Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Pleco Software @pleco.com · 15h

Business update: Q3 of 2025 was:

- Our best App Store quarter since 2019;
- Our best Google Play quarter *ever* (driven in part by a 55% YoY increase in OCR);
- Our best web store quarter since 2009 (thanks to a court ruling letting us offer discounted in-app purchase links to iOS users in the US)

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 21

This is 99% of the same story as Pleco 4.0; nothing went wrong, but we're doing fine financially and we like the work and want to get it right.

“We’ve been having fun,” Gibson said. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

The lengthy production wasn’t the result of development challenges or obstacles, they said. They just needed all these years to ensure that Silksong was exactly the game they wanted to make.

“It was never stuck or anything,” Gibson said. “It was always progressing. It’s just the case that we’re a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn’t any big controversial moment behind it.”

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

Thanks, we finally found the problem - forgot that there's a different file catalog being delivered to the current public beta than to the current internal one

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

Weird - here's a manual link to the data file:

azcdn.pleco.com/packages/p4d...

Can you try downloading that, *not* unzipping it, sharing that zip file with Pleco and opening it in "File Manager"?

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

That's odd - does Registration / 'check for new purchases' help?

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

But 4.0 doesn't support in-app purchases (Apple doesn't let you charge people for stuff in betas) so if you didn't buy it in 3.0 on some other device you'd need to buy it through the website

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

Sorry, should be up now - it's a bit janky but the links / tables all seem to work

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

You can get the US$29.99 price on our web store store.pleco.com

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

(there are some complicated nuances to that relationship which we don't need to get into here, but if Harvard is ever interested in selling us the print rights we'd love to do a printed 7/e ourselves)

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

The print rights remain with Harvard but there are no plans for a printed 7/e as far as we know; Wilkinson's revisions since February (which are extensive, he literally added his last citation a week ago) have all been on the e-book so a printed 7/e would likely be converted back from that.

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · Aug 19

only in e-book for now so our bookshelves are safe for the moment.

Tom Mazanec @tommazanec.bsky.social · Aug 19

For my China studies friends here: new Wilkinson just dropped. 7th edition, huge news. On Pleco, too.

If you don’t know what that means, do you even sinologize, bro?

@pleco.com
#Sinology🀄️📚

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Aug 19

We just launched the new 7th edition of Wilkinson, this time as a digital-only version but available through Kindle and Apple Books as well as through Pleco. $59.99, or $29.99 if you buy it in Pleco as an upgrade from 5/e or 6/e.

Chinese History: A New Manual, Seventh Edition

www.pleco.com

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Jul 25

Sorry for the slow reply. Yeah, it should still be in "Add-ons" - are you using the 4.0 beta by any chance? We aren't able to sell add-ons in that, but you can buy it through our website.

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Jun 10

Update: we've released a new 4.0 beta that should get it to be functional (albeit still with some visual glitches) on iOS 26.

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Jun 9

Note: Pleco 4.0 beta does not seem to work on iOS 26 developer beta (the entire search screen vanishes when the keyboard is open). Regular Pleco seems to be OK aside from some visual glitches, but for 4.0 if you want to keep using that you should stick with regular iOS for now.

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · May 1

We're probably also going to start offering discounted upgrades from individual add-ons to bundles - and maybe even "X % off if you buy X or more dictionaries" type stuff - since with a website we can do arbitrary pricing for arbitrary stuff and aren't bound by what's possible with Apple IAP

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · May 1

It's possible we'll also end up making some add-ons exclusive to our website store, e.g. to reduce paperwork for low-volume long-tail type add-ons or even because it's the only way we can offer a new title (e.g. if it's a % based on sales price and there'd be no money left for us after paying Apple)

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · May 1

Update: we're waiting a bit on the direct sales update, as we have a number of new add-ons we were already planning to launch soon and want to roll out that and web purchasing at the same time (likely with lower prices for web purchases, at least in some cases)

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · May 1

This is a glorious day, one we’ve been waiting for since 2009, and while very much delayed, it is, nevertheless, justice for app developers at last

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · May 1

Gigantic news from the App Store world. (We plan to submit an update adding direct sales tomorrow) www.the-verge.com/news/659246/...

A judge just blew up Apple’s control of the App Store

The judge called Apple’s insubordination a “gross miscalculation.“

www.theverge.com

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Apr 1

Sorry for the slow reply. It doesn't look like our version has the same mistake - we did our own conversion from the original InDesign files so there's no particular reason to expect we'd have the same mistakes (though there could always be different ones introduced on our end).

Image from Chinese graded reader book, person busting open some doors

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Feb 13

We’ve seen more of the latter so far, but will cover whatever sticks

Pleco Software @pleco.com · Feb 12

A big App Store change that might be relevant to some long-time Pleco users: you can now move purchases from one Apple account to another Apple account. This doesn't work for deactivated accounts, and it's not currently supported in the EU, UK, or India.

Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another Apple Account - Apple Support

If an Apple Account is only used for making purchases, those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple Account to consolidate them.

support.apple.com

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Dec 31

Thanks! Not currently possible under our license with them, unfortunately, though depending on how the app works it's possible you could read their books on Android with our Screen Reader function.

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Pleco Software @pleco.com · Dec 31

Not at the moment - I don't think our PDF library supports a different approach to dark mode - but a good idea for the future.

Pleco Software @pleco.com · Dec 17

Nothing like that at the moment - people occasionally ask for a 'tip jar' but we generally just recommend that you find some other Pleco add-on you might consider useful and buy that :-)

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