Mobile App Developers Are Suffering

The converse of the "long tail" distribution has to be the "high peak": a few apps (and a few developers, like King) are making almost all the money. "99% of the value is centralized to the top 0.01%", as we're increasingly seeing in the real economy.

Everyone agrees that app store discovery is bad. What could be done about it? Is there enough incentive for the platform holders to fix it? I'm not sure about the "decay" metric, that would seem to reward spamming still further.

The "instant app" business is much more questionable. If you want the instant transientness of a web page, why not write .. a web page? Is it because you want permissions to access privacy-sensitive parts of the user's phone?

Or we could just accept that the market is full and that all the software people are prepared to pay for is already out there.

(There might be an underserved market for niche expensive apps that would work through Kickstarter, but you can't crowdfund apps because all purchases have to go through the monopoly app stores).

Regarding the supposed barrier that is installing the app: I don't know. For a paid service (as we are comparing apples to apples) the signup process on a web app can be more tedious than clicking a button, entering your mobile store password, waiting couple of seconds, and tap "Open app".

My candidate causes of the current situation:

- People are used to paying very little for apps. On the one hand, apps have been commoditized, yes, but on the other hand, web apps can be a lot more useful and productive than a phone app. We'll see what the iPad Pro and Android successors do about that. I'd suspect that there will serious money be made in enterprise apps.

- Competition (just swipe left and you find other purchase options) and reviews (highest ratings always wins) - I think OP got that right. You CAN do research about web apps before you subscribe to one, but that information is never complete and you can easily shrug off a bad review on some forum and buy that subscription nonetheless.

- Lack of trial versions. I would never buy a $10 app that has one 2-star rating. I would try it out, though. Note that almost every web app has a trial mode - it's a huge conversion driver! That one's completely missing for apps. I think that's also the reason why freemium has become predominant.

We are suffering, but we won't give up so easily.

I am in the top 1-2% of Android developers [1], and while I've found it relatively easy to reach decent traction with a few apps (say 1000 downloads a day, or say $1000 a month), it is very challenging to keep an app in the very top (25k downloads a day, or making more than $15k a month) for very long.

You can put a good fight during your first month, since you can make it very high in the "Top New" rankings, but after that you are against the big guys.

As the article says, paid promotion is a prohibitive channel. At the usual free to paid conversion rates, making ads pay off is extremely difficult.

These two points the article makes are flat out wrong:

> The search function is unusable unless you know the name of the app you’re looking for

Absolutely no. SEO (we call it ASO in the app store) is important, and keyword search is a definitely a source of organic installs.

> This means that unless you actively manage your reviews, expect to have a 2–3 star average.

No way, a high quality app can have a 4.5+, and many decent ones have at least 4.0+.

[1] Not me personally, but the small company I cofounded

I'm kind of in the "so what" camp. Making mobile apps is a choice an individual, team or company undertakes.

To then turn around and say these people are "suffering" is daft. You're a dev, go make something else.

> If the status quo continues, expect the overall app quality to stagnate and developers to move on to other platforms that have a less skewed power law.

This prediction likely won't come true. I don't know why but the situation hasn't changed in years and developers keep pumping out thousands of apps including many high quality polished apps.

I think the biggest issue isn't the searchability of mobile apps but rather the price point. At the current price point you cannot pay for any advertisement unless your in the top 1% and hence your whole marketing plan is then the App Store search results. If prices were more realistic and people could spend on advertising then any app could be discoverable. This is basically what happens when you go with bottom of the barrel pricing...

This is quite interesting though. On the web, search engines were built to fulfil a very specific need... finding content. The more open the web became the better search engines could find what you were looking for. Now with apps, they're being built at an extremely rapid pace, I wonder if we could expect to see some content-finding framework popping up to solve the saturation/discoverability issue.

> In the past four weeks, there were 45,000 new apps submitted to the iOS App Store alone.

That's...staggering. If I tried to guess I would have been an order of magnitude out.

Add to this the segmentation of the market wrt Java and Objective-C/Swift. The app converters are still not fully convincing in my opinion, while developing a web app is directly cross platform.

Independently, the idea of an app ranking similar to HN or Reddit is brilliant.

This type of article comes out a few times a year.

Comparing to the Web. How many new web sites are brought up each day, and out of those how many will gain significant traffic, and generate any significant revenue?

But finding Apps is hard? Yes it could be better, but you can use the Web to your harts content to promote your App which is searchable, assuming that's the problem.

This makes me think of the guy who did the Carrot weather App. An independent developer that took an over saturated category and did something unique.

At the same time thousands of weather Apps, that all look like clones of each other where submitted to the App Store, and nobody cares, but the problem is the App Store right?

45000 apps per month... Maybe I should release my mobile game on desktop instead.

The question is, whether Apple and Google think that something is wrong, or they think that everything is all right. They are the ones who set the rules. Will they receive more money when small companies will be able with less effort to reach the top ranks? I'm not sure.

I don't think that Apple can't change their ranking algorithms. And if they don't change them fundamentally for years, then probably they are OK from point of Apple. And users probably are OK with that too. And if ISV are suffering, who really cares? You can't pay for ads? OK, but BigCompany can, so we will sell ads to BigCompany instead of you. That's how capitalism works. So unless some government regulator forces Apple or Google to change ranking rules, I doubt, that anything would change.

I've developed a few apps, and the method that I saw huge potential in was to promote the app to early adopters by submitting it to specialized forums like xda-developers. These are the folks who go out of their way to give your app a spin and spread the word elsewhere for free.

He's right on the fact that something has to be done. But autodownloading things isn't necessarily the solution.

There's an over-saturation of applications out there and most of them are useless. App developers need to recognize the fact that whilst smartphones are becoming the primary computing devices for a large part of the market, the usecases are largely the same as with most other computing devices - media, finances, shopping and social interactions. And you can do most of that with 10 applications at most.

Personally I haven't come across an application that would prove to be useful or enable a new use case for my phone in the past 2 years.

You can offer an Android app on your site if the user/discoverer has permitted 'unknown sources' for app downloads in their settings, but to me the issue is trust. Not that the app store ensures you don't download malware, but people are not too trusting of site offering apps. Peer-reviewed apks could change that, and an app with malware would be found out before spreading too far. Maybe this is a way to at least bypass the stores. This does not address marketing and discovery.

Thanks for this, I really enjoyed the article. Its what I have been thinking of for a while but quantified much better.

Kind of reminds me of desktop development in the 90s. If you want greener pastures go to augmented reality or VR. Like hololens or Occulus. Throw in a couple drones for good measure and you got yourself a platform to play in.

Tags would be useful, if you were limited to two or three, to aid discovery. Search in the app stores seems to be pretty useless.

That was fun! I can't decide if it was a joke, though.

It's still funny.