have made it so iBird “adapts” to different screens resolutions.  That might not sound like much much but it’s a really tough thing to get right. You see the so-called Android “standard” is actually a patchwork quilt of different versions. In fact Google has revised Android at least five times in the last three years.  And they have created 3 different Android OS’s, one for smartphones, one for tablets and one for televisions (what you have not heard of Google TV?).

Each time Google revises the OS it means that things that once worked fine may now break. As far as Google is concerned it’s the responsibility of  developers to keep up with these OS changes.

On top of these changes in the OS we have carriers trying to differentiate their devices from other companies.  They accomplish this by making changes to the hardware and the software itself. These changes make each Android device work different than others. There is literally an “arms race” among carriers as they try to make their device better than the other guys. Caught in the middle are developers, like ourselves, who have to make sure their apps can still work on all these devices. Let me tell you its a huge mess. Indeed there is a company called Device Anywhere which has a web site that emulates all the different Android devices on the market. Developers can rent time on their site to test their apps, but trust me it’s not cheap (hundreds of dollars an hour) and it’s so in demand you have to make an appointment to test your app. Nice business to be in but the point is the poor developer is caught up in this ever changing landscape of hardware alternations.

I know some iPhone developers who actually refuse to port to their apps to Android because they can’t justify the amount of work required to keep the app up to date.

With iBird we have tested it on at least 50 different devices. We know there are some Android devices which iBird will not work on. But since Google gives you 15 minutes from the time you make a purchase to the time you can get a refund we recommend you take this time to download the smaller iBird Lite and see if it will work on your device. If it wont then please cancel your order and get  refund. Otherwise you have to wait while we try to figure out why iBird won’t run on your Optimus Trend Setter Tablet.

The Solution – CDN

So we have a solution to the server overload issue and it’s called a Content Delivery System. Essentially this is a service provided by different companies such as Akamai, Edgecast, Rack Space, GoDaddy GoGrid and others that hosts media and lets it be downloaded and streamed with high bandwidth. CDNs are typically used for steaming videos and music as well as for downloading software. They do not require that you buy any hardware or even set up any software, rather then give you an account and a browser based dashboard where you upload your content for storage. You get a URL that goes into your application, or a player you can install that is able to download the data from where its stored by the CDN,

How Long will iBird Syncing take with CDN?

The time to sync iBird on the CDN network depends not only on the speed of the CDN network but also your WIFI and your ISP which your WIFI connects to. Its a chain. It starts with the CDN but then goes through these other pipes until it gets to your Android device.

Here are the results I got testing last night using the GoGrid (re-purposed EdgeCast) CDN. This is on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 which is a very fast tablet.

Now your own mileage may vary. Note that iBird Lite with only 30 birds downloaded them all in 5 minutes, meaning about 6 per minute while iBird Pro with 924 birds downloaded them all in 90 minutes meaning about 10 per minute. Why? Because with so many more birds iBird Pro has more time to take advantage of the bandwidth and therefore represents a more realistic average.

The bytes downloaded per minute is around 6 MB (550 MB / 90 min = 6.111 MB / min) or about 100K per second. This is pretty fast by most internet standards. But again it is going over WIFI and that puts a pretty good bottleneck in the speed.

Here are the results I got testing the Maxcdn CDN today. This is on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 which is a very fast tablet. This is the CDN we finally settled on.

Note the time to sync Pro went from 90 minutes on GoGrid to 27 minutes on Maxcdn.  So the birds downloaded per minute went from 10 to 30. That’s 300% faster!

The bottom line here is the CDN will vastly improve the download time of iBird. We can’t promise you will get the kind of speed we did but hopefully it will be way better than the hours it was taking last week.

Thank you for your patience.

