We all use apps, we all buy an awful lot of them, but not many people actually make them. Developer Insight is a new MacNN series that asks the makers of prominent software about their apps. It's a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the software that so many of us run our lives on, and it's also a chance to get the developers' view of what's happening with Apple and computing. These are the people who are doing the real work, and whose livelihoods depend on surviving in a difficult and complex market.

It's not going to be a series that grills developers and pits them against each other. Every developer will talk up their own apps, but they'll do so because we directly asked them. We picked each interviewee because we rate the apps they made very highly, and we picked them because they have a unique and long-standing perspective on the whole industry.

First up is Ken Case, chairman and CEO of The Omni Group whose best-known products are the To Do app OmniFocus, and outlining one OmniOutliner. There's also OmniGraffle for sketching out designs of all descriptions, and OmniPlan, a project management app. Last year, all of its apps completed their move to universal iOS versions as well, and it's fair to say that if you use any Omni app on Mac, iPhone or iPad, there's a chance you're a fan.

These are apps that engender passion, and if you're as keen a user as many of MacNN staff are, then you're reading this hoping that you'll get hints of what's coming next. You won't be disappointed. Before discussing the future of the Omni Group, though, we talked to Case about the origins of the company, and the state of both it and the whole software industry today.

Origin stories

"We started Omni Group as a business rather than [just] contracting for NeXT in '92," says Case. "Now we have 62 [staff] and certainly hundreds of thousands of users. There was a time when Apple was shipping OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner with every Mac, so during that time those copies went out to millions of people, but we don't know how many of those millions ever used them.

"It was partially when Apple decided to make OS X the default operating system, they needed some good native apps to use on there, so they found ours. They started bundling OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, amongst a bunch of other things in the bundle, mostly I think on Pro Macs at that time. It certainly got us a lot of exposure. It didn't make us rich ... [Apple wasn't] willing to pay a lot per seat on that."



Over almost a quarter century since the firm began, it's seen the restoration of Apple and the rise of OS X. Arguably, its apps have been running on OS X since before there was an OS X: many have their roots in software created for the NeXTSTEP operating system created under Steve Jobs that Apple bought when it brought Jobs back to the fold. It's also made many more apps than its current productivity collection: "Yes, we used to do OmniWeb and Omni Disk Sweeper," says Case. "More recently, we also used to do Omni Graph Sketcher, and if you go back further then there were things like Omni PDF and Omni Image and so on, but those didn't make it to OS X."

Now the company concentrates on productivity apps like OmniFocus, but that's a comparatively expensive one next to free alternatives, like Apple's own Reminders. Then if you're going to get a To Do app, it's highly possible that you already have one. Plus, moving from one To Do app to another is a big transition for any user, so developers face a lot of hurdles in getting new business. "I do know that the market is much bigger than we have tapped into [so far]," says Case.

"If you look at the numbers Microsoft quoted around how many people were using Wunderlist when they acquired that -- [around 13 million] -- it seemed crazy-big to me. So we're not that big, I guess you can say."

Today in the App Store

One of the greatest changes across the life of The Omni Group has been the rise of downloadable software but today, in 2016, many developers are not happy with how Apple handles this. "A lot of people are complaining about the App Store and some of the various issues, such as how long it takes for a review to happen, that there is a review at all, that it can be hard to find stuff," agrees Case. "But I think that most of those complaints come from people who never tried to distribute their software through retail stores.

"Because all of those problems, in retail, were magnified, you know, several fold. I mean just starting with the percentage cut that we get, we were lucky if we could keep 30 percent by the time it got through all the printing and distribution costs. The retailer needed a cut, the distributor needed a cut, everybody at every level who touched the software needed a portion of the proceeds, and now it's down to just Apple and us.



"So that's much more profitable right there: we're getting 60-70 percent compared to when we might clear 20-30 percent when everything was tolled [at retail]. So there's that element, but then there's also how long does it take to get updates out there? Well, when you had a printed box on the shelves it took a long time. You had to update all the CDs, get them out to people.

"We might be trying to hit, for example, a deadline for when the shelves would be refreshed. So you had some very hard deadlines that you were trying to make, and if you weren't lucky then maybe they would decide to move you off to a corner shelf. Or maybe they would just decide to pull you from the shelves altogether, because they don't have room on the shelves. That's a huge difference between the App Store and physical retail, where you were competing for every inch of shelf space."

Retail stores did have finite space, but maybe that was a benefit compared to the infinite shelves on the App Stores. Ken Case doesn't see that as a criticism of the App Store, though. "You can't see the full catalog in the store, but I don't think that's necessarily the store's job, to help everybody browse the whole catalog, because you'd just be overwhelmed. I'm not sure if there's a good solution to that or not, and I'm glad I don't have to try to solve it.

"However, in a sense, all of the ways that we had before to try to get people's attention are still available. We can advertise in a magazine, and say it's available on the App Store instead of available in CompUSA or wherever."

Staying with the App Store, but leaving iCloud

Apple now provides iCloud, a service that amongst other things keeps apps in sync across many devices, yet the Omni Group ignore that in favor of its own alternative. That product has a better name -- it's called OmniPresence -- but it is really duplicating what Apple is already doing. "Well, iCloud is really great when it works. I'll put it that way," says Case.

"When it doesn't work, then customers blame us, but we have nothing we can do to try to fix their problems. When we shipped the first versions of all of our software on iOS, all of them supported WebDAV." This was part of Apple's predecessor to iCloud, and performed much the same job of syncing. "Well, of course we all know what happened: after they introduced iCloud, they turned off the WebDAV access, and suddenly everybody who was syncing through Apple's once-supported service were upset because their Omni apps stopped syncing.

"So I guess there's an element of once bitten, twice shy. If we then switched to Apple's iCloud, then we would bitten again when the next thing comes along. I think it's great that Apple does keep moving forward, but we need to make sure we can support our customers, and we couldn't do it very well when we were building on top of services that could go away at any moment; that we didn't have control over."

The future of Omni apps

Each year the Omni Group publishes a roadmap for what it's planning to do over the next year or so. UPDATE 1/22/16: The roadmap is now on the Omni site. Ahead of releasing that, Ken Case told MacNN the broader strokes for this year and beyond.

"There's a lot left to add, which is good news and bad news," he says. "It's good news, really, because we want to keep making the apps better so it's nice to know that there is more to do. But one of the topics is better security, and having Touch ID support so that if you loan your iPad to somebody else, they can't just open up your OmniFocus and see what's in it. Similarly, we want to be encrypting data 'at rest' in documents. I want to be able to put a lock code on my OmniFocus database, or on an OmniOutliner document that I email to somebody.



"We've been thinking about and working towards just how to bring more of the power of the desktop to iOS, particularly now that there is the iPad Pro. We're thinking about how do we take advantage of that larger screen. We're thinking about how, if this is Apple's vision of the future of computing, how do we get that future to be as powerful and flexible as what we have currently on our desktops with Macintosh?

"So we have a lot of work to do on that front -- and there are little steps we can take for that and there are big steps. There are little steps, like it would be nice to be able to do batch editing on iOS like we can do on Mac, and the good news is that almost all of these things are things that we can do ourselves. We don't need any support from Apple or anything else, it just takes time to build it all out."

The Omni Group's apps -- OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle and OmniPlan -- are available direct from the maker's website. You can also get them all on the Mac App Store and on the iOS App Store too.

-- William Gallagher (@WGallagher)

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