Hacker News Reader

Comment by eludwig | Hacker News Reader

The amazing thing to me is that at WWDC, Tim Cook (I think that's who announced it) seemed genuinely thrilled that there are over 2,000,000 apps for iOS. So sad and useless. You could hear the barely contained horror of the assembled developers. iOS has become a victim of its own success.

I guess the market will eventually sort it out, but when? 2030?

View on HN

Usually it takes one turn or so of the technology cycle. Basically the market is poisoned as long as it's too competitive for customers to really differentiate between alternatives. Developers realize this, and stop paying attention to the market. Adjacent technologies (eg. iOS platform libraries, hardware capabilities, backend systems, market penetration) continue to improve, but nobody notices their improvement because everybody's given up on the space as unprofitable. Eventually somebody combines 2-3 of these new emerging technologies together in a way that makes a big difference to consumers, their growth rate starts to look like a hockey-stick, and they get bought for a billion dollars or so (if they weren't already in a big company). Then people start paying attention again, you get another gold rush, etc.

We went through this with the web between 2000-2004. All the money-oriented folks gave it up for dead with the dot-com crash, a number of tinkerers started to move in and play with it, and eventually we ended up with the GMail/GoogleMaps/Flickr/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit/AJAX/Rails explosion around 2004-2005. So usually 3-4 years.

When do you think those 3-4 years started for this bubble?

For iOS, probably last year (2015). Assuming Apple doesn't massively lose consumer marketshare (certainly a possibility in hardware, just ask Motorola), indie development on macOS/iOS/watchOS/tvOS will likely become viable again between 2018-2020.

This is an interesting time in computing history, though, because there are multiple overlapping tech cycles and multiple big companies driving them. During the web interregnum, the dominant tech company was Microsoft, and Microsoft basically completely controlled the channel to the customer. So we just weren't getting fundamental innovations in the browser - there was XmlHttpRequest and hidden iframes that sparked a lot of Web 2.0, and there was Flash from Adobe, but that was largely it. Today, we have innovation in cloud computing from Amazon and Google; we have innovation in programming languages from Mozilla, Jetbrains, and Apple; we have innovation in big-data tools from the Apache foundation and others; we have innovation in machine-learning from Google and a number of startups; and we have innovation in computing devices from Apple, Google, Pebble, Oculus, and a large number of other companies. So while the Apple ecosystem itself may face a dot-com bust, there could easily be a killer app brewing in technologies outside of the pure iOS ecosystem that uses an iOS app to deliver its service to the customer.

It does seem utterly tone deaf to celebrate this fact at a developer conference but they seem to do it every year.

Why? From Apples standpoint it means developers are continuing to keep iOS popular.

And honestly developers, individual and companies, are peer pressure driven. As long as others make it a popular platform, they'll develop for it.

From Apples standpoint yes it's great, I think developers would prefer to hear facts such as about how many users are active on the store, distribution of downloads, median number of downloads per app and revenue. It's like a boss holding a meeting to discuss how great his/her own bonus is this year.

It's more like the boss showing off the stock price. It gets everyone excited because the company is doing 'well.'

The only thing your metrics would do at WWDC would be to cement that unless you're the top app in your category, you're not making money, and Apple knows this. As long as they're super popular though, developers will keep trying.

Also, why would Apple do anything at their event other than make themselves look great.

Saying there are 2 million apps for iOS doesn't mean it is popular for app buyers. It just means it is popular for app developers.

The market may never sort it out. Apple doesn't need to fix the app market to make money, and they're really the only one who can.

So unless they start allowing third party stores, nothing will change.

> So unless they start allowing third party stores, nothing will change.

What would a 3rd party store do to make profitability? Best case thy take zero revenue and you get 30% more money - from TFA it doesn't sound like 30% or even 300% would have made a difference....

A third-party store could do a lot of things differently other than just lower the revenue split — you could have a recommendation engine like Amazon, or you could add curation, or you could change the way search works, or any number of other (possibly crazier) things.

Heck, you could literally just copy Steam in every respect and you'd end up with something significantly different from the current App Store.

Different stores would allow competition on store policies and inventory. Would a store that differentiates by disallowing certain in-app purchasing strategies by useful? It would to me, because I don't want to support companies that use certain sales strategies.

By disallowing certain IAP tactics, the price of an app might rise to meet the required profit margin. Would you be willing to pay more in that case?

> By disallowing certain IAP tactics, the price of an app might rise to meet the required profit margin.

To the degree the market will bear that price, sure. I suspect we would see both a raise in prices (of course), but also a realignment at the studios as to what the expected profit margin is.

> Would you be willing to pay more in that case?

If I could demo it to confirm it was worth the cost, or there was a fairly thorough review, then yes. Even if the "demo" version was ad-supported (and/or limited in some other fashion), that would be fine with me, I could update to the ad-free paid version with less permissions required if it was good. The problem is that they've discovered that ad-supported doesn't hold a candle to in-app purchases powered by game resource scarcity. That gameplay doesn't generally translate well to a paid version (unlimited gameplay resources makes it no fun), and it's too much work to expect them to essentially make two different games.

At this point I've basically given up on most app store apps. I do occasionally put the odd game on there from Humble Bundle though, and those are ones I pay for. You could say I'm getting a really good deal because I'm paying $5-15 for 5-10 games each time, but since I generally only play one of them...

Only in the case of professionally developed apps. There's tons of free (as in beer) apps out there that I just can't find because there's no way to filter out the IAP products.

Personally, I'd just be satisfied if they made a new category FREE+IAP and then we could search for and browse genuinely free stuff.

That's like counting the quality of the code from how many lines of code there are

I think we could send a huge message if at next year's WWDC everyone goes silent when they announce 2.5 million apps - or whatever it will be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com