We Are the App Store
alexyoung.org
alexyoung.org
If you look back on, for example, video game development you can see the problems that can occur without such walled gardens. The home video game market boomed in the late 70s and early 80s, with families buying new games like hotcakes. A lot of game makers jumped on the bandwagon and pumped the market full of low quality games. Whereas in previous years the total number of games for the Atari 2600, for example, had been in the low dozens in 1982/83 this number ballooned to hundreds. Consumers could no longer have much confidence in which games to buy and so they stopped buying, leading to a massive crash of the video game industry in the US that lasted until Nintendo came along with its own walled garden approach.
However, the video game industry has matured since then, and walled gardens are no longer very helpful (there are far more than sufficient resources these days to determine which games to buy and which to avoid based on individual preferences).
As the mobile app market continues to mature it will strain against its walled garden confines more and more. Increasingly such hand-holding is less necessary and more and more restrictive. Apple has a choice to recognize that the market is changing and to adapt or to ignore the changes and pretend as though it's still 2008 while the world passes them by.
The 2600 was walled-by-obscurity for its first several years, since the video chip was custom designed by Atari and not documented publicly, plus the tools to write and compile and run 6502 assembler were fairly primitive. But by 1982 or so, enough reverse-engineering had been done and the tools had matured and enough Atari expertise was available on the hiring market that the system was essentially fully open.
(I've been there - I wrote an Atari 2600 game my freshman year of college in 1997.)
I'm still having trouble buying the collapse of the walled garden as the reason for the video game crash of 83-84. Pac-man and ET are widely cited as two of the major causes of the crash, and those were in-house Atari productions so the walled garden wouldn't have helped there.
But there were plenty of other management and business causes of the crash too. Atari reportedly produced more ET cartridges than existed 2600 systems, hubristically deciding that ET would drive a wave of system buying. That sort of financial wizardry won't be saved by any amount of ecosystem walls.
I'd say that the openness of the system caused the failure of Atari itself more so than it caused the industrywide crash. Atari couldn't maintain premium game prices and volume against the flood of competition. (If better games weren't available, ET would have sold more in the vacuum.) A similar story played out in the PC market over the next decade: IBM created an open system, then got marginalized out of their own industry in a race to the bottom. But the whole PC industry always thrived.
I also think the crash itself is overblown in latter-day coverage. I was a kid and didn't notice anything at the time; Toys R Us still had shelves full of Atari games right up until the NES caught on. The bankruptcy of invincible titan Atari itself was a big event, but Coleco didn't fold until 1988 and Mattel and Magnavox trucked right on in other fields of business.
So tying all this back to the topic, remember that Apple's interest is Apple's own survivability and profitability. Apple's responsibility is not to maximize the adoption and utility of the mobile phone app market in general. Apple's goal is to capture the biggest slice of the pie for itself, and it perceives that it has the clout to do that by dictating terms. Whether they will go the way of the NES to market domination or the way of IBM's Micro Channel to obscurity is up to the market.
Having said all of that, I too am confused with the argument here -- the videogame console market is very much a walled garden and has been for a very long time.
i.e. People weren't driven away by the array of choices. They were driven away by bad experiences.
The system broke down, the chances of buying a good game just on chance were low, and thus the chances that any of your friends had happened to buy a good game was also low. It only took a few times of people getting burned for them to stop taking the risk and to curtail their game buying, staying content with the existing library of games they had. Even though there were still many quality games (donkey kong jr, joust, ms. pac man, and pole position were all released in '83), there was so much crap that people simply withdrew from the market. Moreover, the bubble was reliant on an unlikely massive growth spurt in video game buying, the game industry over leveraged itself, it would have crashed even without a collapse of consumer confidence.
I guess this argument will be tested by the Mac app store.
The game console industry is still very much based on walled gardens.
Have Google really done this? Isn't there soon to be Playstation app store among others? And you can always download files away from the Market?
Suddenly I'm sensing a pattern...
On, uh, AT&T.
@jancona: I didn't sideload with ADB. I copied the .apk to my phone via USB and used a file manager to access my file system. Tapping on the apk installed it just fine. If AT&T disables sideloading with ADB, how do developers test their apps on AT&T's Android offering?
@lukeschlather: I'm using a Nexus One; it may not be possible for phones customized specifically by AT&T. If this is the case, it's pretty f'n unfortunate.
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.kongregate.android...
