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Comments
Ask Michael if he’s sour about Apple and the App Store policy.
And the Epic comment is relevant because they were a massively successful developer with their Fortnite sales, but they killed their own golden goose.
Epic didn't kill anything. Fortnight isn't their primary revenue source and it's a game on the way down. They were attempting to leverage it to get access to the much bigger revenue stream of having their own store on one of the world's biggest gaming platforms. They haven't actually lost the case completely yet and the attention the case is bringing is probably going to result in them getting exactly what they want. It might very well end up cracking open Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo as well. Meanwhile, Epic is now out there being the biggest thing in movie and television production to happen for years.
Are successful developers annoyed with Apple? Ask Valve. They had a really tight relationship with Apple on doing VR stuff. It looks like the relationship has gone nowhere over the last couple of years. Where are any of the top music app developers on the App Store? No one wants to have to tie their success to Apple's whims --- especially when Apple's terms are as vague and nonsensical as this latest stunt.
BTW, lots of the free apps on the App Store are things like banking applications and other little utilities people use in their daily lives. Apple needs these to be available for their phones. If they aren't, Apple will bleed users to Android at an incredible rate. Apple knows this. If they don't want to take on the immense burden of hosting all of these apps, they have a really easy solution available.
Just to clarify, Unreal Engine is big right now and being used in entertainment production. Fortnite was the massive success on the App Store until Epic's CEO basically killed it for them.
And that's the first time I've ever seen anyone claim that Fortnite was "on the way down", especially when Epic's CEO started making noise and was attempting to have their cake and eat it too.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-9-billion-epic-games-apple-antitrust-case
Let's be honest here. The screwups their CEO made would've gotten any normal CEO immediately fired.
The estimates I've seen put the percentage of Epic's Fortnite sales on the Apple App store at about 7% of total Fortnite revenue. Not much risk for the potential of targeting all of those mobile gamers on the iPhone with direct sales.
All games have a lifespan that tails off. Online games depend on a critical mass of players and then die quickly when the user base leaves for the new big game. Fortnite was already several years in to the cycle. The potential payoff was worth the risk to them. Don't get me wrong here, I think the way they played it was fairly dumb, but no one is going to fire a CEO that has a company growing as fast as they are.
So was Fortnite a big deal or not? You seem to be arguing both sides on this one. And what's your source for this 7% of revenue figure?
I found this, which contradicts that number. I'm seeing that mobile accounted for about 20% of revenue:
https://www.businessofapps.com/data/fortnite-statistics/
If that's the case, this was an Epic failure.
Most of mobile isn't iPhone, it's Android. I don't understand what you mean by arguing both sides. The only thing I'm trying to say is that Fortnite on iOS wasn't a big enough potential loss of revenue for Epic to not try their gambit. The potential payoff for Epic if they do eventually get to put their game store on iOS, Android, Playstation, and Xbox is much bigger.
My source for the 7% figure was my memory from articles around the time of the trial. Here's an article from 9to5 that gives that number, https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/28/epic-fortnite-app-store-revenue/ (I just did a search for "epic fortnite iOS 7%" and there are bunches of similar articles.) But, that would be fairly consistent with the 20% figure you cite for mobile if you take the relative platform sizes of iOS and Android and weight them for spending patterns.
Caustic 3
However, you must take into account that per user spending on Android versus iOS is about half for Android. iOS users tend to make and spend more on apps and services. This has been proven in many market surveys of users.
And here's a little anecdotal support for this from Moz: https://moz.com/blog/apple-vs-android-aov
Yeah, that's what I meant by weight the platform sizes by spending patterns. It's certainly not a one-to-one comparison and I don't have all the relevant numbers, but I figure that given Fortnite is a game played worldwide where Android has a larger marketshare and Apple has a higher per user spending pattern than Android that 7% compared to 13% of revenue would be in the ballpark of that breakdown.
It looks like Google is doing the same thing in the Play Store. It's interesting to look at the two announcements to see the difference in the way they are being done.
Edited to add the link to the Google post, https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9934569?hl=en&ref_topic=9877065
So, again Google is an Apple follower. I’m sure you know about the famous meeting between Steve Jobs and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who had also been a member of Apple’s board of directors)?