Mitch Waite

Note if you have a support issue please go to this page and fill out our support form. Contact iBird Support

It’s not uncommon in the video game business for 1% of the customers spend the most amount of money and support your costs of the remaining 99%. The popular gaming company Zynga (Mafia Wars, Farmville) sells its games mostly though Facebook. People that have worked there reported the fact that a large group of their customers spend $500 a year buying food for their virtual cows, horses and bodyguard weapons. One customer spent $75,000 in a year. They call these customers the “whales”. I am not fond of that label but it does tell the story. We wondered if we had whales (or maybe large geese) that wouldn’t mind spending higher amounts on these apps provided they offered additional value.

In 2010 we had just finished adding a large number of search attributes to the iBird search engine (27). The standard at the time for iBird Plus was 15 attributes. Another argument started at MWG about putting all these features into iBird Plus or creating a new app called iBird Pro and selling it for $29.99. Again I followed my gut. Now we had 9 versions of iBird for the iPhone. Think that is enough? A few months later all hell broke out.

Burned Birders

iBird Pro became our best selling app and totally showed us that people would pay for quality and features that were useful. Unfortunately because app buyers get upgrades for free they have developed an attitude of entitlement. We heard from many Plus buyers in email and our forum who felt that the features of iBird Pro should have been offered to iBird Plus owners as a free update. Some really angry people came out of the woodwork, some even threatened to start a class action suit, claiming we were milking our loyal customers, had no scruples, yada yada.

We felt that these criticisms were unfair. But we still wanted to keep our customers happy. So we came up with a compromise; we created an in-app purchase for iBird Plus that for $10 added all the features of iBird Pro and this made our customers very happy.

No Rest for the Wicked–Then Came iPad

Just when you think you have finally got yourself a good solid product line and can take a rest, think again. You see this business is called software for a reason — soft means it can change and change is what apps are all about. In the beginning of 2010 Apple released the fabulous iPad, the first table computer to really catch the fancy of the public. We knew there was an opportunity for iBird and so we worked furiously with our developer to create a version of iBird that took advantage of all the cool features of the iPad. Its larger screen size meant we could have a much more advanced interface, and its faster processor meant we could ask more out of the program. Being optimized for the iPad meant we could have three columns in the landscape mode, which gave the search engine much more power. You can see the results of a search attribute immediately with no need to go back to another screen like you do on the iPhone. We used higher resolution illustrations and photos in the iPad apps and so we gave them the nomenclature HD for High Definition to help people tell them apart from the iPhone apps. Wanting to give more choices to our customers we created three versions: iBird Lite HD, iBird Yard Plus HD and iBird PRO HD. So now we had 12 versions of iBird, 9 for the iPhone and 3 for the iPad. Even we had trouble keeping them straight in our heads.

Tune in tomorrow to hear about iBird UK.

Birding Apps – Part 3. But You Only Sell Electrons
In our last installment about pricing an iPhone app, we had put together regional versions of iBird at $9.99, considerably less than our $19.99 app, as a way to help people with tight budgets. Apparently that was still not low enough.

I wont’ say that birders are tightwads, that would be harsh, but I will say they are very cautious about spending. Someone in our group had what seemed a brilliant idea at the time: why not create an app devoted just to birds found in the backyard at bird feeders and cut the cost in half again. This led to iBird Backyard with 80 popular backyard birds for $4.99. By now there were a lot of small birding apps in the app store priced at 99 cents. Many were free and in general they did not have all the features of iBird and were nearly devoid of depth of content (It was starting to feel like we were in the boutique coffee business; selling a mocha coconut frappuccino in a market that was use to buying a tall cup of joe.) To make the backyard bird product more attractive we added an additional number of popular birds taking it to 234 species and lowering the price to $2.99. We changed the name to iBird Backyard Plus and finally hit the sweet spot – sales picked up to the point it became one of our best selling apps.

