Terry Godier

A Tale of Two App Stores

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 09:34:24 -0500

Apple actually runs two app stores for each platform: a paid one and a free one.

Here’s a story that’s closer to reality than it should be:

You and a friend are building apps. You’ve got the same concept, but disagree on pricing. You want to do an upfront paid app and he wants to do a subscription based app.

You both put in a few months of work and have a v1 concept that feels shippable. Good vibes.

You launch the app. You set a price of $4.99. One-time. Your friend goes with a 7-day trial and $4.99 per year going forward.

Paid apps get no trial period. There’s simply not a way to do it. But in the free store? Your friend has options. He could put a hard paywall in his app, effectively making it paid-only (many do), a soft paywall, an introductory offer, a promotional offer — all sorts of things.

Assuming you’ve built enough of a benefit story for users to buy your app, now it’s time to get paid, and to pay Apple. Subscription apps get an automatic discount on Apple fees for year two+ of the term, dropping from 30% to 15%. One-time purchase apps are only able to get a 15% rate by being part of the Small Business Program, which is a program developers must apply for, and wait for approval by Apple, to enter.

Since you’re a new developer, you applied for the small business program in the same month that you created your developer account and launched your app. Once approved (it takes a little bit) it’ll take effect the following month. Month 1 sales will still be billed at the 30% take rate.

A few months go by and things are going well. You’ve got lots of new features suggested by users and now that you have proven your concept you can invest in some roadmap work.

Apple offers you no mechanism for what is arguably the most natural transaction in software: paying for major upgrades. The only option is to create a new app listing or to use an IAP. There’s a strong disadvantage to creating a new app listing, namely losing your accumulated reviews and visibility. Your buddy creates a monthly plan to go alongside the yearly option. He considers a lifetime purchase as well.

You get your first sales report and notice a handful of refunds. You mention it to your friend and he says oh yeah, don’t you get the notifications? No, you don’t. Well, why are they refunding? You don’t know. Apple does ask users during the Report a Problem process, but they don’t pass that along. His customer requests a refund and he gets a push from Apple within minutes, with the reason attached. He has 12 hours to respond. He submits usage data. He tells Apple whether he thinks the refund should be granted. He finds out the outcome. He has built an entire customer support flow on the back of this API within his app. Your customer requests a refund from a webpage he had to Google and you find a line item in next month’s financial report.

Every missing feature for paid apps has a working equivalent in the IAP world.

Maybe Apple just hasn’t gotten to these features yet, but from where I sit this looks less like a backlog and more like a strategy. Don’t let the word “free” confuse you, there’s still plenty of business to do with a free app. Free means free to download, not free to use, and that’s by design.

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:18:07 -0500

A favor: please send me all of your favorite internet radio stations. Especially those run by one person. Send me any ambient streams of the real world you know of: coffee shops, street corners, gardens, whatever. Thank you!

App Store Reviews are Busted

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:37:31 -0500

Reviews on the App Store have bothered me for a long time. Review systems in general, really.

People leave reviews to give feedback to developers, and to help other users know what to expect. Sometimes they’re used punitively, as an outlet for frustration, or as a support channel.

But sometimes they’re impactful in a way that doesn’t match the reviewers intent. For example, if you have a 4.1 star rating in the App Store, any 4 star review is going to decrease that average. In other words, leaving a 4 star review is essentially leaving a negative review.

In what world is a 4 star review a bad review? A 1, 2 star review - those are negative reviews with congruent intent. A 3 star review is probably neutral (at least logically on a 1-5 scale).

You will see a lot of 4 star reviews that say things like, “This is my favorite app!” or “Gamechanger!” The apps that tend to have these types of reviews are often over a 4.0 in the store and are being actively harmed average-wise by having them, even though the intent was clearly not to do so.

There’s also a fundamental mismatch in the way they’re used by the platforms (i.e. Apple). Reviews, both velocity and aggregate score, are used in ranking and discovery algorithms. A 4 star review with a glowing snippet of text SHOULD be used to aid in discovery in a positive way, right?

What app developers have evolved to do about this is to time the review ask to just the right moment, where you’ve done something awesome in the app and we have a pretty good confidence level that you’re going to give a good review.

Many take it one step further and that is to show a custom review prompt that any rating selected other than 5 stars redirects you to fill in a feedback form, thus trying to gate the reviews that are transmitted to Apple at all.

With all of this in mind, is the system working as intended? I think not.

The logical endpoint of apps optimizing for a 5 star review invalidates the system as meaningful on the store. The system becomes a better representation of the sophistication at review prompt execution than it does an accurate reflection of app product quality. The incentive isn’t to create an actual 5 star app, but rather to create a robust system that transmits only 5 star reviews.

I refuse to do prompts for review of any sort. My app is a paid upfront app with a calm philosophy and my personal philosophy is that I’ve already been paid as part of the transaction. I don’t feel good about asking people to do something else for me. Many choose to do it on their own, which is great, and appreciated, but I leave that choice to them.

As my good friend Jon Henshaw (mastodon / website) told me today:

“I am my biggest impediment and I’m okay with that. I sleep great.”

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:35:54 -0500

So this ad is just downright trickery right?

The CTA directly beneath the show I looked up says watch now. It’s styled like a button, even animated, and yet it’s no button. How can this possibly convert meaningful enough to be worth it?

