Developer: “Losing Control of Our Destiny to Apple” | Hacker News Reader

Developer: “Losing Control of Our Destiny to Apple”

macobserver.com

69 pointsdigiwizard31 comments

Scenario A: “I want to buy VisiCalc/Aldus PageMaker/Microsoft Exchange/Photoshop. What’s the best computer to buy for that?”

Scenario B: “I want to buy a Mac/PC. What’s the best spreadsheet/word processor/email program to use on that?”

Prior to the rise of monetizable web applications, only Scenario A reflected a developer in control of their destiny. Scenario B represented a situation where the platform vendor was gradually "commoditizing their complements,” to borrow a phrase from Joel Spolsky.

The Web has created Scenario C, “I want to browse the web and use web applications.” The web business developer may be in control of their destiny. Then again, we may be looking at Scenario D: “I want to type ___ into Google on my cheap mobile device with its free operating system.”

More appropriate 'D' ->

I want to type ___ into my cheap mobile device with its free operating system."

No one will care if it is Google that gets searched. Only that an answer is forthcoming...or maybe even an app.

Even in scenario B, for most of the '90s and early '00s, a Windows-based PC was the presumed default platform. If you said "I want to buy a computer", it would normally be assumed that you meant Wintel. Scenario A, was, until relatively recently, only meaningful for very specific application categories: if you did DTP, you might buy a Mac, if you did video editing, you'd use an Amiga, and if you did research, you'd get a Unix workstation.

But almost all non-specialist applications, and even most specialist software, was targeted to the DOS/Windows platform, leaving most developers just as much in control of their destiny as in the earlier iteration of scenario A, if not moreso, since they didn't have to expend capital porting their products to a half dozen different platforms and gamble on which platforms would survive.

Platform vendors successfully 'commoditizing their complements' is a very new phenomenon, and one that's attributable to the vendors integrating their own distribution channels into the platform.

Scenario C may be helpful for developers' independence, but desktop/native applications aren't going anywhere in the short term, and the threat of Scenario D - the web itself becoming a more closed, regulated platform due to the influence of Google/Facebook/etc. - still looms on the horizon.

What might be helpful is an open, distributed software sales channel that can compete with the various proprietary app-stores across multiple platforms. Content retail needs to become a protocol, not a place. But this is probably a relatively easy technical project and a tremendous marketing challenge.

It seems that developers are positive about the store, but feel that Apple could be doing more to help them suit their business model. I feel it's also a question of what developers expect the store to do to their business, at the moment it lets ordinary unsavvy consumers develop a trust relationship with a developer who they may have never had any interaction with. (Thus a great opportunity for the developer to market their other wares to the consumer.) Apple is passing on their seal of approval to all items available in the store. It's a Disney approach, but it's a significant barrier to many developers.

I feel that some of the perceived negatives are the result of counter intuitive thinking. For example, a general lower pricing is the result of competition amongst commodity applications. While unique apps can demand a higher price. This is good for consumers, but bad for developers who may have been relying on the status quo. This allows new developers to challenge the incumbent, and potentially unseat them.

There is the issue of the upcoming sandboxing, which while everyone understands why it's necessary, it still has many developers worried. I feel this is mostly for 2 reasons: Information from apple doesn't seem to be 100% defined leaving a question mark over some developers apps, and knowing that change is coming without the full details makes planning difficult. I suspect apple are mum on details because they're looking for more feedback from developers, I imagine that they too aren't interested in neutering the apps that are available on the store.

Many of the other concerns relate to backwards compatibility, something apple is known to be brutal with (often no more than 5 years of backwards compatibility) - this is the most realistic concern, although it's not unique to the app store. Mac os is constantly being revised sometimes introducing bugs or in the case of PPC apps, having support dropped entirely. This requires developers to stay on top of beta releases and conduct appropriate testing.

Overall, the app store leads developers to do a bit more work on maintaining their app. Of course this is in exchange for continual revenue from sales of that app. Which I feel is more tailored to career developers and not casual devs. For consumers this isn't entirely a bad thing, it promotes better apps, app refinement and makes the store not worthwhile for developers who are unwilling to deliver - leaving this ripe market available for those that want to deliver a good experience.

