The App Store is for Suckers

This is the opinion of people who don't try or fail at the App Store.

For a counterpoint, my start-up (me, my fiancée, and my good friend) started an indie GPS app at the tail end of last summer. We worked hard, did many iterations, built up our userbase, and now we have several top grossing navigation apps, and we are piling up cash in the bank.

We don't have a marketing budget. All we do is engineer and Tweet, and we have had steady growth. Now we are also licensing the mapping platform to a handful of other companies, and I'm guessing our revenues will double or triple over the next couple of months, again.

For all those deciding whether to do an iPhone app, it can be done. But pick a niche and plan to work harder than any job you've ever had, or it probably won't pay off. There may be a lot of disgustingly successful Fart apps, outliers in the game section, and the like. But there are also indie devs that make a job of it, and there is plenty of money in it for us too.

People like to say the "App Store" is a bad bet. The truth is, any start-up is a longshot, and the App Store is a fine way to sell software. We pivoted away from the web and Facebook because we found it too hard to monetize, even though we had strong traffic growth and we had won an fbFund grant early on. Different strategies work for different people - you just have to experiment, instead of basing your decisions on bad assumptions and never reevaluating them.

What do I get for my 30%:

* Apple processes payments and wires me money

* Apple processes over 1GB of downloads per day for me (and growing)

* Apple makes my software discoverable to their hundreds of millions of already-entered-my-credit-card users

Also, for expensive apps, 30% might seem steep. But I challenge you to find a payment provider who will let you sell something for .99 and wants much less than 30%, as a fee or percentage. Plus, you can avoid the 30% if you want by having a free app with in-app purchases that you process via some other mechanism.

The main advantage of the app store is a quick and painless payment method for the end users. Your web app does not offer that.

I agree that if you build one web app tuned for mobile phones --- it should work for both iPhones and Android phones...as well as for browsers on laptops and desktops.

But, HTML5 is nowhere close to supporting the features you need, nor does it have access to essential phone hardware. I've built a browser based paint app and a browser based GPS using HTML5 and while fun, I think if you're honest, you know it's not quite ready for that yet. There is too much browser sniffing/adapter pattern going on and it can't be avoided.

That aside, my question to other mobile phone users is how Native vs. Web apps are perceived by users on a phone. Since the Native App is --- well, native --- it is given more prominence within the phone's UI. I suppose you could bookmark the web app, but it just doesn't seem to have as much importance as something natively installed with a shortcut icon, full access to all hardware, native menus, buttons, etc.

So, I don't think you can blatantly say "web apps are better than mobile" --- unless maybe you have a vested interest in that position --- like you're writing a book or something (ahem, ahem).

I think the reality is that app stores are a pretty cheap distro opportunity with millions of people with credit cards on file and are certainly not going anywhere in the near future.

Amazon.com takes a slice of my sales when I use their marketplace. I'm also forced to agree to their policies with regards to shipping fees (I get a credit, but my costs often are MORE than the credit) and their A-to-Z guarantee.

I still end up making more money with the "global" marketplace of Amazon.com than I would my local marketplace. I think the same applies to a well written app over a well written web app.

This is a popular idea lately, that web apps can (and should!) do everything that native apps do. Are there any examples of that people actually use regularly? I know I have tried a few of these 'apps-in-a-browser' and even the ones that worked reasonably well were still clunky enough that it always felt like a worse version of something else, to the point that I stopped using them quickly.

"As you know, it has the iBookstore, which joins the App Store and iTunes Store as the third store on the iPhone. We have over 150 million credit cards on file ready to purchase your apps. We think we’re number one on the web." -Steve, June 2010

150 million credit cards with one-touch purchasing.

The app store doesn't charge 30% of profit, it charges 30% of revenue. It's a big difference.

I think its clear that the store offers some benefits to developers, but mostly economic. Which is to say that the biggest argument isn’t that the development platform is awesome, but that the distribution platform is awesome. Probably even not that it’s awesome, but that it’s the only game in town.

What if there were a third party store out there, one that could provide the trust, and authority need to get consumers over the small purchase hump. What would it look like?

I think Google Chrome team is working on a HTML5 App store but its going to be for Chrome, do you guys think it would be possible to do it outside a major company.

This is something that I have been thinking about for a while, no one has tried this, but it could be huge.

What would this store need to offer, what would it look like?

everything he said was true and compelling. however there remain some arguments in favor of the App Store (unfortunately, in my mind) with the super simple purchase ability for users being possibly the most compelling. The large audience is still attractive but I think the benefit of this to developers is decreasing as the massive number of apps and updates cause so much noise it gets harder for any one app to stick out or be found at all. I've written 4 of the apps in the store now and have reached a point where I look hard for excuses to not make anymore, because I think in the long run it goes against my best interest and that of my clients. The best reason for a native mobile app is if it truly needs fast performance and/or offline access, for example.

It's true. Apple's App store will never produce a Google, a Facebook, or a Twitter etc. The App store platform is designed so that its children will never compete with its parent.

The App store reminds me of walking around a mall - it's mostly a 'retail' experience.

I believe nothing truly innovative will come out of Apple's app store because Apple locks up all the really cool shit for themselves.

The web is the only truly free frontier on which people can build real innovation.

An app for a truly disruptive product will be a web app first and an iDevice app second.

The biggest reason to have an app is to be seen in the network, to be there when users go to search and try and something new. The next best reason, plays more to your ego, gives you internal drive to do more, learn something new and feel like you've made progress, it may be serious fail material but it's still more than a website. Third, transactional goodness is a mere click away vs create an account and enter credit card here, if you nail the concept and yes share the funds with the store you stand to reap the rewards.

"Give up 30% of your profits . . ."

Considering the huge # of apps priced @ $1.00 his math falls apart.

If you're charging $1.00 and have even REASONABLE merchant fees you're going to wind up shelling out $0.40 - 0.50 of every dollar to the merchant processor.

Even paypal is 1.9% - 2.9% + $0.30 USD for the bulk of transactions.

Not to mention access to millions of consumers, not to mention completely eliminating customer service costs, etc, etc, etc.

If you can get HTML5 to do what you need it makes a ton of sense. You can even get a nice icon on the desktop. I have some "apps" on my phone that work this way.

But apps and the App Store aren't going away and its developers aren't suckers. You should perhaps be trying to create apps that are connected with a revenue stream independent of Apple. No need to give them the same status as the IRS.

For a profession that's all about analyzing the impact and trade-offs involved for any particular solution, there's a massive amount of lazy and bullying writing about the various methods of software distribution that exist in 2010.

Hi all -

I'm the author of the original post being discussed here. I can see that most everyone on this thread disagrees with me, which is fine.

I just wanted to let you know that because of being linked to on HN, there has been some thoughtful discussion in the comments that addresses several of the points raised here.

Cheers, j

These bait posts are annoying. Apple supplies the distribution, payment, promotion and a centralized market that can get you thousands of sales just by being good and on the store.

So how are you monetizing your web app? You taking payments? Paying bandwidth? Advertising?

Web apps are fine, but they're something ELSE not something better. Apple is doing some lifting on the App Store and they get a cut, that's it.

If not for Apple, I would not be selling software. I would still code, but for myself. I like to solve problems and software is like a puzzle with any number of solutions. Any time I spend dealing with merchant accounts is time not spent coding. Not that Apple's submission process is smooth -- speaking of-- any opinions on iOS4 submission changes would be welcome. I am not going to quit my day job, yet, I love to use and write for iPhone and the state of cell data networks means an uneven experience without a front end.