How to Succeed on iOS vs. Android — Matt Rouif, Photoroom: Sub Club Podcast

0:00hello I'm your host David Bernard today's conversation is shorter than usual and will be featured in Revenue cat state of subscription apps report each episode in this series will explore one crucial metric and share actionable insights from Top subscription app operators with me today Matt we co-founder and CEO of photo room on the podcast I talk with Matt about why some apps see 30 times higher revenue on iOS versus Android the challenges of running a business on multiple platforms and why you should consider offering a free Android device to employees hey Matt thanks so much for joining me on the podcast thanks though it's been a

0:39while yeah it has so I want to have you on yall have been on both IOS and Android since very early on and has seen some really interesting things on the Android side but I did want to kick off on a higher level of just what are the things you think about as a CEO running a super fast growing app that's on both Android and iOS you how do you think about the differences between the two major mobile platforms yeah it's a question top of mind for a lot of topics to give some context yeah for started with iOS and later on went on to Android

1:17I think it's one year later like iOS 2019 Android even 2021 so even like one year and a half between the two high level I think the big differences are when I think I think iOS I think like a super penetration in the American Market when I think about under it I'm thinking about all the other countries there it's like it's a mix and some countries that are big for mobile subscription like Brazil southeast Asia even Europe where there's a like a good mix and so I'm thinking I'm actually thinking like some people might be only focused in the US and in this case I us makes sense if you're

1:53like you care about localization you want to launch in tons of countries then Android you need to do like cond do iOS only was there a lot of demand did you hear from users like build us an Android app I mean phot was still like kind of MVP the tech was good but not as good as it is now so it wasn't like I absolutely need it yet I think when we started to get traction on I think it was yeah eBay early days as marketplaces when then people we had influencers talking about us and like people in the comments the comments were I needed di on and Di and

2:27iond Andro so I think when you start to do marketing like you you feel like you're paying for actually you pay for some influencers and then all the comments are when is's under R goinging all that stuff so I remember that now so you feel people are asking when you start to eat product Market fit I think before that you can tell yourself like oh it would be better because then the like variety Loop like the famous K Factor all that stuff would be better but I'm not sure it's like you don't feel the pressure if you had to do it over again would you have launched

2:56simultaneously Android and iOS or do you feel like it was it was better to go ahead and kind of prove out the product Market fit on iOS first yeah never never like I would do exactly the same iOS and then one hour two two years later Android and I do think all the adopter of apps as a general rule of thinking would be more on iOS than Android and as a like as a general rule but even more so for the photo space photo video category when you started to build up to the launch on Android did you build up a whole separate Android team and is that

3:28how you run Android to this day is like you spun up a whole separate team that works in conjunction with the iOS team yeah we have two different teams phot the room so with time what we developed is shared engine that is running like the pixel rendering part so everything that is pixel rendering and AI is common we do have some native like device algorithm that run on Apple that is very I mean we didn't even try on Android like it's too fragmented the hardware to run yeah on device Mach running inference but the engine is all the same on iOS and now so how does that work out

4:04today as far as are you still doing earlier Explorations on one platform and like you would maybe test something first on iOS and then move it to Android or now do you kind of more simultaneously release on both platforms or are you even like experimenting with certain things that you think might work better on Android on Android and then bring him to iOS how do you manage that development process we don't don't have like a tightly loose specs where we want to release everything at the same time for all platform now I mean we have iOS Android and even web now the way we think about it is we need to run like a

4:41mean it's like you have two legs like if you really tie them together you don't make like big steps we try to have some flexibility to make sure we move fast because that's the key to success for startup and we kind of use like resources when it's easier I do think there are a few things where we try where it makes more sense based on the platform to try on different a version so I don't know there are more experiments or it's easier to track I mean I give you an example you can create a team in fot room and you can invite someone for Apple it's you can't

5:10really track because of privacy reason through the App Store if you're inviting someone so it's much easier to have a good Benchmark of what would work what would be the dream path on Android and iOS so I mean we're we're not like uh we depends on resources how big is the team iOS team is bigger than Android so it's usually it's iOS first but there are some stuff where it makes more sense to try Android that we would go Android first and then how do you think about monetization between the two platforms I know this is something where photo room is maybe a little bit unique from other

5:41apps but how do you think broadly about monetization amongst the two platforms it's not exactly the same the two platform what I remember quite clearly is so I was at GoPro before and we it was very challenging to have uh good monetization on the under side and what I learned is that there well at first difficult to build a good video app on Android it's the ipis from Apple are really good on the video side and the hardware is less fragmented like it's not like there are some still some device where you think there are some gpus and they're not here or like it's not plug in the right way Apple owns

6:17hardware and software obviously is a bit easier and then there's like I think apple has a very like an amazing brand on the photo side so if you're a photo obest like the reality is you're probably going to buy an iPhone like you really pass about the about photography and so what I noticed at GoPro is basically you were doing like people were doing 3x more revenue on average on apps and there were like 2x more people or maybe 4X more revenue and 2x more people so basically it was 1 to 10 the ratio of like a user the rpu by kind of average when I was looking at some

6:48benchmarks iOS to Android and then I dig into the photos space basically the ratio for photo apps was 30X so value of a user on iOS was 30X bigger than Android so that was a big learning there's a lot of marketing from Apple about like photography you actually if you look at the keynote like it almost as if like well we should call that the camera more than and a phone now because like that's the marketing cell that's why a lot of the reasons why people upgrade is because the camera got better so if you're like taking photos of your family it matters you want to spend time

