This is a really smart idea to help developers of apps collect feature suggestions and help pay for the development of those features from your app's most active users.
The team behind this built AdDuplex which is a really popular cross promotional ad network on Windows so they know a thing or two about active communities and independent developers.
You've only just launched @ailon, but what apps are developers are you starting to see using the service? And where did the idea come from?
@_jamesmundy thank you for posting, James! We've been "dogfooding" the feature request side on our own app AppRaisin and a couple of apps have already launched campaigns during the limited preview phase. None of them are over yet :)
As for idea it basically came from a couple of tweets. One was a joke about indie developers going from making (even if imaginary) millions from paid apps in 2008 to making thousands ads later on, to looking for work in 2015. The other one had a chart of software prices from 1970s to this day, which as you can imagine was going down and converging on zero in the last couple of years. So, while bigger game companies can invest in optimizing free-to-play econimics and then pouring cash on user acquisition it felt like indie developers are pretty much screwed. And we just can't stand that. :) So we thought that most good indie app and games have a community of loyal fans who would pay more than $0.99 to get the app they like improved, but there's no good way to bring devs and users together to achieve that. Several brainstorming sessions later the concept for AppStretch was born.
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