Apple's Mistake (2009)
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
I've learned to take the rejections positively, and in many cases it has improved the quality of my software. Two cases specifically come to mind:
- Apple rejected an app for not putting in battery usage warnings when the app made use of background location
- Apple rejected an app for including placeholder artwork for in-game achievements
In the cases where I felt I was right, I have almost always been able to argue my point with the reviewer and was allowed through. This has been the case both for policy issues and software design.
That said, there have been moments of pain. Like when I was involved in a trademark dispute and was required to rename my app. Apple delayed the process a lot, causing the other party to become concerned (eventually Apple approved the update but it caused some tension). I think Apple has since improved their review mechanism to handle cases like this (e.g., now including the option "Is this update being submitted for legal reasons, such as copyright or trademark infringement?")
It sometimes feels like software developers think they should be above judgment; that they should be treated as first-class citizens and not their customers. I personally prefer Apple's approach. Though I'm glad there are platforms which cater to both sides.
I don't think it's worth the tradeoff.
I'm glad there are platforms which cater to both sides, but I wish the all did. There is no reason iOS couldn't have the curated, reviewed, controlled App Store and the ability to sideload whatever apps you wanted, for those of us who don't want Apple deciding what we can or cannot run on our own hardware.
If sideloading were possible I wonder if it would increase the piracy rate for my app, on which I make a living.
Personally, I would love to do away with the certificates and signing and be able to run whatever. But I wonder if it would hurt my business. I realise that piracy is already possible, but I suspect any form of sideloading makes it a far more accessible option.
Edit: as I said, I'm pretty aware of the sucky bits. My review process (expedited!) went on for months while the trademark dispute played out. It was an incredibly anxious time.
Allow apps to bypass review. These apps will be hosted on Apple and charged the 30% fee, but they will not be indexed and not be displayed in any way on iTunes. You will have to have a direct link to buy them and download them.
It doesn't matter if it increases the piracy rate. What matters is whether it decreases your purchase rate.
It's possible that sideloading would decrease your purchase rate. I don't think so, but I wouldn't rule it out. Even then, I think people's freedom to do what they want on their own hardware overrules potential harm to your business, to the extent that I find it incredibly weird to propose it.
At the end of the day hot dog vendors sell hot dogs in highly regulated NYC because people in NYC buy hot dogs. Companies sell their goods to Wal-Mart and Neiman Marcus instead of at the flea market because that's what keeps the lights on. Small publishers work with Amazon despite horrible terms because it puts steak on the dinner table.
One thing this article reminds us of it that pg has the not uncommon HN blind spot for Google who he claims has "remained true to their founding principles". I guess stabbing a close partner in the back by releasing a clone of their flagship product is not being evil. I wonder if he's also a fan of the Samwer brothers?
What is the product you're referencing?
1. All these companies "stab each other in the back" and engage in cut throat competition for everything, including (notoriously now) employees and customers.
2. Of all the things google has done, or is doing, or might do releasing Android was one of the more benevolent. At least the "victim" was a giant corporation not defenseless employees, factory workers, developers or customers.
3. Evil is what Sergey says is evil.
I'm a huge fan of Apple products, but "benevolent" is certainly not a word you might use to describe them as a company. In many cases (not all), the opposite can be said of Google.
Since then, Android has certainly grown into an viable competitor to the iPhone, though it's still far behind in many ways, particularly developer adoption and the high end of the market (which is by far more profitable).
Apple has also gotten a bit better and faster in app approval from what my friends say. Still, the iPhone is a lot less hackable than especially the nexus phones. It's still bewilderingly hard to test an app with real people (I'm writing my first iOS app right now and so wish I could just email an apk to even 5 friends). I know many get around this surreptitiously using the "enterprise" program (my hunch is Apple knows but quietly lets it slide knowing that a lot of the best developers do this).
Compared with rooting an android, jail breaking an iPhone seems more risky and less effective. And Apple seems to have succumbed to carriers wrt banning tethering apps not only from the app store, but also in code (from what I hear, haven't had the chance to see if it's possible yet).
However, there are a lot of reasons startups still start with iOS and leave android as a second thought:
1. iOS users actually buy apps, use them, and spend money in them which is extremely rare amongst android users
2. A lot more iOS users have the latest OS and enough also the latest hardware, which means you can do the coolest stuff the platform allows and (at least initially) not have to worry about deprecating well for legacy devices/OS.
3. the devices themselves are (as pg wrote) just too much better designed compared to to even the best android phones. I have a nexus 5 and iPhone 5s and slowly over time I pretty much only use the iPhone except when developing for android. It's little things that cause this behavior, like being able to plug in the iPhone's power cord in the dark (since it's symmetric).
It's still too early to decide whether Apple's tight control is purely a good or bad thing. You could make a decent case either way.
Pretty simple with TestFlight.
Companies who have iOS apps deal with this every single day.
So do Android users. Over a year ago iOS and Android phone apps were dead even in revenues. [1]
Android tablets are behind the curve still, but for the first time Android tablets are outselling iPads -- Android tablets took 62% of the market in 2013. [2]
It will take a while for that lead to actually cause Android tablet revenues to exceed iPad revenues, but it seems inevitable. So in eventually the Android tablet revenue numbers will match or exceed the iPad's as well.
>the devices themselves are (as pg wrote) just too much better designed compared to to even the best android phones
iPhones are nice, but they totally don't trump the features if that's what you care about. I have the Nexus 5 and I wouldn't give it up for an iPhone; the screen size alone makes a huge difference to me.
The Lightning connector is elegant. But I can buy a micro-USB cable for a dollar; a Lightning cable is at least $9. I can have extra cables everywhere I need one for next to nothing. And yes, getting the polarity wrong sucks, but having a standardized cable that works on ALL the devices I need to charge is even better.
