albertogh

It looks like the machine is under heavy load. My shell just stopping responding and now ssh hangs while connecting :-(.

I'm not a specialist in that field, but my marketing efforts have been basically the same for both platforms. Of course, I might have targeted the wrong users in Android while targeting the right users on iOS, but I think that's unlikely to be case.

Maybe I didn't make that clear in my previous post, but while the data I posted is only about two apps, the percentage is consistent across all our apps (mine and my brother's) and some of my friends who develop for both platforms. That's still anecdotal data, but I wasn't claiming it was significative, just my experience.

P.S: Not trying to sound rude nor defensive, English is not my first language

Sorry, I'd prefer to not disclose that.

I'd say it's even lower than 7%, both for paid and ad supported apps, at least on my experience of having several applications for both iOS and Android. There is a small percentage of Android users willing to pay for apps, primarily due to Google not requiring a payment method when setting up your account and lots of Android users who don't use the smartphone features. This, in turn, makes the CPM lower in ad supported apps, since the ads have smaller returns and thus the advertisers pay less for them (compared to iOS).

Just to prove my point, here are yesterday's profits for a couple of apps:

- Paid app:

    - iOS: $128
    - Android: $6

- Ad supported app:

    - iOS: $1285
    - Android: $21

And that's without taking into account that Apple does most of the tax collection/invoicing for me while Google does not, despite taking the same sales percentage.

Nice catch :-)! Since I closed the project I mentioned in that comment, I wanted to release some parts of the code. The article about Readability reminded me of it, mostly because some of the comments suggested that a lot of people were rewriting Readability using Python and lxml. This part of the code was mostly clean and well tested, so this morning I spent half an hour writing the README and pushed the code to github.

C implementation and Python bindings, opensourced one hour ago https://github.com/fiam/readable

Given the number of articles I guess you're processing each day, I think you should probably rewrite your parser in C. I used to run a service which basically consisted on a feed reader where every article was preprocessed by an algorithm similar to readability. I wrote the parser using lxml and it looked fast enough, but when I started running on the 400K-500K pages per day territory I started having performance problems. Since parsing the pages is easily paralelizable across multiple machines, I could have just rented some more servers. But where's the fun in that? So I sat in front of the computer and 4 hours later I had a C implementation which passed all the testsuite and, according to valgrind, didn't have any memory leaks. As soon as I deployed it into production, CPU and memory usage dropped by something like 10x (don't remember the exact number) and I was able to remove some servers and bring the costs down. Sadly, I had to close that project because I was spending too much time on it compared to the revenue it was generating, but it was so much fun while it lasted.

There's currently a segmented control in the top left of the article to switch between article an comments, but your suggestion sounds interesting.

I'm using view based tableviews, which are only available in 10.7. Thanks for trying though :-)

Clickable links: http://imgur.com/a/rCbVN http://abra.rm-fr.net/~fiam/HackerNews.zip

Good idea. The problem is "FaceBook for iPad" is listed in their submissions rather than in their apps, which means it hasn't been approved yet. However, if they end up passing the review (I have my doubts about that), I'll make sure to buy a copy and report back to Facebook.

Sandboxing is only required for apps sold in the Mac App Store and the OS won't require apps to be sandboxed. None of your non-sandboxed apps will stop working on March 1st.

It looks like I can't edit the submission, so I'll add a comment. First, I want to thank everybody for your suggestions and let you know that I'm seeing my lawyer first thing tomorrow morning. I've been collecting evidence for a while now and I realized their app description has some portions copied from mine, so I think I got enough to fight back. I'll post an update as soon as I've got substantial information to share. Again, many thanks!

I'm pretty sure he meant to say "to incorporate" (fundar in Spanish) rather than "to fund" (financiar).

You've reminded me the time when I decided to leave my job and become a freelance. My parents wouldn't stop telling me I was crazy for leaving a nice job for the uncertainty of being your own boss.

I'm not in PT right now, but GF lives in Porto and I get to spend quite a bit of time there. Drop me an email (it's in my profile) and we'll catch a beer some time.

I'm Spanish and my GF is Portuguese. I can vouch for everything you said.

As an enterpreneur, I work really hard every day to meet my goals. 14 hours days are not unusual to me and working some 3-4 hours a day on weekends is the norm. When others know I work from home, they either assume that I just sit browsing Facebook all day and I'm really just collecting unemployment for the government or that I'm a lazy asshat whose parents pay for everything.

A year and a half ago, I was lucky enough to be featured by the most popular regional newspaper (~1M people live in this area) because of some work I did. A lot of the people who know me IRL congratulated me by it, but you should have seen some of the comments in the newspaper's website: they were incredibly vitriolic, calling me a lot of things like "lucky code butcher" or suggesting I was friends with someone in the newspaper because what I did was not newsworthy.

Combine that with the absurdly high unemployment rate, the incredibly high amount of people who prefer collecting 600€ of unemployment rather than working for 1000€ and the ridiculously high taxes we have to pay (an employee taking home ~1300€ a month would cost me around ~2700€) and you end up with the nightmare for startups we have here.

I'd the prefer to not disclose that publicly.

This sounds like a very good idea. I'm going to see my lawyer tomorrow and I'll tell her about your suggestions (this one and sending the documents in Spanish). Thank you so much!

Please, take a look at this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3220187

TL;DR Apple won't care

I don't think they copied any of my code nor assets. However, their app does basically the same as mine, but lacking and lot of features and their is UI not as polished as mine (the app looks pretty amateur).

I was under the impression that I was responsible for sending them the documents in a language that they could understand. This sounds really good. Many thanks for letting me know!

I really appreciate your intentions, but I'd prefer to deal with this just abiding by the rules. Plus, that would give the squatter a lot of undeserved sales and would boost their rankings.

As someone who bought his first domain from someone else some weeks ago, I'd suggest you to contact the current owner and ask them if they might be interested in selling it. After a few days of negotiation, I was able to get the domain for a very reasonable price.

Names are unique in the App Store, so it's too late for that.

I'm in Spain. I didn't think that getting their app removed from the EU stores would make a noticeable difference, since the app is only popular in English-speaking countries. However, your point really makes sense. I'll be contacting my lawyer later today just in case.

It's the App Store. I didn't publish a Pro version because I preferred to use IAP to remove the ads rather than publishing a separate binary.