100

I feel like celebrating! 🎉

Today my IP camera viewer for macOS, GlanceCam, received its 100th rating in the App Store, a 5-star review:

For such a nerdy app, that requires Users to have some knowledge of their network and to customize URL strings in order to connect to almost every brand and model of IP camera out there, I think it’s a great average (and it the US App Store it’s even better at 4.2 stars with 45 ratings).

The 1-star reviews sting a lot, to be honest, but are to be expected because the app is not really plug and play, as I try to make clear before the purchase, in the App Store description.

To help make the camera manual configuration process easier, I reply to all reviews and support requests, usually in less 24 hours, volunteering to research the proper string for the specific camera a User owns; sometimes I can’t find it because the camera does not support standard protocols, other times people don’t get in touch at all, and in a few cases they didn’t read the app description in the first place and expected a different product, but hey, that not only happens in the App Store, but with every kind of product sale everywhere. In all these situations where I can’t help, I immediately point discontent Users towards Apple refund procedure, but the return rate for GlanceCam is very low, again a great result for this kind of application.

Overall I think GlanceCam has the most generous and supportive customers possible: having had a 100 people take the time to rate the app, and 36 of them to actually write a review, is such a privilege for an indie app developer, and I wanted to take the time to acknowledge that.

P.S. Today’s 5-star review renews GlanceCam’s most frequent feature request: “Really hoping the ability to view multiple cameras at the same time comes soon”. I’m not really ready to give a timeline for it (I’m trying to learn a page or two from this blog post from Brent Simmons), because work on this feature has proven time and again to be a lot longer and difficult than I expected, but I have a decent prototype working on my Mac, and GlanceCam 3.0 will certainly include multi-windows support when it ships, hopefully not too far in the future. Sorry I can only promise that it will come, but not how soon!