RealCasually

Thanks for the advice. What type of lawyer do you recommend for this? Any references available?

That is a very contained risk I am willing to take for what amounts to a hobby side project. I am just trying to see what I would need to do to cover my bases and ensure I don't enter into a zone of unbounded legal risk (or at least prevent it to the best of my ability).

That is certainly one aspect I am interested in HNs opinion on. Of course we won't be able to magically solve that issue, but I wanted to see what the current state of affairs is. As someone alludes to above, there are implications on even trying to police it vs respond to abuse comments. Just trying to see what the best step forward is.

Sounds like Slide Masters in PowerPoint. Have you given it a try lately?

I see a great many reasons to keep it closed, not least of which is many millions of dollars worth in intellectual property.

I want a pony, too. But unless I am willing to pay for it, I won't get one.

You didn't answer the question--what makes you believe you are entitled to free software from a company that employs thousands of people to write it?

Why should it be free software? What gives you a reason to feel that level of entitlement?

I would assert this is the worst time in history to get started in app development. I have been building apps since 2008, and things have been going downhill for indie developers. Back in 2008, many large companies didn't understand the space, and indie devs were able to carve out very lucrative niches. Now, with the abundance of simple toolsets, tutorials and classes, there is an app for seemingly everything. Worse still is the price for apps has been pushed down to effectively $0. Without creative marketing or a sizable marketing budget, creating an app in today's market is brutally challenging. Sure, you can hack up a quick utility now, but the chance it pays your rent for a month is approaching zero, quickly.

Something like $0.10/gal off, and tied between your Safeway loyalty account and credit card you use to buy your gas.

What problems do you see with Office for Mac? Honestly curious.

Top 2 choices: - Send an email to our list with a couple options. I would expect minimal response - Build in a popup in our app asking existing users to choose between 3-5 options, including the current. Report those stats to analytics and make a call from there.

Anything else?

Nothing like discovering your recently released app crashes on iOS 7 and being unable to download the SDK to find out why, or fix it.

Thanks for your opinion! I have removed the redirect.

Curious, what is your rationale for thinking this needs to be an iOS only concept? As an Android user for years, I don't really think twice when I see it, it's just convenient.

Even if the whole point of the click on the web page is to learn about the app?

My backup plan is the iOS Smart App Banner along with a custom Android solution that looks similar.

Good point about the potential double-prompt.

Try to think about it in the context of clicking on an ad for the product. Since the site is just a glorified app store page, I figure I am just reducing 1 click from the purchase flow.

Do I irritate enough people that they refuse to buy because they wanted to view the advertising site? This is a different scenario from a service which also provides a normal web service, but is trying to pawn off their mobile app.

For now, I am leaning towards automatically redirecting them.

Was the accounting error that you got paid some % of your retail price for each free download?

I believe I was just hearing about high profile apps including Facebook doing this recently. This is a somewhat out of character move to attempt to wrangle in the Play Store content.

Put another way, once installed, you press the Home key, and are 2 TAPS away from having it permanently set. It is a great solution to the problem, and something sorely lacking on iOS (for things like browser and email defaults).

We have been working for over a year on this app, which takes data from multiple official sources, and synthesizes it using an aviation concept of 'personal minimums'. We worked hard to polish the app in a niche which otherwise contains some pretty ugly apps.

I would love some honest feedback on our landing page and how we could improve it to drive more conversions.

Thanks!

I think this is dead on. In meetings at work, 10 minutes is the norm. A quick "sorry, running late" seems to make people feel immune to keeping a room waiting.

I think this is how people approach it. When you say switch over, what do you switch over to?

We recently discussed underscore-cli here on Hacker News (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4491058) and I find it to offer more than this, but still a nice tool.

https://github.com/ddopson/underscore-cli

Also available on iOS: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&#...

And on the web: http://shouldiflytoday.com

Thanks for any feedback!

Thanks for posting here. How does this project relate to XMLVM (from Google employees)? We used that in order to bridge an Android app to iOS and found it to be pretty impressive. Is this based on that foundation, or a purely new effort? The main difference I see from XMLVM is that it tried to also bridge some aspects of UI, as well as was a bit more generic to attempt to bridge to C and C# as well.

This seems a lot like a rebrand of XMLVM (http://xmlvm.org/overview/ -- also a Google-employee-run project) with some missing UI features.

Write Once, Run Anywhere.

Touche.