The Real Cost of Apps – Starting with Apple
Let me toss some cold facts on you about the profit of Smartphone apps. There are lots and lots of people who have their fingers in the pie. First you have Apple taking out 30% of every sale. Now I am not complaining when you consider what Apple does for their third: they host the app on their servers and always provide a wide bandwidth on the net for you customers to download it. (For Android Google doesn’t let you have apps larger than a megabyte and iBird is almost 500 megabytes so we have to host our database on our own server). Apple also interfaces with the customer and there credit card collection, cutting down on a ton of support and collection issues. And Apple provides a great market place for your app in the App store, meaning that you don’t have to worry about people finding your app. If they know how to type “birding” into the search box your app will appear.

The Hidden Cost of Development
Most of our customers have no idea what it costs to develop an app. First you have to get the content together. That means artists to paint the illustrations, writers to create the text, editors to review the writing, testers to make sure the text is correct. Art is expensive and will be the subject of an entire other blog but for now just keep this in mind: feathers are one of the most difficult objects in the world to paint realistically. Very few people are good at it so that narrows the number of painters down to a small group.

Then there is programming of the app. You have a lot of people calling themselves iPhone developers today but let me tell you a secret. Very few of them can write good code. I lucked out and found myself a very good developer early in the game. But I also gave him a big advantage which was we had a complete working version of iBird running on Windows Mobile platform. So he could see how we did things and at least had a clear specification of how iBird should work. We also gave him another advantage; the entire content for iBird lived in a time test SQL database on the web called Whatbird.com. Therefore all he had to do was write code to take the contents of the database and display it on the screen. Not a trivial job but at least one that was manageable.

Next we have to pay the people that test the app, plus the people that manage the entire process of content creation, and then there is the need for accountants, and attorneys for the contracts. Perhaps now you get the idea; app development is very expensive. I wont give you our profit margins but I can tell you this much, its not anywhere as lucrative as I had expected.

But You Only Sell Electrons
I’ve heard this argument a lot. In fact recently an attorney told me “you are not publishing anything material like a book or a CD ROM so your cost of goods is zero, therefore your profit margins should be huge.” My answer was “in your dreams.” The truth is all the costs of development for something like a book are put into the hands of a single person; the author. Sure you have editors and production people but they are only responsible for managing words created by a single creative writer. Software on the other hand is a complex synergistic hyper managed process with all the costs I have listed and this makes the it 10 times more complex and more expensive.

Licensing and Royalty Costs
Additional costs come into play for things like bird calls which in our case we license from the Macaulay’s Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. Other licensing costs can be in the photography, illustrations, and other areas of content. You may also have to pay royalty to programmers and artists, depending on how you negotiate your payment process.

Marketing Costs
If you want to make sure people know about your app you can’t just rely on word of mouth. You need to attend shows like MacWorld, which are very expensive. We have been to Macworld in San Francisco two times and we will be there again in 2012. Magazine ads, Internet advertising, brochures, and other materials all cost money to develop and print.

One More Critical Element
So now that you know a little about the expenses in producing an app. And for this entire formula to work you need one more major ingredient to avoid bankruptcy: success. Success in apps is getting tougher every day. When we started at the end of 2008 there were 5,000 apps. Today there are close to 450,000 apps on the iPhone and thousands of new apps everyday!

A few months after iBird Backyard was out and we understood all the costs I have described above, we realized there needed to be a way to get people to discover our apps without spending the money to buy them. Sounds like the impossible dream but there is a way. We called it iBird Lite. We gave it all the features of iBird Plus but just 30 birds, which was enough to get the idea across and help people make a buying decision. As soon as we published our Lite edition it’s downloads were huge. We saw an immediate jump in overall sales. After welcoming iBird Backyard and iBird Lite to the family we had 8 versions of iBird for the iPhone. Time to stop?

Tune in tomorrow for our next installment: iBird Pro and Whales.