7:21on photography then you're probably buying an iPhone especially in like the biggest Market of all like the US and that's like a huge that makes a huge bias towards like people spending money on the photo apps on the App Store compared to the Play Store what happened with photo room is like we got very International and the most important part is that people buy photo room because photo room helped them make money like we help your store grow we help you as an e-commerce owner as an entrepreneur as a restaurant owner to have good quality imagery to like present yourself on marketplaces on social network in your emails and so I

7:59mean as a business owner it doesn't matter like there's no filter on your iOS or Android person there's like actually no bias and so that's why at the end of the day like everyone is working a lot of people have small business owners there are a lot of them in the world who are under it and so they spend more they don't care they just spend the money that the subscription that make them like more successful so there is no bias in that and so we're much more successful like relatively on the photo space on under than the other apps that are like hugely biased towards iOS and because of the

8:27API also you see so many apps that never went on Android so it's like it never made sense economically for them where it's very different for us you've mentioned several times the fragmentation of devices on Android and the challenge is there do you have any advice for folks who are building on Android as far as like QA or like minimum required specs for the app how do you think about making sure that people do have a good experience on Android devices the best way to make sure you have a good experience is it's a very practical advice but I remember the thing I did is like for a year or so

9:03I I just switched as like a funer as we were building the app to Android and so I was like only using that to make sure it's important and there is like a you pay attention to details so that was like a first very practical just like remove your your sim card from your iPhone by a good Android device and make sure like you you test like it's dog footing is the key and then keep in mind also that like iOS people update and upgrade their device to lat us OS a bit more than an Android and Apple is really good at that they always have like they

9:35always give this like last feature that is like fun that makes people move and I think it's I don't know behind the scene but I think they really care about that and they advertise that a lot so yeah keep in mind you can't like maybe on iOS you can keep two versions of the major Ros and Andro you need to keep a bit more do you have a a separate QA team or what what does quality assurance look like on Android and and I mean do you even have like does the Android team have 20 or 30 devices that they test on or how do you think about that that

10:05quality assurance side of things for Android we don't have QA at phot so that's the one thing like everyone is in charge of their own bugs and everyone is using the app we do have a strong beta test flight Android internal so these are managed different ways but where people like test the app for a week and they have the latest feature but sometimes it's Uggy and we look at the analytics what's happening there is anything weird we have some signals you know I mean photo is lucky enough to have like a product that is you can use in your everyday life so we have people

10:37using regularly and the team internally using the app I you say like I want to be fair with the Android team like one of the difficult thing is the distribution of iOS versus Android in most tech companies is heavily biased towards iOS so it's more it's much more difficult to get people testing an Android what we do give is like anyone that wants an Android as phot employee who on iOS and once's under and going to use it or test it or try it or is a PM which is you can have two device if you're going to help the Android team any other learnings that you've had now

11:10operating on Android for almost 5 years that you think folks could take away I mean one of the challenge that we haven't really solved is how do you you solve for design and and you know product because most people and most PMS they would go on iOS at our scale I'm sure like if you're 10x bigger you can have someone that is specific you can have a design that is specific to Android but reality is like it's like two different languages you know it's two like you I mean you can take Portuguese and Spanish like it it's some and grammar is similar but some like idec like expressions are different and

11:42then you can make kind of a f or stuff like this so give some freedom and make sure that the Android team like understand and that you you say know you understand the the differences like I mean the obvious example is a share icon I had so much debate with the design team and like a product about like the designs and you you see this this little arrow compared to the three circle like the branching on under it that are that is the share icon like people under they don't understand the iOS icon and it doesn't look native it's like you're using a word in another language in

12:12their platform so if you're making the betat and that's for bed that like native is better then yeah you need to adapt and adapt the language and we don't have two version of the designs that one for iOS 400 so makes things a bit difficult but yeah you have to allow for this Freedom based on like the native language any last tips that you think people should be thinking about and the differences between IOS and Android there's one big thing that people tend to forget is Apple is 30% Commission on new subscription they have like some people if you renew stay on 15% under is all 15% so it it does make

12:48a difference for your margin especially for like a company or margin like fot room where you have like GPU costs for machine learning and gen so it does does make a difference yeah yeah I think a lot of people forget that I forget that often is 30% versus 15% you know and for those you maybe aren't familiar with this on Android Google made the decision three or four years ago that just all subscriptions it doesn't apply to to games and consumables and single inap purchases but on all subscriptions it's 15% across the board and as Matt was alluding to on iOS once a user has retained for more than a year you do get

13:26bumped down to 15% but on initial conversion that spread instantly gives you more margin so definitely something from a business perspective to be thinking about it even if you're average revenue per user is lower on Android your margin is actually higher on those pairs so yeah great tip for folks to be keeping in mind yeah but build on under is great too all right anything else you wanted to share as we're wrapping up any especially great roles you're hiring for these days yeah yeah I mean we keep growing and so we hiring both in engineering both platform IOS and Android and also so like we're hiring

14:00for top of tunnel of the App Store like if you're app store haer you know all the details of that and you want to look like very top of Fel of apps I actually play with there are many things like act new things use phot API to make screenshots you know all these things like it's a very interesting role awesome all right Matt thanks so much for joining me this is really fascinating thanks for sharing your insights thanks David it was a good time thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. subclub

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