Universal App – One Price, Two Code bases – Merging nightmare
I'm working on the iPhone release of Landing Soon and I've been struggling with how to release two apps from a single (currently) universal project. I started the app with the intention of selling a single binary with both apps packaged inside it; however I came across a few issues with this approach.
The problem comes about when you upload a single package to iTunes Connect with both binaries;
- I can't set separate prices for each binary (iPhone/iPad)
- It's not clear that when a sale is made of the universal that it's because they wanted it on the phone or for the iPad
- There's no way to release different versions separately, if you update the iPad code it automatically updates the codebase for the iPhone.
The first reason I would wont two products is simple - the iPad is my primary market and hence I'll be devoting significantly more resources on this platform (mostly because of screen size affords me the ability to create a much more simplified UI) and therefore I feel I can warrant a slightly higher price tag.
There are simply some things a larger screen size lets you do that the iPhones' screen cannot - the Landing Soon dashboards are a perfect example.
On the second point regarding "who's downloading what" - if I knew that people are buying the iPhone app over the iPad version then I'd have to rethink my allocation of effort.
Until this afternoon when someone suggested I use two build targets and restructure my build process I wouldn't have even thought it possible to get two separate products from the same code base - so that's what I'll be doing over the next week...
The iPhone version will most likely be a whole dollar cheaper than the iPad version but will contain most (80%) of the feature set.