Bjork Brings Biophilia to Android With a Little Help From Apportable (YC W11) | Hacker News Reader

Bjork Brings Biophilia to Android With a Little Help From Apportable (YC W11)

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129 pointscollinjackson50 comments

This seems as good a place as any to dump thoughts about "app-albums" in general. One thing that I always try to remember is that we're living in the future, and it's foolish to assume that things from the past will work the same way in the future.

Hence, app albums. Album apps. Whatever. Point is, people have smartphones now. The music experience is changing because of that. I'm down with it. In fact, $13 for an album with all the extra app functionality seems pretty good, seeing as the standard iTunes album price is $10.

But the problem with creating this sort of future-music experience is that it leaves some people behind. It used to be simply an iPhone app, but now there's an android port. Guess what: my phone still can't get it, because my phone's version of android isn't supported by the app. I couldn't get the Magna Carta Holy Grail app either. Apps aren't a universal format like a record or a cd or an MP3. They therefore necessarily leave some people behind.

You could argue that every media shift does that. But when the album becomes a sort of multi-media experience, it's tragic that somebody would need a different device that in almost every other respect is functionally identical to their current device to experience it.

Which is what makes a service like apportable important: it's expanding the audience of this numedia album experience. I doubt there are many people who want to limit who has access to what art or information, but the problem with being so future is that you're imposing those limits in the pursuit of making something unique.

Maybe I'm overthinking it. But I hate feeling like I'm missing some part of the experience because I'm happy with the phone I have.

CD's left cassette player people behind. I think many folks forget how ridiculously expensive CD players were for home stereos (or computers) when they came out.

Vinyl got left behind by cassettes (for some people at least).

Everything is 'left behind' by whatever replaces it.

This point isn't very relevant though, because the artist wasn't releasing different media for different devices. The cd release still came with a cassette release, etc.

That's not always been true - lots of 'bonus tracks' and the like. Lots of content was only released for a single media type.

Right, I get that. But the whole app ecosystem is very different than that. If you own a turntable, it'll play records. If you own a CD player, it'll play CDs. If you own a tape deck, it'll play tapes. If you own an iPod, it'll play mp3s (and it's relatively trivial to convert digital music files an iPod can't play into music an iPod can play).

But when you own a smartphone, you don't necessarily know if it'll play apps. When I bought my phone, it was the current android release and it had everything I wanted in a phone. Now, it still has everything I want in a phone, but they aren't updating the OS. I could mod it to support android 4.x, but i'll lose some of the functionality of the device. This is not so uncommon, and it's not likely to stop happening any time soon. The solution I tend to get is that I just have to deal with it or buy a new phone. That seems silly to me, but perhaps I seem silly to you.

Yeah, it's almost like they moved from vinyl to tapes to "Creative SoundBlaster compatible CD"

Yeah, it's almost like most people replace their standalone music player every 2-3 years.

I think I understand what you're saying - I don't think it sounds silly, really, I just slightly disagree.

I think it's about abstractions and where you draw the line of 'different thing' - I see 'If you own an iPhone 4s it will play the apps for it until it dies' and 'If you own an Android phone with 4.x on it, it will play the apps for it until it dies' as being equivalent with 'If you own a cd player it will continue to play CDs'.

You're blurring the lines between CDs, Vinyl, Cassette, Hi-CD, SACD, DVD, HD-DVD, and BluRay audio as being all entirely unique 'universes', while smooshing all of the smartphone world into one 'universe'.

I see the difference between an iPhone 4s and an iPhone 5 as more like CD->DVD: similar, but distinctly different. Sure, lots of content works on both, but then, lots of content doesn't.

It's just now, with software-based (primarily) differences, that people even THINK about backwards compatibility/etc. as a feature to offer. CD players didn't offer backwards compat. with vinyl albums, for example (although, this argument might be flawed in that most future optical-disc drives did compat. back to CD).

With software, we CAN provide backwards compatibility, and you're argument (if I do understand properly) is that because we can, we probably should. I am torn by that, and can see strong arguments on both sides of the fence.

CDs are a standard storage medium containing audio encoded in a standard way. There are a multitude of ways to get that content (the audio) off of the CD and playable in a multitude of ways, because the music is in its pure digital form.

An iOS or Android app, on the other hand, is architecture-or-platform-specific code, depending on a particular OS-sized API and all its UI libraries, all of which are expected to become obsolete and unusable in a relatively short time.

No, I don't think you're overthinking it. If anything, you're giving them too much credit.