To my mind, the far more concerning part of this is that Apple isn't even ready for sandboxing. As Jalkut says, "the only things we know now that we didn’t know [at WWDC] is that there are some sandbox entitlements that exist in the shipping OS X Lion that we know are available to us."

Apple was going to require sandboxing at the beginning of November, even as the entitlements system that would power it isn't even ready to support it (which is, to my mind, the real reason that they pushed the deadline out by several months).

If I have a beef with Apple, it isn't that they're taking my control away, it's that they're demanding that I sandbox my app without implementing the controls to make it work outside of the most basic apps.

It's a shame about this typo a little more than halfway through the article:

"TMO: That’s right. The pubic face is, oh, yeah, there’s no problem."

:) Nice catch. I think John already edited that one out. ;)

Indeed he must have.

A lifetime ago I worked as a reporter, but also did page layout. One of the stories I wrote was about a local food pantry at a church that was running low. I don't remember exactly what my headline was, but I left the "r" out of "pantry."

Oops.

I'm an indie developer and I too think about how much of my destiny is tied to Apple. I think about it each time we launch another product. You have to when, rather than getting a bunch of sales from people all over, you get one check each month from Apple.

However, the other side of this tradeoff is that check from Apple is a lot more than it would be otherwise. In fact, I can safely say, that my business would not exist at all, if it were not for Apple and the App Store.

For people like Jalkut, who is one of the inner-circle of mac developers and fairly well known, there are many marketing opportunities. When he releases a new product, he is assured that daring fireball will write it up, and others as well, and suddenly he'll have a huge opening day. This is what worked for Wil Shipley so well. But we're not in that category.

Unlike the "chosen ones" (and it really is an insular, exclusive circle of those types who get that kind of coverage) most developers would not be able to even have an app business if it weren't for the App Store.

Thus, the App Store has allowed tens of thousands of startups to be built by a much broader segment of the population than ever before. You don't need VC, you don't need a bunch of employees, you don't even need an angel round, you just need a Mac, some time, and an $99 a year Apple developer account.

In addition to our startup, I have a friend who has supported himself for the past several years doing this writing apps. He's not trying to "do a startup", he's just started a lifestyle business.

Apples "control of destiny" is intrinsically linked to that opportunity. The opportunity comes form Apple selling your software for you in a single location. The only way Apple can do that-- given that people are constantly looking for opportunities to harass, denigrate, and sue Apple-- is to control what apps appear in the store.

Apple gets sued because people think that their free software update wasn't good enough! Serious class action lawsuits get launched for crap like that. So, of course, Apple is going to watch what's in the store.

But so long as you're offering a legitimate app, not trying to scam people, Apple doesn't really care.

I know people who have hated apple for 30 years think that this is some draconian thing... because every large company they've dealt with has habitually screwed over everyone they could. My thirty years as an apple customer giving superlative support and bending over backwards to not screw me over, gives me a great deal of trust in them.

Finally, there really is no real point in this campaign of worrying about whether Apple has too much control. Its obvious that its not illegal for Apple to offer an App store. So, why are we getting the daily articles like this? Why the campaign?

Its because the campaigners have an agenda. Their agenda is to promote android, and maybe get enough popular support for this idea (I once had someone tell me I was stupid for developing for iOS instead of android-- someone whose a consumer who knows nothing about anything technology wise has been reached by this campaign!)..... if the campaign is successful enough, then maybe they'll get legislation passed. Just like the anti-patent campaign wants to undermine patents, I think that's the real goal here.

And just how does it increase freedom for app development to be regulated by the government? We can see how that's worked out in other areas of government regulation of technology (though maybe the crowd here is too young to remember the dark ages of landline phone service where there was no innovation... certainly you can recognize that there are only 3 major cell carriers, and thus the prices are high. That's the result of the government deciding there could be only 3 spectrum owners in each metropolitan area, limiting competition via regulation.)

If Apple becomes untrustworthy, then we'll migrate our business. We'll take a hit, obviously, but the bigger fear is that there isn't any other venue to access the market like the App Store. Putting up a website and getting people to go to it, and then getting people to part with money is a whole lot more difficult than getting into the appstore. And it's a whole lot more expensive than Apple's %30 cut.

