Indie Developers and Crossing the App Store Chasm | Hacker News Reader

Indie Developers and Crossing the App Store Chasm

dangrover.com

95 pointsdangrover15 comments

Again, what is the iPhone app store doing that Palm didn't do before? There was a thriving app market. While it was web based (as opposed to device based), normal every day people bought millions of dollars in apps every year. I cut my teeth in that market at Quickoffice (who has translated that experience onto the iPhone today). While Palm was at its peak we would do 7 figures in sales.

What Apple did that other cell phone competitors (particularly Symbian) absolutely failed to do was make the app buying process seamless. For Palm users it was drop dead simple. Download the file, double click, and sync the device. On Symbian devices it was a mess of menus, disclaimers, and other crap that made installing stuff generally suck. It looked and felt like installing a big software package on Windows. The iPhone certainly deserves credit for fixing that.

Still, so much of what the iPhone has done was improve on what the folks at Palm did years ago. You can find examples of touch based interfaces (snappermail springs to mind) on the old Palm devices. Palm sported app-centric data with no exposed file system. Many of the design conceits of the iPhone first resided on Palm devices. It's part of the reason that I chuckle every time Jobs rants about how everyone is trying to steal from 'him'.

That said, there is one thing that I think is truly revolutionary about the iPhone app market. The advent of truly useful (and effective) mobile ad networks changes the game quite a bit. Being able to monetize free apps is huge. One of our app developers here in Colorado has actually seen their ad-supported titles surpass their app-store purchases which is interesting (and they sell a LOT of product). We didn't have that in the old days... it would have been really nice:) Both Google and Apple are bringing interactive ads to their respective platforms, so they clearly 'get it'.

In todays marketplace Apple clearly doesn't have a monopoly on the app market. The Android app store is a worthy competitor. It's easy to find apps (although I wish the 'top *' categories would rotate MUCH faster). They install seamlessly. You can find all the information you need in store. I really am not sure how it's really any different than the iPhone experience...

That's kinda my point. The App Store isn't that great. It's the surrounding platform that makes it work.

I think, with some improvements, Apple could be moving way more apps with the App Store.

> I really am not sure how it's really any different than the iPhone experience...

A few opinions:

* The iPhone UI looks so much better than the Android one. Yes, users care about such details. It's all part of their overall experience.

* The responsiveness of the iPhone is unparalleled. This has an impact on the experience users have when they run apps.

* iPhone users can generally count on a certain level of quality from approved apps. Android users don't have the same luxury. As a result, Android users may feel less inclined to explore and install new commercial apps (if the risk of wasting money is greater). This issue may be partially resolved by their refund policy, but still, no one likes having to deal with refunds.

* The online Android Market only lists a few apps. Sure, you can browse all of them from your handset, but it's an annoying limitation. I can't even see the price of these top applications showcased online.

* People from many countries cannot purchase applications from the Android Market. Only developers from a handful of countries can publish applications on the Android Market. As a Canadian developer, I'm not able to. So much for the open device (yeah, I could sell them outside of the Android Market but that's a pretty huge disadvantage).

My experience with Android is purely in the form of my HTC incredible. I get that we're talking about pretty subjective things here:)

* UI appearance: I think the new HTC sense looks and feels on par with my iPhone 3GS. It's attractive and intuitive. My wife actually finds it be far superior for her tastes.

* Responsiveness: This is less subjective. Android running on the snapdragon is VERY responsive, certainly on par with the iPhone. I have played with a buddies original Droid. It definitely has some general lag to it. The difference between my phone and his is night and day.

* Quality of apps: Seriously?:) The app store is filled with 180,000 apps. 179,000 of them are complete crap. I've owned an iPhone since day 1... fart apps, picture of the day apps. I bought a fitness tracker a couple of months ago that crashed constantly and barely worked. Apple is not hand auditing applications. It's random at best. The auditing process is a content-control not quality-control. Among the apps that I actually use, I find the quality to be quite high on Android as well. There are bad apps and there are very good ones (weatherbug on Android is actually much nicer in my opinion).

* Android market: I guess I've never considered this. I've actually never even looked at apps using desktop iTunes. 100% of my app purchases have been on-device. I think this really comes down to the philosophy of the platforms. Google is building a self-contained pone-in-the-cloud. Apple still sees the iPhone as a bit more of a computer satellite (like Palm, but far less tethered I imagine).

* Countries: Ya.. that's definitely lame. I assume it's going to change soon. I would hope at least. You definitely have a fair gripe here (and I'm sure it colors some of your opinions a bit?;> )

what is the iPhone app store doing that Palm didn't do before?

Moving units.