Also, in the blog's comments you were asking if Google will allow the distribution of another App Market to be distributed via the Android Market, looks like they do:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.appspot.swisscodem...
I could be misreading what you had posted, if so, apologies in advance.
And yes, so far as I know most android phones allow installation of apps from anywhere via a simple checkbox setting.
To put it lightly, this substantially weakens the argument.
The App Store can be very good for those who work with it, but in the same way that using Adsense can be good for those who use it. There are other options; they may not be the industry leaders, but they are viable options and you'd be a fool to turn down a platform with 100 users just because a tough platform with 110 users is better known.
In the same way that some men are attracted to insane girls, it seems that some developers simply cannot get enough of Apple's tough, kinky, anti-trust-bound love.
Contrast this with iOS which provides the robust and featureful CoreAudio api. As far as I can tell there doesn't appear to be anything like the new Accelerate framework introduced in iOS 4 for Android either, so things like native FFT aren't available.
List them, please.
Winmo has been a complete failure so far.
Android has shipped a lot of handsets, but the users don't seem to like to pay for apps.
Nokia is dead.
Palm is dead.
The next closest competitor to the Apple App Store is still nothing more than a tiny dot on the horizon. Maybe that will change, but most developers want to get paid TODAY.
I don't expect WP7 to immediately take the market by storm. If anything, Microsoft showed what they do with the Zune; they don't care for market dominance, just a share of that market will do them just fine. WP7 won't be the dominant phone, but I can see it being the new Blackberry and finding a great niche of paying customers.
> Android has shipped a lot of handsets, but the users don't seem to like to pay for apps.
This is the attitude I cannot understand. People won't pay money for things that don't provide value, regardless of platform. Choosing Apple because "iPhone users pay for stuff" is like opening a McDonalds by a public school because "they've got the money to buy things". The Android market isn't perfect, but it's getting better and better and people that make good apps for Android will likely be rewarded by great sales.
Except that it seems most developers who have an iOS app and and Android app report far better sales from the iOS version of their apps.
In some sense you are correct, people will buy things that provide value to them. What is unclear is if the "value" in their Android handsets is the availability of apps, or the greater availability of free apps. People buying iPhones seem to expect to pay for additional apps. It's unclear if people buying Android devices expect to pay for apps, or if they expect it to be FOSS, where the majority of the apps are free. If it's the latter case, then Android may never be a profitable primary distribution source for developers, though it can be potentially monetized in other ways.
Android is now at a point where the average user couldn't care less about OS having open-source aspects. The reason few people buy apps for Android is because while there are a lot of apps most of them are awful or have free alternatives. This is what separates the iPhone experience from the Android experience, and in my mind this is why people don't spend big on Android, and why people would if the right app came along.
This may be true, but then look at the profitability of some free apps paid for by advertising: http://www.droidgamers.com/index.php/game-news/android-game-...
Given that this is recurring revenue and not dependent upon new sales (though, yes, dependent on new content packs), I'd say it's pretty well done. With the caveat that Angry Birds is the outlier, not the norm.
Today, after working with Android for a year, I could care less if I had an Android instead of my iPhone. In fact, I find myself carrying around my development device for various apps and usability reasons.
I'm over angry birds. I'm tired of seeing all the polished over-done games in the app store. I prefer the simple, indie games of Android, I like the personality of the Android Market, I like the browser on my Galaxy, etc, etc.
Side note. My kids do not. They think my Android games are stupid.
Also, it is not "I could care less", that makes no sense. It is "I couldn't care less".
But beneath this there is a deeper concern that is now making me consider choosing the web over learning to develop for iOS: I don't trust Apple. I love my iPhone and iPad, but these frequent and unpredictable changes to the TOS makes it quite a liability for me as a developer. Making a product/startup always involves the what-if-google-does-it risk, but this new what-if-apple-shuts-you-down risk is more disturbing imo.
Predictability is the bread and butter of B2B relationships, and Apple doesn't get it. Instead Apple treats developers as consumers rather than partners - changing terms to the developer agreement as if they were a specsheet for a piece of consumer electronics.
You shouldn't trust any platform vendor. If you're too small to get a contract stipulating that they can't pull the rug out from under you, you should start developing only after making a careful calculation of risk/reward.
Yes, sometimes MS pulled the rug out from under them and/or directly competed with them with unfair advantage. But not really that often.