Apple is giving a huge opportunity here, and the restrictions of it are intrinsic to its nature.

> Unlike the "chosen ones" (and it really is an insular, exclusive circle of those types who get that kind of coverage)

You know how these guys got that way? (1) They blogged. They shared their insights, example code, ways of solving common problems, etc. with the world. They answered questions from strangers – Wil Shipley had a long blog segment giving long helpful advice/critiques to code sent in by strangers. (2) They talked to each other. They hung out in a (not hard to find) IRC channel, chatted about their common interests, griped about common problems. They met up and drank beers at WWDC and MacWorld and C4. They organized local meetup groups: Daniel Jalkut for instance dumped a ton of effort into running the Boston CocoaHeads group for years and years (maybe still?). (3) They built a bunch of great products that people liked. They built reputations for solid support and a rapport with their customers.

In other words, this is not some impossible-to-break-into clique or conspiracy. Becoming a “chosen one” yourself is quite doable if you put solid time and effort into making good stuff and giving back to the community.

> We can see how that's worked out in other areas of government regulation of technology (though maybe the crowd here is too young to remember the dark ages of landline phone service where there was no innovation [...]

I'm pretty sure the crowd here is mostly too young to remember (or know) that once upon a time you were only allowed, by contract, to connect to phone lines those devices that you rented from Ma Bell, or its equivalents outside the U.S.

personnally i find it quite amazing, and incredibly short-sighted, how developpers are willing to give up the freedom of the web in favor of the golden chains of the apple platform. because, make no mistake, this is where its going: in a few years nobody will want to try your stuff unless its an app, and the web will be a ghetto for porn and 4chan.

haven't we seen this movie before when microsoft controlled basically all of personal computing? at least on windows the user could install anything he wanted. now, not only developpers are at the mercy of apple's policies, but apple has decided to prevent any theoritical disruption from within by forbidding apps that host code (other than its own browser).

It's definitely interesting to me that some developers call people who purchase their app through the App Store "customers" when, in reality, they have NO way of knowing who these people are, contacting them outside the app, or really doing anything with them at all. That, to me, does not a customer make.

If you don't have a way of "doing anything with" your customers that functions independent of holding their email address and/or credit card number, you're not doing something "with" them so much as doing something "to" them.

Not every application needs to be a goddamned community experience wherein the original transaction spawns a lifetime of subtle sales attempts from the developer. Be happy that someone paid to use what you built. If you want more money from them, or you want their email address, build so much cool shit that they want to hear about what's next.

As Chris Rock said: "You pay to see me? We cool."

Very few people will probably agree with you, probably even try and bury your comment, even though you're absolutely right.

No one wants to admit that their fav. ecosystem is basically mob-mentality dressed in a sleek, comfortable, suit - but it is.

I love Xcode, the Apple ecosystem - but I'm finding it hard not to look down the road and see the inevitable. Are people willfully blind?

It's a mixture of shortsightedness and comfort. We have this Apple/Google fanboy thing going on, where one is trying to be better than the other. While that happens, the open web, something both sides seem to agree is important, becomes an "old media" way of doing things.

I totally agree. Even Microsoft is going to follow suit[1].

[1]http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/windows-8-app-store-will-...

I dread a world in which every app have to be approved by Microsoft/Apple. In the end customer is going to lose.

No, most customers will win. Their experience is improved by the layer of curating to weed out broken and scammy stuff. Most customers don't have needs that can't be satisfied within the set of apps that Microsoft and Apple approve, plus the entire public browser-accessible web.

It's not black-and-white that "OPEN == GOOD" and "CLOSED == BAD". There are tradeoffs both ways.

I am open source agnostic but I will not allow someone else to control what apps I can install.

Scammy stuff will still exists and only difference will be that customer will never know about it[1] and is going to live under false security.Companies will try to ban every person trying to expose vulnerabilities.

[1]http://www.darknet.org.uk/2011/11/apple-bans-security-resear...

Do you thing a small set of employees sitting in a company's approval department are experts of every single thing that can be ever conceived by a developer?

I am not against the idea of sand-boxing if it is built in the OS API. How approving a sand-boxed application is going to improve the security?

