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Audiopad to stop sending messages by 31 Jan 2014

Audiopad is a beautiful app that does one task extremely well. It has proven to be a trusted companion to hundreds of users that have sent thousands of audio memos since the launch more than a year and a half ago.

Sadly, Audiopad did not gain sufficiently wide traction to stay profitable in the long run. The Audiopad service relies on a server to forward the memos to the recipients, and the hard truth is that this server costs money to run regardless of app sales. I have reached a decision to shut down the Audiopad server by 31 Jan 2014. From then on, Audiopad will lose its mailing ability, but it will still work as a stand-alone audio recorder.

announcement

I am truly sad to take a useful service away from the dedicated people who take advantage of Audiopad on a daily basis. But it’s a necessary move because putting money into a machine that doesn’t give at least as much money back just isn’t a sensible thing to do in the long run.

I have thought about switching the app to a subscription system, but implementing a new version would add even more costs. A number of existing users would also abandon the app and not pay a subscription. This is not a solution to the problem.

I also thought about asking for donations to keep the server up, but that is simply not a professional way to run a service. I doubt that users would keep donating to something they already paid for — even though they only paid $1. (If you really want to donate then either comment on this post or send me a message.)

This leaves me with the choice I’ve made. I am very grateful to the users that Audiopad has attracted, and it’s been very satisfying to build something solid that is being used by lots of people all over the world every day. That is a good thing.

Thank you very much.

Audiopad: a high-quality app

What are we up to at the moment? Two things:

First of all, we’re very pleased that the first version of Audiopad is so well received. We must have been very thorough in our testing because not a single bug has appeared after launch. Very pleased with that, too. There was a minor issue in the web service that sends the recordings to users’ mailboxes, but we solved that within one hour – and earned another great customer review.

Continue reading

SEO is paying off

Once upon a time, if you googled Audiopad you would not find this app on the first page of results. Thanks to some SEO magic, we now rank #2! (At least that’s what I’m seeing when I google “Audiopad”.) SEO stands for search engine optimization which is a systematic approach to improving the search engine ranking.

There is no trickery or bribing involved here. We achieved this SEO improvement exclusively by working with the content on the site and its meta data, and by getting some inbound links from the outside that are garnering more and more clicks.

Combining attractive content, careful wording, inbound links, and visitor clicks has paid off. I am positive that we will even reach pole position, and this might happen sooner than we expect. Continue reading

Lift-off!

Audiopad only just hit the App Store and is already receiving great customer reviews and 5-star ratings from around the world!

Here’s a great big thank you to all the early birds. They’re smart people! You should join them 🙂

Fellow developers might be interested to know that it took 12 days for the app to go through Apple’s review process, but the review itself lasted less than 3 hours.

Audiopad version 1.0 is ready!

We have thoroughly tested the many beta versions of the Audiopad app, and I am very confident when I now say:

IT’S FINISHED!

It will still take a while before you’ll see it in the App Store though, because their review process is always a game of roulette. I have no doubts that the app will be approved; the unknown factor is how long it will take.

If you’re impatient, you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.

Things are looking great!

I am very excited about the Audiopad development progress!

The graphics are complete and look awesome, and we’re making fantastic advances on the code too. The basics of the app are working as they should.

Audiopad app icon
Audiopad splash screen

We’ve still got to polish the completed parts, and there is some tricky back-end work still to do. One part of that work appeared because we ran into a limitation in iOS, but we’re turning that into our advantage because working around this limitation helps us deliver a superior solution – just wait and see!

Hello world!

Hello indeed! Welcome to the blog of Golfbravo.net. This is the soap box from which we will provide updates and progress reports.

Go check out our About page to get an idea of what we’re trying to do here. We mention being productivity maniacs. I really mean that; the most important thing to us is getting the task done – fast.

The prettiest application in the world is useless if it requires several manual steps that might as well be automated, or not even needed. The cleverest application in world is also useless if its user interface is not what the user expected. (I’m looking at you, Java. Oh, and let’s not forget Lotus Notes.)

We believe that the user gets the best experience when he can get his task done without even thinking about the tool he uses. The way to achieve that is to make the tool disappear; make it work exactly as expected. This is our design philosophy. it is simple to state but hard to execute – and we are determined to get it right (eventually).

We have a handful of product ideas and we’re going to execute them one step at a time. It is our hope that you’ll recognize our dedication in these products – although, if you don’t even notice the tool, we’ve proven our point!