App albums are totally lame IMO. Just like having apps for a small to medium retail/service business are generally lame. It's not worth the effort for most people to find and download this app.

Look at Bjork's iPhone app reviews. There are 763 ratings. From what I've read, you can multiply ratings x 30 to get a rough estimate of sales [1]. That would put sales at 22,890 units. At $12.99 that's a net (after Apple's cut) of roughly $208K. Maybe that covers Bjork's cost of developing the app, producing all the additional content, and her additional time needed. Maybe. But I'm skeptical.

Even if it was profitable for Bjork or Jay-Z, the problem is smaller artists are going to try and emulate this and it's going to fail miserably for them.

[1] http://osxdaily.com/2011/04/27/estimate-sales-downloads-of-i...

It's also important to note that a lot of artists don't make money buy simply moving units. Honestly, selling 20,000 copies of a non-pop non-rap album is a pretty big deal.

I disagree that this wouldn't be a good move for smaller artists, though. A mildly technical assistant could get some simple iOS functionality up for a band; maybe not on the scale of bjork's app, but there should never be a reason to stay out of the mobile market. It's too integrated in modern culture to safely ignore.

You want a great million-dollar start-up idea? Be the first company that app-ifies albums.

App albums remind me of the trend in the late 90s to build a lame Win32 .exe wrapper around a website and ship it out on CD-ROMs. It made some sense as a response to slow internet connections, but in retrospect it was an obviously time-limited, user-limiting idea. App albums are similarly just a response to limited standard "interactive experience" capabilities. They'll go away in time.

The most use a Mac user could get out of one of these today is opening the HTML files directly in a browser, if the files can be accessed. Same deal with accessing any actual music/images/video/text in an app album on an "unsupported" phone (which, keep in mind, could be a new iPhone or Android a couple years from now).

My thoughts as well. This is just like the enhanced CD of old. It was a proprietary pain in the ass.

Meanwhile, I have mp3s from the 90s that play and sound just fine. Not sure if the Apple or Google stores will even exist in 20 years, but my mp3s will always play.

Also, it took them two years to make the android port. That tells me how little invested they are in future proofing this thing. What happens when the next couple of versions of iOS or android break it? I doubt they're going to be there to support it. So this is music as temporary gimmick. I can't say this is a good thing. This app is more like a game Bjork wrote the soundtrack to as opposed to an album with games.

Yeah, app albums are a devolution. Just another format that will be too much effort to use in 10 years, making you buy the next hot format if you want to listen to the songs that you already bought.

This exact same thing happened during every media transition. When albums stopped being available on tape, people who refused to upgrade to a CD player were left behind.

The same thing is happening to you, here. You're not getting a new phone (you like your current phone just fine), so you're getting left behind.

Don't lose any sleep over it. If you want to "extra" content badly enough, you'll get the right device to play it.

the thing about the other media transitions is that they weren't happening at this accelerated rate. Records had a good, long run before cassette tapes; which were around for quite a while before they were surpassed by CDs. I got my phone, like, not that long ago.

I'd upgrade in a heartbeat if there were a good, modern smartphone with a physical keyboard though. But hey, you can't have everything in life.

Tape never supplanted vinyl, it complemented it (read/write vs read-only).

Kids in high schools moved in phases from vinyl to cassette tapes (many of which were purchased with music on them) to CDs to mp3s and they're the largest music-buying demographic. Few people bought pop songs on vinyl once they were available on cassette. But I think you're right from the perspective of a recording engineer, or anybody who used reel-to-reel at home, or someone who bought underground punk records all through the 80s, etc.

I went from cassettes to CDs to MP3 all before I left high school though.

It leaves the _future_ behind too. Or a less paradoxical way to say that.

In 15 years, I bet I'll still be able to listen to my mp3s, no problem at all. If I still have some CD's I haven't ripped, I bet I'll be able to rip them without too much trouble, even 15 years from now. I'll probably still have my turntable and be able to play my vinyl, even.

Will I be able to listen/play to Bjork's app/album in 15 years?

Some art is ephemeral. Not all art needs to preserved for all time. Have you ever seen a Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala? The monks spend weeks creating an amazing detailed geometric piece of art, and then carefully destroy it, pouring the sand into a nearby river.

That said, I'm sure that the actual music will be released in a more portable/permanent format at some point.

This really isn't that much different from other album concepts that depend on a particular medium. The Who's Tommy is a rock opera; but more people know just the album. I recall various artists releasing albums on CD-ROM with interactive graphics and animation back in the mid '90s; and of course those were platform specific, for now obsolete platforms (though you may be able to run them in an emulator if you want to try playing them).