There were a lot of theories flying around the Mitch Waite Group about why Winged Explorer (WE) failed. Most of us thought the $99 price was too high. Others felt the Windows platform for mobile phones was at the end of its life. After seeing the iPhone it was hard to disagree that the future of Windows Mobile, with its poke with a style interface, was over. But I honestly wasn’t sure what to do about pricing. Clearly people liked the idea of a bird field guide they could carry on their phone, were sick of carrying large books around with them and loved the idea of playing bird songs in the field. Still I was exhausted from the 18 months we had spent working on WE and wanted to throw the towel in. But there were the emails. Dozens of them all saying the same thing: “Love the WE demo but do you have it for the iPhone?” Someone once said the wise businessman goes were the market leads him, and these emails seemed evidence we had the right product on the wrong platform. So I found a good iPhone app developer in September and by December of 2008 and we had the app ready to go into the iPhone app store.

But how to price it? Prevailing wisdom around the water cooler was 99 cents because that was what most apps cost on the iPhone. My thoughts were there were not enough birders with iPhones to make any profit at that sales price. And when you think about it iBird had the equivalent of 14 field guides, which if they were books would be valued around $280 ($20 per book). With birders used to spending $15 to $40 on bird guides I went with $19.99 for the price of iBird Plus. People around the office thought I was nuts.

Flying Below the Radar
For the first few months iBird sold modestly, better than Winged Explorer, but nothing to brag about. Somehow the word needed to get out that you could use your phone as a field guide or we would fly forever below the radar.

Hitting the Proverbial Bulls Eye
Around March of 2009 Apple released a series of television commercials for the iPhone that showed off the various apps. One of them was called “Itchy“. It showed 5 seconds of iBird Plus playing the song of a Red-faced Warbler and a finger taping its icon. Within a few days the sales of iBird went through the roof. The 5 star reviews people left in the store made it very clear $19.99 was a bargain. I finally had a winner. Or so I thought.

Prices are Elastic
There were some however who felt $19.99 was too expensive. They told us in emails they did not travel much and wondered if we could sell a version of iBird that just had the birds in their state at a lower the price? Managing 50 apps, one for each of the states, would have been a nightmare. The answer was five regional versions of iBird: North, South, West, Midwest and Canada for $9.99 each. Once these came out their sales was not as high as Plus but the profit totally justified the effort. So now we had 6 versions of iBird for the iPhone. Was that enough?

 Tune in tomorrow to learn when its time to stop.

We got this review for iBird North in the app store today:

Wonderful (v4.0)
5 stars on Jul 12, 2011
I have been using this app for for over two years now and couldn’t be happier! My friends are so impressed how I can ID so many birds just by their calls! My recognition ability has improved ten fold! One suggestion though that would improve this app to the point of astonishment would be audio recognition. Simply point the phone in the direction of a call and the app would ID the bird based on the call (just like “sound hound”). That would be amazing! Thanks for everything!!
Peace…

Even with all the exclamation points its an awesome review. But the part about audio recognition got me to wondering how many other birders would like such a feature? And do you think it would be hard to program into an iPhone?

I’m often asked what is the best birding app to get? The question was easy to answer in 2008 when there was just one app for the iPhone. Today typing “bird apps” into the Google search box will get over 41,000,000 hits. Typing “bird” into the Apple App Store and you’ll get hundreds of results. Does the world really need so many apps for birding? Are there that many birders and do they really care?

The answer to both questions is yes. Recent figures put the size of the birding industry at over $68 billion. This includes travel, optics, camping equipment, books and yes, birding apps. The number of people interested enough in birds to call it a hobby is in the millions.

With so much money being spent would you think the price of an app matters to birders? Let me tell you about the background of our app and how arriving at its price was such a challenge. This little history should be of interest to not just birders but any company that develops apps for smart phones or tablets.

Are 5,000 Apps Too Many?

When we launched iBird in December of 2008 the iPhone had only opened the gates to app developers for 6 months. In that short time there was rumored to be around 5,000 apps in the Apple app store. The majority of these were either free or sold for 99 cents. I was coming off a depressing experience of having launched our first birding app, Winged Explorer (WE) for the Windows Mobile platform, the dominant player in 2008, at $99. It launched in July of 2008 and a month later its sales were dismal. I was ready to give up.

 Tune in tomorrow to learn how to price an app.