Hacker News Reader

Comment by hasmanean | Hacker News Reader

So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…? Interesting.

I remember writing apps for the iPhone and the biggest hurdle to getting it submitted was sizing the screens for the display variants.

There would have been no chance of developing an app for the Nokia ecosystem with all the different screen sizes your app would have to support.

Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something.

Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.

View on HN

> So the breakthrough happened when Apple shrunk the computer into a phone, not when Nokia grew the phone…?

I think the true breakthrough was actually the iPod; the true "first" Apple phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR#E1 was a flop, partly because they allowed the various collaboration partners to hamstring its features. The iPhone took everything in-house.

> Even downloading an app or ringtone required going through all these scammy websites and you had to enter your exact Exact model number and pay somehow…then they would text you a link or something.

> Apple really cleaned up the ecosystem with the App Store. It made apps safe to download.

Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were even worse.

> Correct. People (rightly) hate on the restrictive and profiteering nature of the App Store, but the telcos were even worse.

The now-hotly-debated 30% cut was seen as a reprieve from telco distribution and brick-and-mortar, where the retailer was taking 60-70% of the purchase price.

Not just 60+% of the price but also upfront access fees for the privilege of being listed. I worked for projects with some decent sized companies and they were interested in phone apps right up until what they saw as a proof of concept project was getting offered terms like $50-80k per carrier just for the privilege of being in the carrier’s store.

This is still better than when Qualcomm was hawking their mobile Java BREW platform around the turn of the century. We had a mid-tier brewery interested in trying a product locator but Qualcomm wasn’t willing to budge on terms which included a percentage of their total gross revenue – they were still insisting on seeing tax filings up until we walked away!

BREW. A pox on that pile of crap. Thanks for reminding me about all that, including the Verizon “Get It Now” store. It does actually make me feel less bitter at the somewhat-less-cynical Apple Way that we have now.

People could care less about the app stores 30% cut. Developers care. Even then 90% of App Store revenue comes from pay to win games and whales buying loot boxes and coins.

You’ll have to excuse me if I can’t manage a tear for them.

I can't believe I have to write "developers are people too" on Hacker News.

No one cares about “developers” - I’m one too.

The things that developers want is often orthogonal to what end users want.

1. End users have never said “it would be great to have PWAs so we can have the same lowest common denominator for our phones that we have with electron apps on the desktop”

2. End users have never said “we really want a ‘relationship’ with the developer so they can spam us with related offers”

3. “I feel so bad that Epic and other companies who spam the App Store could get 30% more for selling loot boxes and gems for pay to win games” - this is where 90% of App Store revenue comes from. It came out in the epic trial

On symbian there was an app store before iphones existed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com