Loopy Pro: Create music, your way.
What is Loopy Pro? — Loopy Pro is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive live looper, sampler, clip launcher and DAW for iPhone and iPad. At its core, it allows you to record and layer sounds in real-time to create complex musical arrangements. But it doesn’t stop there—Loopy Pro offers advanced tools to customize your workflow, build dynamic performance setups, and create a seamless connection between instruments, effects, and external gear.
Use it for live looping, sequencing, arranging, mixing, and much more. Whether you're a live performer, a producer, or just experimenting with sound, Loopy Pro helps you take control of your creative process.
Download on the App StoreLoopy Pro is your all-in-one musical toolkit. Try it for free today.
How can devs sell more apps, helping the iOS music scene survive and thrive?
Just had a quick skim of this:
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-apps-got
A lot of it focuses on social media companies but I think there are a few nuggets in there.
Some things I can think of:
Open betas
Much better leveraging of influencers - some devs have this in the bag, some are terrible at it
For complex apps with closed betas, especially ones that have a lot of youtubers or other influencers in them, the dev making an unlisted video explaining the main features so that influencers spend less time figuring out complex apps without sufficiently good - or very long - manuals. This will lead to better YouTube vids that show apps in the best possible light.
Devs would benefit from spending more time building their social media channels by not only posting once in a blue moon when their apps come out, but instead posting content related to the scene on general, collabing with other devs to mutually support each other etc. Even if you have a large YouTube channel or Twitter / Insta, if you're only posting a few times a year the algo won't care as much as it will if you're posting more regularly.
Joining the AB Forum and being open to suggestions. If you make an app that only suits your own workflow and willfully ignores how others might use it, you're limiting your sales. Of course this has to be weighed against feature bloat, loss of direction, overcrowded UI, too much need for menu diving etc.
Some devs are really lacking in UI / UX skills. They would benefit from expanding their skills in these areas. Even if that time spent means they make one less app, the apps they do make will be more appealing and can be sold at a higher price.
Bigger beta pools - too many apps released with bugs that really shouldn't be there on release, leading to bad reviews and / or refunds.
Just a couple of thoughts, I'm sure others will have more ideas.
Comments
Make a shimmer reverb or tape delay.
It's a must!
Analyze the market and competitor offerings. Selling another VA synthesizer or compressor is getting harder
I think a demonstration video a week before launch by the dev is a lot helpful in making people enthusiastic about a new app. And some side info how the app was developed and if it was based on something vintage, the history and some background, just make a little story around the app.
IAPs, sorry
Offer a free Lite-version or a trial-period.
We shall not forget that most of our beloved apps are the results of one-man operations and that there's only 24h per day.
Keeping a healthy work/life balance is very important for the for both physical and mental wellbeing...
...It's the classic 'pitfall' of marketing a one-man operation as 'we as a company'.
This really does give a skewed perception of what to expect once the truth is out in the open...
(Ie. the more we push one individual with requests and feedback the more likely it is that that person, if not being careful will hit the wall BIG TIME. I know, I've seen that happen more than once!).
Processing feedback takes time and that time I'm quite sure most devs will spend on actual programming...
Personally I do my best to support end-users but I can't not guarantee that I know 'everything' about 'everything'.
I mean this is not a 'job' for me even though it sometimes feels like it
Cheers!
Yes... 4POCKETS is good in that area. > @Identor said:
Yeah like red rock sound offers those 5 minute demos that you can keep trying by closing and reopening the auv3
Also.... Teasers. Bram and Hainbach are good at that.
Patches are great to showcase the company name and brand logo. Making customized patches and attaching them to your apparel or clothing is ideal for adding a timeless fashion and design to advertise and promote your closet.
https://austintrim.co/custom-patches/
I'm really unsure how much interest there is in merch among the ios community. I know Doug mentioned that it did very little for him
Good suggestions but will the extra work involved equal comparable gains? Hopefully…
As has been commented before, IOS pricing needs to change. We should be paying more.