It's annoyingly difficult to pull definitive PDA sales numbers for all time, but this article:

http://digital-lifestyles.info/2005/08/03/pda-sales-set-for-...

says that annual PDA sales peaked at 13.2 million in 2001, then slid for several years, then picked up again. That's all things called a "PDA", which obviously includes a bunch of Blackberries, Windows CE gadgets, etc. Palm had only 17% market share in 2005. So assume that Palm was moving about 20% of those 13.2M units in 2001. That's 2.64 million. Round it up to 3 million units per year. [1]

Apple moved 8.75 million iPhones and nearly 11 million iPods (many of which were iPod Touch units) last quarter:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/once-again-apple-has-its-be...

Which is to say: Apple is selling iPhone OS hardware at a rate at least 11 times larger, and probably more than 20 times larger, than Palm ever sold PDAs.

(And this is just counting Apple products. The OP's point about App Stores applies to Android as well. iPhone plus Android equals Palm times, say, fifty.)

This is the OP's point: Palm may have pioneered the market and sold a bunch of software, but Apple, and its Android-based follow-on products, have grown the market by orders of magnitude.

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[1] On the one hand, the fact that my lame Google-searched sales stats stop in 2005 is a problem. Palm sold stuff after 2005. On the other hand, my impression was that Palm was also becoming a phone company around that time. Anyone with better data is welcome to show it.

normal every day people bought millions of dollars in apps every year

I would contend that few "normal every day" people bought Palm products. The iPhone has had far more mainstream success (as the numbers from mechanical_fish attest). That's a big difference, both in the type and number of people now buying independent apps.

Coming from outside the App Store, two things always stick out at me:

1) They have totally nailed the purchasing experience. I think that probably increases sales system-wide by well in excess of a factor of ten, and it powers factor #2.

2) The use of iPhones is social in nature. Not fake social, like Facebook apps. Real social: hey, look, my cool phone can fart. Folks I know with iPhones pull them out at dinner and show me how much fun they're having slinging birds around. And darn it, I want to sling birds, too. That is why Apple loves the apps: because each one is a recurring opportunity for you to explain to your friends "Here's what you could do on your iPhone, if you were cool, but you can't do it because your phone is lame", why Apple is trying its darndest to kill cross-platform development ("Big deal, I have that game on my Droid"), and why some developers are sort of falling into accidental virality through quality of experience. (Some others, of course, are intentionally engineering the virality.)

What do you mean when you say Facebook apps are "fake social"?

I mean that use of them is about as solitary as games get, and the prevailing reason they're known as "social" is because of artificially engineered spam-your-friends-to-advance mechanics. I play a particular RPG on Facebook -- beating some monsters requires getting 100+ folks to click on a viral link for you. We've got our own little social norms and lingo for dealing with that: I click on your link and tell you "PRTF http://example.com/12345 -- for "please return the favor", because since I'm telling that to several dozen people I don't know and don't care about every day I'll be darned if I actually type it out.

None of my friends have ever come over in real life and told me "Patrick Patrick guess what guess what I got a new FarmVille cow." That would be really, truly social for me. (And I say this as somebody who regularly hears stories about WoW loot or D&D games from days gone by.)

To keep with the anecdotes - I have friends who when they meet up normally pull their laptops out for some farmville (and to plan how to get the next level/cow/whatever). It does happen.

But great observation on the iPhone games thing - one of the discussions at our extended family dinner every couple of weeks is the new iPhone/iTouch apps we have.. "Hey check this out" is really effective marketing (as of course it is in every industry)

Funny that you say this. Just yesterday my neighbor sprung for an iPhone after slinging around birds on mine for a day.

You're absolutely right on that count.

Your iPhone's home screen has become something of a conversation piece.

Great post. The hidden gem I got out of it is the reason why we will always have developers and hackers and programmers. And it will always be a cool job.

We need to adapt to the times, the culture, the technology, the platform, the needs and wants of the people. There always has been, and always will be, demand for that.

To the naysayers worried that hackers will die out, I point you to the people who say barely anyone can program with any proficiency and everyone sucks. Meet me in between, where I'll be building my business.

The remark about most people being afraid of computers is dead on. Lots of people, even people growing up around computers see them as big baroque systems of buttons and menus that they don't really understand. My mom uses an iMac, and for the most part, I don't think she realizes that there are other programs you might want to put on it aside from MS Office. With her iPhone, she has not only found and installed apps, but she actually _uses_ them. I it's think that one of the biggest successes of it all has been what Dan describes: regular people understanding what software is, and how it can make their lives better.

Excellent article. So far computers have been aimed towards technical users. To most people computers are rocket science. The iPhone OS is the first serious attempt at challenging that, and it's working. It's an exciting and profitable time to be a developer, so long as we focus on creating apps that solve actual problems and create valuable experiences for the user.

Nice article, Dan.

The key insight I found was that the whole mystical, complex concept of "software" has been distilled to something that ordinary people can understand as atomic elements, "apps."

That's a fairly profound shift in software marketing, for sure.

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