Contactile update in the pipeline

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on the initial release of Contactile. I am thrilled that you took time out to share your thoughts on how to make it better. I’ve completed the first update and it has been submitted to Apple for review. I am pleased with the outcome and I think that you will be too. Stay tuned for it on the App Store. I expect it to be approved in about one week.

Think Before You Price

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Majesty Software hasn’t broken any sales records with its iPhone apps. It’s most recent release, Contactile, barely made a blip on the sales charts when it debuted a few days ago. I can count the total number of paid sales without taking off my shoes. The sheer number of apps on the store makes it quite challenging for small, obscure vendors to gain traction.

So, after a brief time in the lowest price tier (that’s just 99 cents in the US), Contactile is now a free app. The next planned release will sport a few enhancements and is likely to include iAds as a potential means of generating revenue. I’d rather not alienate the handful of people that paid for their copy, but the sales numbers are just so small that the burden of maintaining separate paid and lite versions is hard to justify.

In hindsight, I wish I had made Contactile ad-ware from the outset. That would have avoided the dilemma of having an ad-supported update go to people that paid for the initial release.

Contactile: A Different Twist on iPhone Contacts

Majesty Software has just released a new iPhone app. It’s called Contactile and it offers a different approach to accessing the contacts on your phone. The motivation for Contactile grew out of the sometimes frustrating experience of using the standard Contacts app on the phone.

For small address books, the Contacts app is fine. As your address book grows, you often need to resort to excessive scrolling or using the search mechanism to locate a desired contact.  Scrolling through a long list can be challenging and searching in the standard manner requires more than a few taps.

Contactile admits that you have to search at the outset and offers a faster way to drill down to your desired contact. Read more about it here.