I definitely know the weasel maneuvers by Schmidt and co.
Although, looking at the timing of these two announcements, I'm wondering a bit if this whole thing isn't a poorly executed marketing response by Apple to Google's plan. There's no doubt that Google has some real cleanup needed in their store. I very much hope that this isn't Apple responding with some marketing nonsense to what Google is doing.
......
It wouldn't surprise me if there is a genuine issue that needs solving (i.e. the App Store is so bloated that discoverability is a real problem...with a ton of apps of little merit or user interest clogging things up) and that Apple (being insensitive to developer relations in recent years/decades) has chosen a brute force method without thinking about the morale impact.
That's a definite possibility. The only thing I have as a bit of a counter is that searchability of the App Store has always sucked a bit. They could at least make some better categories first. What they bunch into "Music" is completely unhelpful.
I do believe that the problem of search and discoverability is too big for a store to handle at the scale of the App Store. If you are an app developer, you can't depend on the App Store to get your products out in front of people. You are going to have to do all of the types of marketing that you would do in any other context.
I think I found out about Korg Gadget on another forum like KVR or GS but luckily found ABF soon after. That’s when I first (late I know) realized how far iOS had come and timing was good, we had to move to temp apt w our stuff (incl my whole studio) held in storage. I had tried like Yonac? steel guitar on iPhone 4 a few years before but it was a novelty to me then. Oh had Camel Alchemy on my OG iPad 1 but never hooked it up to anything and recorded it (I did want to).
Point is I found everything NOT thru the App Store and it has always been so bad I’ve never even thought about trying to “discover” apps there. It’s like an assault on the eyes. I’ve found most every app thru ABF. (thanks btw)
I don't think their timing is as close as it appears. Check the Wayback Machine and Apple had some policy revisions announced on February 14, 2022. Heck, even back in January.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store-improvements/
Actually, considering how long this has been their policy, seems them finally putting their foot down and applying a 2 year time limit must've been the final straw for developers who've failed to keep their apps up to date.
Actually, my first comment in this thread suggested an understanding of Apple's point-of-view. I disagree on the implementation of the process, though.
I'm not assuming apps are more profitable than they are. Quite the opposite, in fact. And in most other respects, my views tend to align with what you have written.
When I mentioned the system being broken, it's precisely because of the whole 'Price-of-a-cup-of-coffee-with-free-updates-in-perpetuity' mentality. I've already suggested elsewhere (In the demo thread) that prices need to rise. Another member suggested something like 10%, whereas my position would be that the whole pricing structure needs a much more radical upwards shift. Moreover the whole expectation that updates, over-and-above bug-fixes, should be free, is something that should never have come to pass, and that has well outstayed its 'welcome'.
And it really comes down to us, as consumers, to change our expectations so that developers will be properly incentivised to continue to advance development. At such a point, the notion of being 'forced' to update an app might be all but redundant.
Fortnite is by far Epic’s biggest source of revenue. It was pretty much single-handedly responsible for giving them the funds to start up the Epic Games Store, which they see as one of the long term ways to get out of being reliant on one piece of software (the other being licensing Unreal Engine 5). However, they’re nowhere near with either yet in terms of eclipsing how much they earn from Fortnite.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-9-billion-epic-games-apple-antitrust-case
‘ After a meteoric rise to popularity in 2018, Fortnite generated more than $5 billion in its first year for Epic Games, new financial documents reveal. The document, made public as part of Epic’s court battle with Apple over the latter’s App Store practices, shows that the game brought in more than $9 billion total for Epic in 2018 and 2019.
The document doesn’t break down how much Epic specifically profited from Fortnite, but the company reported more than $5.5 billion in profit from the two-year period.
In the document, the company predicted that it would have almost $3.6 billion in revenue for 2020. Epic doesn’t usually publicly provide financial statements, but CEO Tim Sweeney’s recent testimony indicates that it actually made much more: $5.1 billion.
