In the very near future, Mr. Robot will no longer sell his app in iTunes and the Android markets. Instead, he’s moving it to be a web-based app… which in all honesty will look and act just like the app and you will barely notice a difference. You’ll just browse to it instead of launching it.

Why these changes?

Delays on the Apple Market: Apple takes 1-2 weeks to approve any changes we make to the app. That means every time there is a patch, like 4.3, iPhone and iPad users get information late. And that’s not cool, man.

Platform support: it doesn’t take a ton of work for us to port these apps over to the Apple and Android markets, but it does take some effort. And inevitably, users have problems with the app stores themselves, or technical difficulties from jailbreaking a phone or running uncommon OS’s, so we try to help them. But that means we have to become experts for every platform and OS… that time adds up. And we’d rather be spending our limited resources developing cool features, not porting & supporting the app on 4 different markets. We haven’t supported Windows phones or Blackberries yet because the demand isn’t high enough to dedicate time to it, and that royally sucks for people who own those phones. Mr. Robot doesn’t want to discriminate against those humans anymore, so moving the mobile functionality to the web will now support all platforms.

Money matters: Some of you have an Android phone and an iPad, which means you have to buy Mr. Robot’s app twice (he apologizes for that btw). Also, sometimes people do something nice for Mr. Robot and he wants to give them a free app, which he can’t do on the Android market right now, bummer. In addition to all of that, both Google and Apple take 30% of every app sale… sure $0.60 from a $2 app may not seem like much, but if we sold $10,000 worth of apps, that’s $3,333 we could have used to pay another developer to make cool features, so why let Apple or Google have that money?

Moving the app to the web also allows Mr. Robot to let you try features before you buy them (no credit card required). What a thoughtful robot.

How will the web-app work? Once it’s live, you will just browse to www.askmrrobot.com on your mobile device, and we will auto-detect that you are on a phone. We will show you the mobile friendly web-version which will look, and function, like the app does today. That version will require a premium subscription, which is only $1 a month (our low early-adopter price) or $12 annually.

What if I already bought the app? Mr. Robot has your covered! As a thank you for being an early app owner, Mr. Robot is making special user accounts, just for you. These special accounts will get you free access to the mobile web version and RoboCouncil all the way to Mists of Pandaria forever. Also, if you buy an annual subscription at any point up to Mists of Pandaria, you get $2  $6 off the price. Mr. Robot talks more about the transition plan here.