Why alienating developers is a winning strategy | Hacker News Reader

Why alienating developers is a winning strategy

apenwarr.ca

18 pointsscommab11 comments

I'd disagree with the author. iPhone won't see very many large, high-risk applications developed as a result of Apple's approach. Apple screws over developers and partners too often. You will build a $1 application in a few man-months for iPhone, no questions.

Build a Google Voice? Build a Flash->iPhone compiler? You might get screwed and lose a really big wad of cash.

When business types decide what to build, they multiply out risks. You have technical risk (developers can't build it), market risk (people won't buy it), and a bunch of others. Typically, they're individually low-risk (say, 80% chance of success), but when you multiply them together, you get pretty low numbers.

If you toss in the additional risk of "Apple will cut me off if I'm successful and they want to compete with me" and "Apple will cut me off if they don't like me," it makes it a much less compelling platform.

The costs also go up if you can't share codebase. Requiring iPhone SDK is sort of sane -- you make an iPhone-specific front-end, and it looks better. Requiring Objective C or one of their other languages is kinda wacko -- you can't even share back-end logic. If I just spent millions on something complex (image processing engine, voice recognition system, or whatever), I don't want to spend another big portion of that for an iPhone port.

Worse, the same applies to custom business software, but even more so. If I have an enterprise app employees must use (think UPS guy or bus driver or anything like that), I care a lot about development time, not much about usability, and I can dictate platforms. If I can recompile to Android but rewrite for iPhone, guess what I'm gonna do?

What these authors fails to see is that innovation does not come from the big guys and that is all a heavily regulated platform will attract. In my mind I project that a lot of the authors must be younger, and have not been through one of the typical screw the developers cycles. This has been seen so many times in the tech sector, it is almost like clockwork.

The small developers will pack their bags and take their innovation to another platform, once one is up to par and that is the trick, as of now Apple is ahead of the pack, and so long as they are, developers will put up with them, but as soon as another platform is on par; The trickle will start to happen. Apple knows this and they have placed a huge bet on the fact that, they can remain the leader of the pack. I would assume that they feel that their patents are strong and that will keep them the front runner given their suit against HTC.

The author doesn't even mention innovation, and may not even see it as important in the platform game. After all, Apple spent years leading in innovation while it varied between "marginal" and "beleaguered" in the market. So clearly innovation isn't enough to win the platform game, and looking at the winner of the last big platform game I'd say that it may not even be necessary.

So while I personally value innovation, I don't see how it's relevant to the author's thesis.

Speaking of enterprise apps, look at the plight of the rather upset SugarCRM. As I recall, they were planning on using the Adobe tools so that they've have one code base for the various smart phones they want to support.

It doesn't make much sense that this app be totally in the iPhone style, it mostly needs to be "good enough". I can't see them doing anything other than treating the i<whatever> market as an unfavored stepson, unless a large majority of their customers use it instead of Blackberries and so on.

The author has entirely missed the reasons for Apple's successes and failures.

I was a Mac guy in the '90s. The Macs of the day were uninspired beige boxes. They were also expensive and used connectivity technology that made peripherals more expensive[0].

The OS also sucked. The UI was nice, but from a technical standpoint, NT4 was easily and clearly superior[1]. Even Windows 95 had better memory management and multitasking.

Everything Apple made from about 1988 to 1998 would have gotten the Steve Jobs "This is shit!" stamp. Apple lost ground in the '90s because it made average products and sold them at premium prices; it had little to do with third-party developers.

The success of the iPhone also had little to do with third-party developers. It simply has the best user experience, and a "wow-factor" that makes people want to buy one when they play with it. The iPhone would be the most popular smartphone even if it had no third-party apps at all; most people by the iPhone for the iPhone, not the apps.

[0] Not inherently, in many cases, but the result was less competition between peripheral makers than on the PC side.

[1] It pains me to say this. I've always hated Windows.

Maybe it's too early and I need my coffee, but I can't tell where you differ from the author. He also says the success of the iPhone had little to do with developers. ("Developers never had anything to do with it." is his closing line.) What you call "wow-factor" translates to the author's "awesomeness".

The last paragraph of the article is

Microsoft won on the desktop by being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile by being developer-hostile.

Quite a bit of the rest of the article doesn't seem to support that conclusion, but that does appear to be the conclusion of his article. I'm saying that Microsoft being developer-friendly has little to do with them winning on the desktop instead of Apple.

Incidentally, on the desktop Apple is now making good products and being developer-friendly. They don't have a huge market share, but I recently read that they're getting 20% of the global profits from PC sales.

I see where you're coming from now, thank you. FWIW, the sentence that followed made me interpret it more like this:

Microsoft won on the desktop [while] being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile [while] being developer-hostile.

(I didn't think the author meant to imply causality)

Author misses one important point - Apple doesn't need the goodwill now with a big winner on its hands, but it might need the goodwill later if they're in a competitive race in a new market. And all things being equal, I think developers would choose "the other side" if the quality/market size was close.

These sorts of short term capricious mandates don't always come back to bite a major player, but sometimes they do. It might bite Apple later, or might not. That article was a really fun read though, I do like his style and tone.

Not only that, he has a point: it might be fun to have an evil empire for hackers to rally against once more. ;-)

I think that author claims that Apple will always be one step ahead of the competition even without paying attention to what developers think and do and that's because Apple gathered a lot of money and they can put it into designing new gizmo and marketing it furiously so the user-base builds up and developers will follow because they are money-whores.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com