The revenue from Fortnite far outshone any other businesses that Epic ran at the time — “other games” (such as Rocket League, acquired by Epic in 2019) made $108 million in revenue in 2018 and 2019, and Epic’s engine brought in $221 million over the same span. Epic’s Game Store, launched at the end of 2018, brought in a total of $235 million between 2018 and 2019.‘
Fortnite was their source of revenue at the time of that analysis. My point is that their goal was to shift their revenue from a small portion of a declining stream to a potentially huge new source of income, their stores on platforms that were blocked to them at the time. The loss of the 7% of the Fortnite revenue was worth the risk for them.
It certainly hasn't killed them either. Their new campus they are building should be an indication that they are doing fine and expanding. They already knew by the time they cooked up their little play at Apple that all of that was coming. Current news makes my inclined to think that their play was well timed and that they are going to get what they wanted in the end too.
Yes, Apple did the store improvements thing on their developer website a bit ago. I think I even remember it being noted in an updated developer agreement some time at the end of last year. It's the timing of the notices that went out this week that has me suspicious, also the implications of two years. Apple's wording on their stuff is very vague. But, Google's wording would translate to 2-to-3 years in Apple updates.
Maybe they are playing off each other with their responses to the inevitable and growing problem of too much junk in their stores.
I love this thread - especially that brilliant vibe coming from those of us with little to zero actual experience in developing for iOS (or anything, probably) trying to convince poor @NeonSilicon , an actual iOS developer that, despite his repeated, desperate arguments to the contrary, pushing out forced fake updates for no other reason than to please the giant jerks at Apple is just a piece of cake that all those indie devs should happily play along with. Best of the ABF right here. 🙂👍
BTW, the fake update response isn't just here. It's everywhere I've seen this discussed. I've even seen people calling themselves developers suggesting this as a good idea (that makes me wonder about the state of software engineering). Do people really want a periodic flood of updates that do nothing to their software? Do they want the update history of the apps they use obscured by fake updates? Do they want their banking apps to have an increased attack surface because they contain unused code? Now, when the attempts on their data and money are absolutely huge?
@ervin, I do appreciate the comment, thanks!
🎯
Honestly don't see this as all bad though it may be a bit draconian. What they could probably do instead is make it a longer period, or issue a more explicit warning or something for apps that aren't updated for a long time, instead of outright removing them from sale.
That information though already exists in the version history, and I've been buying only apps with a fairly regular update cycle (less than 1-1.5 years) for a while now. Sure you could miss out on some apps this way, but I've usually just gone with other alternatives, and even in cases where they are very unique it's not been mission critical or such a big deal to me in the larger picture. Looking at the ones I use, some that aren't updated often and might go missing eventually are rme totalmix and serato remote, but I'll manage.
The other side of this is that there are millions of apps on the app store, and some are indeed duds. And not all app stores (in my case the Indian one) are that forthcoming or friendly towards issuing refunds. Infact the last few times my request has always been rejected, and now I've stopped asking and so just make myself that much surer before buying, and hence the above described policy of only buying frequently updated apps for some time now. The game Titan HD which was a crash-fest and a total waste of money is one example that comes to mind. For the sheer number of apps, it's just not really possible to check them all so some sweeping measure for quality control is probably the only way it can be done. And if this leads to more consistent quality and stable apps, then it's not all bad.
Fake updates is a no-go, really. And, as you've acknowledged, there are definitely going to be many cases of apps just being complete as they are. So rather than speculate the worst i.e fake updates, perhaps it won't quite pan out like that.
…Never mind
How are devs supposed to meet Apple's artificial requirements when their apps are complete but they are forced to update them then?
The root issue is that Apple is placing a requirement on the 3rd party developers instead of doing the job that they have forced on themselves by not allowing any other path to release software but the App Store. The App Store is unmaintainable by design. It's on Apple to fix this. Anything else will eventually drive the platform down.
Aged and not functional is a genuine issue that is a worthwhile exercise in resolving - there are still apps that I get from search results that have the error that they won’t work on my device (i.e. are 32-bit), and I have installed a few apps that crash on loading.
I guess ideally that should be addressed independently of any apps that have not been updated for a long time.
Honestly, at this point with how much money I have spent on apps that have not been updated for a couple of years, it makes me want to not spend another dollar on iOS. It is anti-customer. If it is a cyber security measure then define the code requirements to meet the necessary thresholds, regardless of how long it has been since an app has been updated.