This. Attackers just point their attention to the greatest targets. When one target disappears, the attackers don't disappear - they just find a different approach. The recent iOS security breach proved this, in my opinion, pretty concretely.

I agree that both open and closed can co-exist, but if media drives media (ie, advertising agencies chasing the app-for-no-reason bandwagon) how can we be sure that we don't have a monoculture in software development in the future? I don't think there is any argument that that would be an entirely bad thing.

At my job, I am embroiled in signs that point in this very loathsome direction.

Web pages are still terrible for rich content. For the web to really work you need something that is A) stable B) ridiculousness cross platform C) Fast both to load AND run D) degrades gracefully on limited Hardware, interfaces, AND network connectivity. HTML has always been a compromise and Adobe was incapable of maintaining and expanding Flash.

An opensource solution might be able to bridge the gap, but until then App's have significant advantages for users and developers alike.

What universe are you living in? The web sites/apps I use do all the things you describe, on desktop and mobile, excepting perhaps that most do not function offline (though the capability exists, the adoption rate is still low).

What's wrong with HTML being a compromise? Most things are compromises. What started off as hyper-linked rich text is a now a pretty-good (and completely open) software platform that really does work on just about any computing device there is, which would have seemed like a crazy pipe dream 20 years ago. What's the problem?

Any application that works with media, e.g. audio, video, needs really good access to the filesystem. I can't see Avid Media Composer for example ever conforming to the sandbox idea. What is Apple going to do about that in the long term? Give up on their platform for professional use?

Apps that need access to arbitrary files can ask for it when setting up their sandbox credentials. Apple has to approve that, of course, but that's the cost of "safety."

I'm with the majority here who fear this new feature...

Then you don't understand the sandbox. There's nothing to stop something like Avid Media Composer being able to access your video.

But it doesn't need to access your address book.

I was of the understanding that the sandboxed app needed permission to access certain files that weren't created by them, I'll read the documentation more thoroughly. Perhaps a better example are apps that scan you drive to tell you what your file system is full off (to free up space for example). This type of thing is extremely useful, and would seem to violate the sandbox idea?

My understanding is that it's not permission from the user, but permission from Apple. If you need to do something outside of the sandbox, you need to go through their API calls. And when you submit your application, you need to justify each out-of-sandbox-API call you make.

Have you ever taken a job with a company as opposed to starting your own? You do so not because you trust the employer to watch out for your individual self-interest, but because they will pay you more than you think you can make for yourself.

The app store is pretty much the same thing. I think most developers go into it with their eyes open because they figure 30% is an order of magnitude less than the increased sales they expect to get. Is it short-sighted? Maybe, but what can one developer do given the choice of either making lots of money or not? If all the developers abstained sure they could put pressure on Apple, but that's statistically not going to happen, plus Apple has been at the mercy of developers before and now they are very careful to make sure their ecosystem is complete with or without you. They'll dangle a juicy carrot for you, but they do not need to care if you take it.

1. What good is the "freedom of the web" when all an application needs is client-side processing of client-side data and client-side user action? It's not even "Client" at that point because there's no server worth mentioning. The decision has nothing to do with "golden chains," and everything to do with choosing the right tool for the job, where "right" is defined by maximizing customer value per unit development BS.

2. Despite the uptick in development BS caused by "unfair" reviews and the "accelerated timeframe" with which Apple moved to enact sandboxing requirements, OS X development and MAS distribution remain a remarkably low-hassle way to monetize the activity of "getting useful, graceful code onto users' machines."

OTOH, the other platform for which I regularly write commercial software is z/OS...so consider the source, etc.

I have a hard time imagining, let alone fearing, such a future when we have an abundance of alternatives. How much can Apple limit developers or somehow degrade our consumer experience when Android, Chrome and Windows are readily available? If you can really imagine Apple kicking Avid, Pro Tools and Blizzard off of the Mac platform (the sure result if Apple forced them on the App Store and demanded %30 of the revenue) then you have a much more active imagination than me.

Apple's building a controlled app store, we get it - that doesn't mean that their only goal is control. To me, this is like imputing in 2003 that since Apple's highest profile products were music related, that Apple would soon be strictly dedicated to music-related software and hardware.

The 1984 commercial comes true. Big brother turns out to be the chick with the hammer.

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