We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.
2 Comments
I think this is a mistake. Not everyone needs or wants a click through. Their failure does not mean Apps for mags are doomed. Some work very well, and some publications are able to pull it off. The Economist come sto mind.
The Financial Times proved that you can have an app like experience for subscribers on mobile devices, without the need to sell through an app store. I expect the internet to largely move in this direction over the next few years, as content becomes viewed more often on smaller screened, touch activated, mobile phones and tablets.
Comments are closed for this article!