Enjoy the art now, in the context it was created for. Maybe it will exist in the future, maybe it won't. Don't worry about it too much.

> This really isn't that much different from other album concepts that depend on a particular medium. The Who's Tommy is a rock opera; but more people know just the album.

Just the album? Tommy is a rock opera album. Rock opera is a genre, or subgenre. How does a rock opera depend on a specific medium?

You can still play video games from 15 years ago (and earlier). I see no reason why this would be different for app/albums.

Doing so requires either preserving or emulating obsolete hardware. There's a small but passionate contingent doing that for games; not so much for app albums.

I'm curious to see how this works out in the future too.

Emulating an NES (15 years ago, woot!) is a LOT more technically straightforward than emulating either a Wii or iOS. But in 15 years, will emulating 2013 iOS seem about the same level of challenge as emulating an NES today? I honestly don't know, but we will find out.

> You could argue that every media shift does that.

I think the huge difference for VHS, CD, DVD, BlueRay is that every publisher supported the standard (after a format war). That can't happen for iPhone/Android, but yet another standard can be built atop - java, flash, HTML5 etc.

Apportable blog post on the announcement with a more technical explanation on how Apportable works exactly: http://blog.apportable.com/apportable-raises-2-dollars-dot-4...

Collin is doing an IAMA on the story: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1iiyxu/i_cofounded_app...

If they are able to get the UIKit framework up and running, then they will have the killer platform overall. I can see already the advantages for games that are mostly OpenGL but with UIKit it will be 'game over' :-)

We have something new coming down the pipe for UIKit soon. Stay tuned.

I am :-)... already signup for the free plan, and I can see the Indie plan has the "Advanced framework"

Suggestion: you may want to have somewhere a screencast showing a standard UIKit app demoed, may be the standard Widget catalog demo that's available with Apple SDK.

Good suggestion, we'll make sure to include UICatalog

Apportable looks extremely interesting for our company. Can you give us an indication of how far we can get right now with a UIKit based app (no game, no OpenGL) and Apportable? I couldn't find any documentation about this on the web.

I assume and hope your upcoming announcement is regarding non-game apps. :)

Side question, but... why develop for a closed platform like iOS first, and then port to an open(ish) platform like Android? (now, I know some answers, but I really hope people don't start doing this for new projects, even if Apportable is as good as they say...)

Why not? It's basically the same as developing a desktop app for Mac first, then porting it to Windows. It makes much more sense than going the other way -- you'll never get a good Mac app if the platform wasn't considered from the start.

The more closed platform has a stricter standard for user experience. It makes sense to build around that standard, then port it to the "free-for-all" platforms with necessary adaptations.

Apportable looks like a fantastic product. Does anyone know if such a thing exists going in the other direction (Android to iOS)?

Anything to help with making it easier for developers to make reliable cross-platform apps is very valuable to the industry.

That seems like the direction that would be less vulnerable to copyright/patent claims. I could easily see Apple raising hell over the compatibility layer Apportable ships with their "ports". Android, itself being an open-source project, would be immune to that.

Sure, but Apple, being sometimes a little overeager to keep the apps they accept "of the right sort" -- ideally fully native, really -- could see an compatibility layer and decide to simply refuse to approve any apps using the bundled Android layer.

They would have in the past. These days they do allow a variety of mechanisms that let not-exactly-native apps run in iOS.

The Apportable people are sitting on a goldmine.

Most likely, the cold truth about mobile development is that the guys selling middleware, trainings and even certifications are doing much more money than most app developers.

It is the usual story about selling shovels in any gold race.

Not even close. You think middleware and trainings are a 5 billion dollar market?

Which guys are getting 5 billion dollar from their apps?!

congrats Collin, Zac and others! Awesome technology, perfect for porting non-standard UI apps from iOs to Android

indeed.. wondering how this is done technically.

This is a video I gave at iOSDevCamp on how it all works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHNq3D4ko74

and the slides: https://slid.es/zacbowling/objective-c-for-android

This couldn't have happened at a better time for the apps we're working on in the coming months! Congratulations on launching and all the best for the future :)

I'm doing an IAmA about this story:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1iiyxu/i_cofounded_app...

I hope it doesn't come with the privacy intrusion of a Jay-Z.

Original title was "YCW11 Objective-C for Android startup Apportable gets 2m led by Google Ventures".

More on that story: http://pevc.dowjones.com/Article?an=DJFVW00020130717e97haong...

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