AppGratis

» see appgratis.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Simon Dawlat was born in 1984, the same year I was, and spent 2007 to 2009 working in Silicon Valley before going home to Paris with an idea that did not need much capital. He started a daily newsletter about iPhone apps in 2009 and called it AppGratuites. It had 20,000 subscribers by the end of that year and kept climbing past a million.

The company behind it, iMediapp, was put together in October 2010, and the newsletter became an app with one moving part: each day it picked one paid app and arranged for it to go free or heavily discounted for twenty-four hours, then pushed a notification about it to everyone who had installed AppGratis. Developers paid to be the app of the day because a spot bought them a spike of installs, and a spike of installs bought them chart position. The French trade press reported two million euros of revenue in 2011, rising to seven million in 2012.

The name was internationalized to AppGratis for the launch in the United States. By early 2013 the company employed about a hundred people in Paris and Lyon, and in December 2012 it raised ten million euros from Iris Capital and the Orange Publicis fund, a figure the American coverage a month later printed as $13.5 million. User counts in circulation that spring ranged from seven million to twelve million depending on who was counting and on which platform.

Turkey was never a serious market for the thing this ran on. Paid iPhone apps needed an iPhone, and an iPhone here carried an import tax that put it out of reach of most of the people I knew; the free tier was where the country lived, which made a service whose product was a discount on a paid app fairly beside the point.

~ the case file ~

~ 7 april 2013 ~

Apple removed AppGratis from the App Store on 7 April 2013. The stated grounds were clauses 2.25 and 5.6 of the review guidelines, which cover apps that display other apps in a way that resembles the store itself and the use of push notifications to send marketing. Apple had quietly added the first of those rules the previous October. Dawlat said he was in total disbelief and had assumed any crackdown would land on low-quality copycats rather than on the company that had raised ten million euros the previous quarter.

The reaction was louder than the usual developer complaint. A user petition gathered close to a million signatures by May, and Fleur Pellerin, then the French minister responsible for the digital economy, used the removal to argue publicly that distribution platforms needed regulating. None of it moved Apple. An Android version shipped in May 2013 to a store that had no objection to it, which mattered less than it sounds, because the money had always been on the other platform.

~ the four years after ~

What is unusual here is that the company did not die at the moment it was killed. It still had the raise and most of the staff, so it kept the service breathing while the engineering effort moved to something else: Batch, a push-notification platform for other people's apps, started in 2014 and built out of the infrastructure AppGratis had needed for its own daily push. By 2018 that was a profitable business, and it is the reason Dawlat's name is not simply an entry in a list of people Apple ended.

~ bye.appgratis.com ~

The service stopped on 15 February 2017 and the team put a single page at bye.appgratis.com. It opened plainly: "After 7 years of operating AppGratis and more than 50 millions installs globally we're shutting down the service today." They said they had written a long and thorough post-mortem weeks earlier, decided it was boring, and threw it away in favor of three short lines of advice, of which the last was that people will give you advice and often they are wrong.

Under that came the part that reads like a yearbook: a roll call of every first name that had worked there, Adrien through to the end of the alphabet, followed by thanks to everyone who had cheered at their jokes and downloaded their apps, and a footer saying the whole thing had been made in Paris and Lyon.

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