To who?
It's still true that foreflight costs less than the paper charts it replaces, right?
There are other very good options out there. Foreflight might be the dominant EFB, but it's certainly not the only one. If you don't like the price, then just try something else. I use iFlyEFB. There are other options out there that are free, if you're *really* price conscious. (But if you can't stomach ~$100ish a year, how can you stomach flying at all??)
[td] Full Story: AVweb (11/3) I seem to think boeing made some money on the deal quite unusual for them… |
Probably costs less than the postage to mail you the paper charts for an IFR subscription, but when on compares the FF pricing to other products the FF is 2x.
Private equity and growth capital? Oh, plan on some significant price increases.
It was announced in April. The deal closed and money changed hands this week.
ForeFlight offers so much more than just replacing paper charts. Weather, NOTAMS, flight planning and filing, etc.
The deal has been in the works for a few months now, so the only news is that they finalized the sale to Thoma Bravo, a software investment firm.
I’ve been using Aviator Assistant for a while and like it.
There's considerably more to Jeppesen than ForeFlight. Candidly, FF is a small chunk of Jeppesen. The major airlines have departments that handle releases, flight planning, dispatch, crew management, etc. This is expensive and many of the small airlines and bizjets can't afford it and/or don't have the expertise. So these customers contract with Jeppesen. Remember, this is a global business. Take a look on the website to see where the offices are. Not only this, but all the "other country FAAs" send Jepp the raw data for integrating into FF and other tools. It's an incredibly expensive and time-consuming process to put into Jeppesen format. There's a huge data center in the main offices (if it hasn't been moved to another building) glassed-in so you can watch the real-time maps of all the aircraft being monitored.
Exactly. I'm always very entertained when people complain about the price.
Do they own a meaningful amount of real estate? That would be pretty unusual for a mid-cap company that's got a global footprint. I'm mildly surprised to read that they own any at all. It's not like they are a manufacturer building factories. They just need offices.
I have a big mac before most commercial flights. Not really a fast food guy in general, but the low quality of the sit down places in airports makes the consistently mediocre quality of a big mac, fries and a coke appealing in that setting.
They’ve been in that building for 25 years. As for the other 2 that are nearby, dunno. Need to remember until this week, Boeing was the company, Jeppesen just a small chunk of Boeing Airplane.
Yeah, I knew you were joking.
Most of that analysis makes sense, but the "deliberately limit their market" part. I dunno. Last I saw, Apple sells as many tablets as the next four vendors combined.
I actually stopped using Jepp when I switched from paper to totally ForeFlight. Back then I always had a good experience when I had to reach out to them. Sorry to hear they've gotten so bad with the Customer Service.
On the iPad/tablet side it is true Apple has a huge chunk of the market. But how many FF users also use, or WANT to use, their phone as their backup device... On the phone side it is 3 to 1 Android.
Probably more appropriate to talk about OS market share rather than brand market share. Globally, it's about a 50/50 split between iOS and Android. In the US, it's closer to 60/40 in favor of iOS, but in Europe the balance tilts toward Android.
Not in the US, where the vast majority of FF's market is. In the US ios is nearly 60% of the smart phone market. Among pilots, and this is an educated guess, I would think it's even higher than that because you have to have a certain amount of money to fly and people with that kind of money are also prone to buying phones that "just work", rather than trying to save 20 cents per day by buying a phone with a less consistent user experience, or a weaker app store, or won't seamlessly connect to my ipad and mac, etc.
Yeah, it's essentially a complete rewrite. And it's a rewrite to compete in a market with a customer base of people who spend much less on both platform and apps.
I mean, that's definitely got a lot of truth in it. But it's also true that there is no single android. So saying 60/40 in phones in the US still hides that to address the 40 is going to be tons more work than addressing the 60. And don't forget Surface. That's in the 10% range now on tablets also.
Maybe so. And yet, it can be done. iFlyEFB started on WinCE before the iPad was a thing, but quickly added support for both iOS and Android quickly after tablets appeared on the market. They have the same UI on both platforms, and it works on pretty much any Android device running an OS since v...7, I think? So it can be done. And they have essentially one developer.
Absolutely it can be done. But there are only two ways to do it.
Or a third option: They were first to market, when iOS was the only game in town, and had a product that was good enough that they established a critical mass of market dominance such that they can afford to just continue to ride that.
They weren't first. There were other tools on proprietary platforms. They weren't even first to launch on generic hardware. WingX was a little earlier, probably others. And ifly was only a few months after FF. First mover advantage wasn't there, so we're back to my first hypothesis, that people actually wanted a native experience. FF might have been the first to provide that particular wrinkle. Heck ios and android even launched the same year. There wasn't a time when ios was the only game in town. It is true that the cross platform toolkits were pretty awful back in the day. And it's also true that android was a disaster back in the day, with no one meaningfully enforcing or even recommending core experience patterns. This was true to the extent that many argued back in the day that it was one of the benefits of android. A developer wasn't constrained to what Apple thought. They could do whatever they wanted from the app all the way to the OS. So a million vendors made a million phones, none of which worked the same, shared an app store nor, in many cases, even really actually worked. And, again, people used to pitch this as a good thing! We're still dealing with the repercussions of that insanity almost two decades later even though the situation has improved tons over the years.
We had very different experiences during this era. My flight club had multiple people using multiple solutions (both dedicated hardware and apps). I personally had WingX, FF and another one whose name I no longer remember. It would be fun if someone had an article comparing products in the 2007-2009 timeline.