Current v1.0.13 is out now for iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:22:40 -0500

This release includes some really nice quality of life features to help your river become even more calm.

You can now set a custom velocity / age out date for a source!
You can now configure the app to use the “since it first appeared in the river” date as the age out start so that you don’t miss content if you have long periods of away time (good for you!)
Sped up reader extraction.
Sped up fetching for iCloud only accounts.
Fixed a bug where on cold launch the loader may get stuck.
Fixed a bug where iCloud sync can overwrite current membership and appear as though pausing is broken.
Improvements to the river position on iOS when new content arrives.
Youtube rss should no longer discover random channels.
Keyboard focus on macOS should be restored much more reliably for shortcuts access.
Command + Z to undo release is now available on macOS.

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 14:26:03 -0500

New Casio day. This one is a Databank DBC32-1A.

Can’t wait to set it up and nerd out for 3 hours with the doorstop sized manual crammed into the display stand.

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:14:50 -0500

True, but also can I live right over there 🥺

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:01:36 -0500

Back to bog posting. Something in here calls to me. I suppose I am something of a swamp wretch at heart.

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:01:41 -0500

📢 New Essay:

“Communication technologies have been reshaping the human body in a slow migration down the arm.

They’ve run out of body. Now they’re reshaping the message.”

www.terrygodier.com/body-lang…

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:13:44 -0500

This mystifying thing: “got that bog in me” is one of the perfect examples of why I love are.na so much

are.na/3m7ukvpdd…

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:15:07 -0500

Andre The Giant Has A Posse

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:04:03 -0500

Don’t know if I love this or hate this

www.bulova.com/us/en/col…

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:08:31 -0500

Now this, this I like:

www.theverge.com/tech/9004…

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:10:32 -0500

If you can see this: 🫈 - you trust Apple too much

On AI and Prior Art

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:22:21 -0500

This morning someone posted a video showing a version of Current they had built with an LLM. My reaction wasn’t to be upset or threatened or defensive. I felt disappointed. I wish they had pushed further, or added something new. What they built lacked a lot of the character and philosophy of what I did and only approximated the look.

The hard work of building a thing now isn’t writing the code. But I don’t think it ever was.

I differ from a lot of longtime engineers in that I don’t find the act of writing code to be sacred or really all that original. I’ve written code for 25 years and I don’t feel like I’ve owned any of it, or that I genuinely invented any of the approaches I’ve taken to solve whatever problem I was building against. The reason I had to write the code in the first place always felt more like a bug than a feature. Some of the things I’ve done felt nice - tricksy logic that accomplishes something that the machine didn’t want to, or the satisfaction of an elegant solution. But those things aren’t why the software exists in the first place.

Where I do feel a sense of ownership and pride is the philosophy.

The hard work of building a thing is developing a belief and a philosophy for the how and the why. Being able to zoom out and reason from first principles. Being bold enough to eschew decades of generally accepted interface design. Cultivating the resolute spirit of taking a side in the argument. Surfacing from the dopamine stupor of the app you’re using and taking an objective look at the screen and wondering why it looks that way.

Most of what I see on various indie builder social channels are new builders excited to make a thing that looks and behaves like the other thing, and most of what they post are screenshots of sales or progress they’ve made achieving what’s already been done, in the shape of what already exists.

I think it’s really great to be excited about building things. There’s an agency, a sovereignty you can feel when building and I’m over the moon that more people get to experience that.

But if I might: my advice to new builders is to trust that the bajillion dollar, bleeding edge system you’re using is capable of doing what’s already been done.

That means that you can take risks. You can ignore the prior art. You can push further and discover what your tastes are and how you might make better software, and differently shaped software. Use those new powers to build the future, not another piece of the past.

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 09:03:56 -0500

I’ve been very careful to build a high signal fediverse feed and while I do feel I have control over it, I’ve found the issue is that I still fall into the pattern of not stopping to think about what I’ve seen often enough.

The content is different but the learned behavior is still the same 🤔

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:39:30 -0500

I feel like all of the great designers I look up to are fundamentally empathetic people. There’s a deep care and a calm and an understanding of shape and form and the messiness of living that they’re working to make a little better for you.

Current v1.0.11 is now out for iPhone, iPad, and macOS

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:28:25 -0500

This one was a bit of a bear, some really nice new features, and a fantastic new icon from Matthew Skiles!

Changelog:

New App Icon (which supports tints, dark, glass) by Matthew Skiles!
You can now log in w/ any site and reader mode will fetch the logged in full content
macOS now has a safari share extension
Feed detection on add a source catches more sneaky edge cases
macOS got a visual design and interaction overhaul
Sometimes a source feed doesn’t update regularly and so when it does, it can provide content that pops into current way down the river (due to chronological item order), so now there is a new ‘hey we just found this but it was published in the past’ function that will put those items up towards the top for a few hours so you can see them.
Action bar at end of articles now displays more reliably at end of article and doesn’t disappear (and you can still tap anywhere to present it)
Miniflux could create duplicate currents, and no longer does
YouTube videos (and many other video embeds) now play in line.
In app browser now has more options (release, share, etc)
You can use spacebar to scroll (and shift space) in reader on macOS
Approx 1 billion other UI, UX fixes that hopefully you won’t notice and never did

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:06:43 -0500

My favorite movie. This is me, in about 3 hours, this wonderful Friday eve.