They certainly never "pulled your app from the store". I'm still having a hard time getting my head around that concept and why anyone would invest development resources into that kind of platform.
If your answer involves "I trust the platform vendor" you're not making a decision, you're gambling.
> "I'm still having a hard time getting my head around that concept and why anyone would invest development resources into that kind of platform."
It's a risk like any other. (Non-gambling) business-people accept risk when they think they can make enough money to offset it.
Oh, except for every time that someone made a large enough profit (wordperfect, visicalc, Corel Office, Peachtree or Quicken) or made a big enough splash (Netscape/Mozilla, google, more recently mint.com) in their ecosystem.
"pulled your app from the store"
But, they can if you sell on XBox Live Arcade, or Windows Phone Apps Marketplace (especially if you have an open source license for your app that MS doesn't like).
The vast majority of MS Windows software products fail for reasons other than the platform vendor screwing them over intentionally. MS has known from the beginning that the success of Windows was primarily dependent on ISVs developing for it.
The XBox and MS Phone stuff seem like different things entirely. XBox is specifically not intended to be a general-purpose application platform. I can't imagine the MS Phone will ever require more than a free download SDK to develop for it, although this "marketplace" is likely to be a more reviewed ecosystem.
especially if you have an open source license for your app that MS doesn't like
It's not a question of MS not liking it. GPL, especially v3, is designed specifically to prevent binary-only app distribution which is the app store business model.
Also in the real world, people that often violate the trust of others are sooner or later marginalized, excluded from the social circles that supported them.
Risk/reward calculations sound nice, certainly within the skills of any MBA, but impossible to do in our industry and whenever I hear people talk about it sounds more to me like trying to rationalize a bad decision.
This actually works out to be somewhat similar to politics. Reading forums and blogs, you can observe people's politics in their feelings about companies like this. Conservatives and religious folks often feel you should give respect to the site authority, while liberal people feel the customers deserve more credit and need more power. It's just like unions vs. management.
Unfortunately most of the apps that can be realized as web apps are just more of the glorified paperwork UIs I burned out on writing as a web dev in the first place.
Unfortunately they're disabling the freakin' Upload inputs, so file uploads aren't possible without native hooks.
I really hope that Apple will realize that even if they aren't getting a cut of in-App purchases, these Apps do add desirability to the iOS platform.
However, the current 'most recent' entries are dated December 3rd of last year. The small print does say "Apple is providing links to these applications as a courtesy [...]"
But the crux of this entire debate is whether users will demand iOS versions of applications. Apple thinks they will, and they think they deserve a cut for it.
There are lots of emotional arguments being made right now, but it seems like this is a simple business decision for developers. If a developer doesn't see enough value in iOS (given its development costs), then he shouldn't build an iOS app, end of story.
Deep, sophisticated web services do not pop up overnight. I think that Apple will feel pressure when their web store is completely overrun with $.99 games and low value apps... and Android users enjoy a comparatively deep pool of high quality services and publications.
This argument makes no sense to me. Apple's 30% cut is too high, and therefore app developers are going to tend to cut their prices? What sense does that make?
I thought the whole "problem" here was that the 30% cut was going to force publishers to raise their prices (across the board) to cover the additional distribution cost. And to sell product at those higher prices they will need to provide more value. Perhaps more value than they can provide.
Low quality apps like $.99 games won't be effected.
I'm not sure I completely agree with the premise. I do think that as Apple continues to push against the developer community you'll see a continuing downward trend in average app quality. The de-facto culture of the .99 app has already driven much of that, but at some point more sophisticated developers are going to be looking for greener pastures away from Apples control. The question is: how hard can Apple squeeze before that happens?
I'm seeing some of it now. The better developers have seemed to only make half-hearted attempts at Android ports thus far. Their attention has been so focused on the Apple cash machine that it's made it difficult to shift focus. So you see a lot of inferior ports dotting the Android market. With the uncertainty that Apple is creating in the development community, I'm betting that you'll see more and more developers hedging their bets and building out much higher quality applications on Android.
I'm sure Google is doing everything possible to court that. In the end Android benefits not because everyone wholesale leaves the iOs ecosystem, but rather because they start putting some of those iOS dollars to work making things better on Android.
That's how Apple loses in the end. Android has a huge distribution advantage. These decisions serve to erode the iOS app advantage. Once Android has achieved level pegging in apps I see nothing stopping it from taking over the world.
I don't see any serious pressure coming from anywhere to be honest.