FREE TRIAL - iips//OCRKiLcom us as we began working on our game, Firewatch, which will be distributed on the Steam gaming platform. On Steam, afer our initial app approval, all future patches are NOT manually approved and are automatically posted, limited to one every 15 minutes. Stress gone. Instantly. + Like many others, we could fll a small book with frustrating and tragicomic App Review ‘anecdotes. So many that I’ve become strange bedfellows with Richard Chipman, a man who has an extremely unenviable job. (Each time he calls us | make sure to tell him I appreciate his hard ‘work and that I know he’s just the messenger!) That he and I have talked enough to have any kind of rapport is a distressing sign for a company like Panic that’s been around for 15+ years and is clearly focused on releasing top-quality software. Now, please don't get me wrong, I know App Review is an enormously difficult problem to solve and I have no good answers. Yes, it feels like there needs to be someone “checking the work”, and things are better for it. But, as you know, sometimes the work checking is inconsistent, misapplied, and frequently frustrating. We're even luckier than most, in that we have developer relations folks to help us with issues, but it’s clear that our reps have no idea whats going on in App Review and can only pass vague ‘message back and forth. Ultimately, this situation leads to even more background stress: each time we hit that “Submit App” button, we sit back and wait for the inevitable new surprise. problem to arrive. + The worst customer support is support that arrives in the form of a one-star review of your app, especially when that one-star review has a known fix or workaround or very simple solution, and ‘we have no way of communicating that back to the customer. Most of our reviews are positive ‘and helpful, but these ones are hard to get over. I ve actually spent time Googling for ‘people’ iTunes handles in the hopes of finding the customer so I can contact them. Like App Review, though, it’s a hard problem to solve. I do not think reviews should become “forums” and think it gets messy (even visually!) if Reviews tum into a big back-and-forth. We "ve talked about how maybe it'd be great if I could fire off an anonymous response to the customer through a protected one-time e-mail address — their privacy is maintained but I can tel them how to do the thing they thought they couldn't do. Or what if Reviews were just thumbs up / thumbs down, not text? Whatever can be done, it’s clear that “Reviews” are often the dumping ground of the uninformed, and it’s extremely stressful because it can reflect poorly upon us. « There are times when a user has purchased our software to discover that it doesn *t meet their needs. This probably wouldn't be a problem for a game (either you like itor you don "tt, but for something like, say, Transmit, which may have strict compatibility requirements for specific SFTP servers or whatever, this is a very real possibility. And when this happens, we can do nothing, Technically, the App Store is “no refunds”. But in reality, as you know, there ’s a chance (75%? 90%?) if you e-mail Apple that you will get a refund. So we tell people to ignore the "no refunds” and e-mail anyway, which already feels weird. Worse? When they do get a refund, they are then banned from ever re-purchasing the app. They can never buy it again! We *ve literally Tost that customer forever, no matter what we do, or if we add their feature later. It *s nuts. 10s interesting to note these first four points are all stress-related: the App Store takes parts of our job that we're already extremely good at — like customer support, quick updates, easy refunds — and makes them all more stressful and difficult, in exchange for giving Apple 30% of our tevenue, That's the equation that makes us want to stay away from the sore. | want that equation to change. If the stress goes away, the 30% might start to be more palatable. PX-0104.2 CONFIDENTIAL APL-APPSTORE_ 00058137