In the meantime, perhaps all devs could include tip jars so we can tip all updates (the free updates thing seems particularly unfair to me).
Habit I’m getting into but only FAC and Kymatica have them currently in my workflow. Small change I know but better than nothing.
Stuffs too cheap. In hardware days you’d have a few items and rinse them, now we’ve all got gear we’ve barely unboxed.
One thing I’ve noticed with music app developers in particular, is the general poor level of social media interaction.
Just to pick a personal example - I managed to build up a couple of million followers via a number of Twitter accounts, for a series of business ventures I used to run a few years back. To help my favourite devs along, I’d often retweet their release posts, vids etc., via relevant accounts, to try and help give a bit of free extra exposure for their products.
I did this for a number of years - hundreds of posts shared to hundreds of thousands of others. Not once did any of them return the favour by retweeting a post of mine, or even bother to click the ‘like’ button on any of them. Out of all the devs I followed and supported, only one followed back.
Fair enough. Who cares what I do.
So I stopped. I’ve since abandoned most of the accounts and cleaned out the Tweets as they’re no longer relevant, but I still keep a couple of music project related ones going. I say I’ve stopped, I have actually tweeted a few recently - but it’s still the same old closed shop.
Yep, more tip jars
Very true, Monzo, a lot of devs surely appreciate people tweeting about them but rarely return the favour. Not saying this has to be a one for one relationship or anything like that, but it's often a one-way street. I can think of a few devs who are more obliging and interact more, but many expect it to be a one way street. Fun fact about twitter.... People you engage with are more likely to see your posts.
That said, social media can be a huge timesink, so I also understand that some have just decided it's not the best use of their time
(after writing these comments I realised that they kind of apply more to someone who has more time than average to devote to iOS development, perhaps even full-time, versus someone doing it in their spare time)
If I were to write some software as an independent developer then I would use Canny, or similar. This is what Michael uses for Loopy Pro https://roadmap.loopypro.com and I saw another dev using it recently as well, think it was the developer of SAND. This is ideal for people to throw their ideas into the hat, though I think the voting system would need looking at to avoid missing good ideas that were submitted later.
With this sort of system you would have the usual app release thread and then people could discuss the app and rather than @ the developer asking for new features or shouting into the void in a thread on here or YouTube, they would be invited to use the web page instead so that they could see what else had been suggested and what the current roadmap looks like. We could still discuss stuff we'd like to see here but ultimately there would be a place people could go and deposit their idea without needing to directly engage the dev or be lucky enough that the dev stumbles over their post in a 50 page thread.
This level of transparency (to me) removes a lot of the guesswork as to what a dev is up to and what feature requests they are aware of. It also means people aren't left wondering whether their idea ended up in a void. It may reduce the chances of new features appearing out of nowhere, which can be a nice surprise, but I feel that knowing that there is a defined set of features coming at some point keeps users invested in your app.
If you don't use a formal system for collecting ideas then reach out to the community to find out what they might like to see. SevenSystems did this recently with the latest Xequence 2 'usability' update and I like to think both the users and developer got something out of it.
Use IAPs or the model Loopy uses for significant new function. This brings in new money for the developer, rewarding them for their time, and again keeps users invested in the app if they see that their 'subscriptions' or IAPs are bringing new value to the application over time.
Devs need to understand that releasing apps with 'missing' features is not a problem if you are upfront about the software being something you intend to add to over time rather than abandoning after a couple of updates. Trying to boil the ocean is what causes apps to take years to be released, by which time a more nimble developer has stolen your lunch. Release little and often (or on as regular a cadence as you can), where practical. I like to see apps such as Mela evolve over time, where a developer is focussing on crafting fewer apps and making them incrementally better over time, though I can certainly see how the scatter-gun approach of releasing apps may bring in more income over the longer term.
If we weren’t releasing our stuff on desktop as well as iOS it would be difficult to justify the time in creation to the results. Yes, we make stuff that we (myself and Gabriel) want to use but so much time could be saved if we didn’t do any nice ui design/making products usable beyond a initial brain vomit of an idea.
