That's a fascinating pricing model. It makes a great deal of sense, too, since presumably there's work to be done keeping all that data fresh and up to date. But I wonder how many other transit apps we're going to see with a subscription model, when users are so used to ridiculously cheap, one time purchases?
Indeed, we're getting ridiculous amounts of bad reviews re: our pricing model. People were used to getting transit direction for free in iOS 5, so there's a lot of angry people out there. Some people suggest we should get VC money and make the app free, but what we (@gcamp and I) really want is to make the best transit app out there and not have to care about an exit strategy or pleasing greedy angels.
In my personal opinion, if you're not thinking about an exit strategy, you should be.
In the bigger picture, Apple's top two smartphone competitors build transit directions into their mapping solutions. Apple can't afford to leave transit the exclusive domain of third-party developers indefinitely. To use Joel's phrase you're "picking up nickels in from of a steamroller". You should expect to get Sherlocked eventually.
Not everything has to be a startup with some grandiose exit strategy. Making a great product and a solid living off of it is perfectly viable, and quite preferable for many people.
But you're right about being aware of what apple may do in the future. I'm not convinced they'll add public transit (back) into their core mapping app though, as you imply. I think apple has made the decision to optimize for drivers, which tends to be the majority especially outside of huge cities.
We haven't. You're right that some help on the business side of things wouldn't hurt. With the iOS 6 launch though, Apple is pretty much taking care of the marketing end. Not sure what else could VCs bring us... (maybe that's just me being naive here)
I don't think the work to be done to keep the data fresh is that much, since they're basically scraping publicly available data. Plus, as nice as the interface is, Google has already done this with Now, and presumably it'll be coming to the iPhone soon.
