Announcing our free scanner app, again.
Free, now with 100% more libre.
When we decide to build a new app, we start by finding where the customers are. What kinds of apps are useful and popular? Can we make something nice for some slice of app users, and serve them better somehow? Wherever there are customers, there is competition. That’s proof of customer demand! It’s a good thing.
This is all to explain why, two years ago, we entered the hyper-competitive niche of document scanning apps. We built our app Scanner Live for the newest iOS release. It was a slick, minimalist take on the ancient niche of PDF scanner apps.
But the niche proved a bit too frothy for our humble plan – a plan which didn’t include paid advertising, because it was totally unaffordable. Ads for scanner apps cost $15 per tap and up – that’s not per download, it’s per tap on the advertisement! We hoped for the best and pushed ahead anyway, but Scanner Live had a mediocre launch, then languished in the back pages of the App Store for the last two years.
In retrospect, it’s not surprising Scanner Live didn’t succeed. Vibes, memes, and features for the latest iPhone can’t win against a massive paid user acquisition campaign. And maybe it’s just sour grapes, but we started to wonder if there was something avaricious about this niche. Why can our competitors – apps that, to put it delicately, vary wildly in quality – afford to pay $15 per tap?
The answer: they monetize their apps with weekly subscriptions, some of which work out to more than $400 per year:
Document scanning is one of the oldest, and most competitive, niches in the App Store. The category is led by a handful of honest, high-quality apps who charge fair prices (e.g. Readdle’s Scanner Pro, CamScanner, the stalwart TurboScan™). Look just a bit beyond these worthies, though, and you’ll find hundreds of lesser-known scanner apps hawking weekly subscriptions.
The irony is that this over-monetized niche is one of the least necessary, at least for simple scanning functionality. iPhones come with scanning functions built in; out of the box, your iPhone can do document scanning, text recognition, and even lightweight PDF editing and signing.
If the iPhone’s built-in capabilities ever took a bite out of third-party scanning apps, it’s hard to find the evidence. There are still millions of App Store users looking for document scanner apps. If you scan a lot of receipts, manuals, or notes, having a dedicated scanning app can save you a lot of frustration, and give you a library for your past scans - but users who look for these extra capabilities are vulnerable to being hustled into paying top dollar (per week!) for a slapdash reskin of the tech that comes free with their phone.
Our sour grapes fermented into the tart wine of righteous indignation, and we had a thought: Scanner Live failed to support our business, but maybe it can support the App Store economy as a whole, by giving users a safe, trustworthy, and free option for a lightweight scanner app.
Here’s how we’re going to do it.
Introducing Open Scanner
Open Scanner is the evolution of our scanner app. It’s free to download. It has no in-app purchases, no paywalls, no third-party SDKs, and no ads.
And it’s not just free to download. It’s ‘free-as-in-speech’, too: as the name implies, Open Scanner is open source (under the MIT license).
Releasing the app’s source code under a permissive license is how we make it trustworthy. Technically-minded people can read the code we write, audit it, and even republish it as a different app. The MIT license means that even if we’re lying, moustache-twirling villains who fill the app with ads and upsells, the app’s source code will be out there for anyone else to freely republish – our consent is not required. For the adventurous, you can even download the source code and run it on your iPhone.
Preorder now, keep it forever.
Now comes the ask: Even though it’s a free app, we are asking you to preorder Open Scanner.
Preordering Open Scanner does not cost money. It means your iPhone (or iPad) will automatically download it when we release it. A surge of downloads for a new app on launch day increases our reach and gets more eyes on the project.
Releasing our app like this gives it the forever home we think it deserves, and hopefully saves app users some money and frustration. When app users trust the App Store, everyone benefits: users take more chances on new apps, indie developers flourish, and the positive feedback loop produces truly delightful apps. In a way, it’s our iPhones’ community garden. Thanks for helping us tend it.