Social media is hugely important as well… We’ve only just started taking it seriously the last couple of months but it’s made a massive difference.
David
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Hence my highlighting their lack of engagement with others that do it on their behalf - for free.
It took me a very, very long time to build up my social media followers, and was incredibly effective in pulling in the punters. I eventually had to tweet my own promotions in stages to avoid crashing my servers. I’m sure I helped the developers I promoted make a few quid too.
It only takes a couple of seconds to like a post, after all.
Lots of good points!
That's good to hear!
Given that there is a seeming 'gotta catch 'em all' nature to iOS apps, I wonder how much greater the market could grow relative to the extra amount of time and energy drain involved in maintaining a big SM presence.
Personally, I still think the way for the app market to survive is with higher RRP, fewer or no sales and subscriptions and variations on subscriptions.
I have mixed feelings about sales too. Variations on subscriptions - yes, people don't like subscriptions in general, but I think Nikolozi and Michael are doing pretty good things in that area. It's not suitable for all apps though - some apps just come out pretty much 'finished' and aren't really suited to being constantly developed. Also, a lot of devs are just like most of us - addicted to novelty. By the time they finish working on an app they may be itching to get on to other, totally different, projects 🤔
You can't sell something that people don't want, so I suppose gaining a large following for one's apps is always going to be the result of word of mouth and repeat success.
Look at all the top selling music-centric devs. They have a pattern of quality, happy customers and their every new app sells no matter what. These things involve a good reputation which only happens over time.
Yeah, i guess the sub model would not really work for certain apps. But I guess it still remains to be seen how the 'Loopy Pro' format pans out.
Probably (in my opinion) for the iOS music community to thrive into the future either 1 of 2 things need to happen:
1. The widespread recognition that the computers in our pockets are in fact powerful enough to do music production. This would make the entry level to "typical" or more widely "accepted" music production low enough that a higher volume of sales would be a sustainable business model for the larger developers with the flagship products; think how the free to play model of video games has exploded over the last 10 years as gaming has become more accessible to its user base.
2. RRP needs to increase so that the few sales on iOS matches the few sales on desktop; yes there may be more users of some products on desktop but piracy is rife. Even as a small, relatively unknown developer we have had things stolen and installers recreated with viruses... This is just one of the reasons I like the iOS ecosystem. Our RRP is purely based on seeing Audio Damage talk at a conference where they said that their pricing strategy was 1 to 8 (iOS to desktop) and that it offered similar income; I hadn't even considered iOS before that.
The first issue is gradually getting there but will really take a more widely accepted "professional" DAW like Logic Pro to make it truly happen - personally I'd love if Reaper were to take the step, they have always seemed the most forward thinking to me and have great touch support. If we take the Roast Beef statistics so far there are ~3270 downloads on the App Store compared to ~5750 desktop downloads on our website (this obviously doesn't take into account the pirated re-created installers that are out there however).
David
Thank you for the detailed post David, hopefully other devs will chime in as well. I think this has the potential to be a very enlightening and useful thread for both devs and users.
No problem, it's an important dialog to have! I must say its a topic of conversation I usually try and avoid as a developer as it has the potential to be dangerous water... Often I see threads with people saying that {insert app name here} costs far too much for what it is when sometimes the desktop price could quite possibly add an extra 0 to the end of the price. The reality is that the true value is probably somewhere in the middle due to the Waves-ification of the desktop market where people predominantly only buy stuff when it is put on sale. We try to price our stuff fairly but there are many buyers that won't touch anything until they see an html strike tag through a price.
The real obstacle to higher prices on iOS is Apple’s rental terms; the value proposition just isn’t there if your investments can simply disappear at the click of a mouse.
I do love many things about iOS music but that thing in particular is really troublesome once you’ve spent a fair whack of cash on the platform. When you consider the longevity of some desktop licenses and the value that represents, cheap as chips suddenly doesn’t look like it really works…
Yep.... No resale ability has to be priced in too