It depends on what you care about.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/03/27/android...
[2] http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/03/gartner-195m-tablets-sold-i...
From the Forbes article:
"A year ago, that lead shrunk to iPhone users being 50% more valuable – and right now, if the app is designed specifically for Android and some segmentation is considered, the revenue generation potential is the same."
That's a big if, and a qualifier to boot.. I don't think what that article is saying (potential for revenue can be the same in some cases) is the same as "dead even in revenues".
I agree that screen size is crucial, but I have an iPad for reading etc. If I had to choose only one device, then screen size would be a bigger deal.
Regarding profit/revenue, what about articles like these (also from last year):
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/31/android-in-app-downloads/
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/11/27/apples-ios-brings-...
I find this understanding of the numbers far more prevalent then what your article described.
> So do Android users. Over a year ago iOS and Android phone apps were dead even in revenues. [1]
That statement was new to me. I'm guessing it is specifically talking about revenue from ads, since the source of the quote works for an ad network. This discounts revenue from sales (which I believe is nearly nonexistent on Android), IAP (which drives major revenue for "free-to-play" games on iOS, but I don't know about Android), and subscriptions (who knows).
I also find the "Android tablets outsold iPads" interesting news. The breakdown of tablet by manufacturer shows Apple clearly winning (36%), Samsung #2 (19%), and everyone else below 6% with a large bucket of "Other" (31%). That's still a strong position for Apple at the high end of the market, and mirrors the smartphone market where Apple & Samsung make all of the profit.
I think Apple has staked out the premium devices, and will continue to be successful there. But, won't most of the growth come from global markets where their products are out of reach for most consumers? Where does that leave them, and can they afford to continue to ignore the rest of the market?
And if Apple made no mistake, then what does that bode for the future of programming?
This is a crucial passage:
"But Android is an orphan; Google doesn't really care about it, not the way Apple cares about the iPhone. Apple cares about the iPhone the way Google cares about search."
Google ended up caring a great deal about Android. Maybe it didn't in 2009. Maybe it did, and it was just taking time to figure things out. But it's hard to argue now that Google doesn't take Android seriously. And now Android is a big threat to iOS.
In any event, I wouldn't say PG was wrong about this point. Rather, I'd say that hindsight is 20/20. Android was in its infancy when PG wrote the essay, and he was correct in calling it out as a viable threat to iOS.
I don't necessarily agree with the "why" of it, though. Android's rise isn't really the result of arrogance on Apple's part. It's largely the result of two factors: 1) its distribution as a decentralized platform; 2) the price-competitiveness of Android devices. To the extent a lot of developers prefer Android to iOS, it's an opportunistic preference -- not a moral or philosophical one. Developers will go where the users are. More and more users are on Android. A secondary factor is that Android is an easier testing and deployment environment.
Market share could get so tiny that developers decide to switch to Android-first, but as of now iOS still holds the crown. Without other metrics like user engagement turning against Apple, developers have no reason to be Android-first.
I'd say it's entirely too early to call the ball here. The long game for both Apple and Google isn't limited to phones and tablets; it's to gain platform ubiquity across all devices, across all aspects of your daily life. Both platforms have a very strong horse in that race, and I'd have a tough time betting on one or the other right now.
Moto X
http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/messages/4171610/
It has absolutely nothing to do with being better. Apple simply gives up 80-90% percent of the market by being a premium phone.
As I said in my post: "its distribution as a decentralized platform." You and I are not in disagreement here.
I didn't say Android was a "better" platform. I said that a lot of developers consider it to be. And I went on to qualify what I meant by that, i.e., that it's got wide distribution and can be used to deploy and test rapidly. As I mentioned, it's an "opportunistic preference." I don't think developers have been alienated by Apple the way PG predicted they would be.
Anyway, that doesn't really matter either. Which market currently provides the best possibility for real income? I'll put in the extra work on Android if there are more paying customers. From a business point of view, one should be following the money and not playing "think like a geek" and rationalize it through technical issues.
This has happened over the last few years as Google began exercising more control over the platform and secure a better experience; now - there's Android, the somewhat orphaned OSS, and Android, the Google experience OS.
It's understandable. Whenever a new model is released, Apple's constrained supply means these store's daily profits are dictated by whatever supply Apple decides to give them. They're likely getting much smaller margins than other brands, and therefore limited in their ability to lure customers with discounts.
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As far as I can tell, Android owners fall into these categories:
1. Educated customers that genuinely want an Android-only advantage (e.g. oversized screen)
2. Uneducated customers who bought whatever the salesperson recommended.
3. People with tight budgets or low expectations that might otherwise have purchased a feature-phone.
4. Counter-trend hipsters who think Apple is too mainstream. Seriously. I know quite a few people who fit this category.
5. Stupid Google fanboys who are convinced Android is amazing open source nirvana, and probably haven't ever owned an iPhone anyway... because they're not an stupid Apple fanboy.
Developers are simply not the main factor.
In Android world, rejections happen after something bad happens. That means some person who trusted an app got screwed, and enough have to get screwed, for Google to take down the offending app.
It doesn't always make life fun; we're submitting an app update tomorrow that is totally benign but will take 5-6 days to get approved. But on the other side of that is a customer base that installs updates from us without worry, and that's very valuable to us.
There are horror stories about terrible approval process decisions and being stuck in limbo. But for each one of those, thousands of developers see their apps approved or rejected in a pretty reasonable way. That ratio doesn't excuse bad decisions, but the approval process has made the iOS platform what it is for developers and customers today.
We can iterate on the product at near web-speed on Android. Our last game started on iOS first and at one point it had an update take 22 days to go through Apple's approval process. It was a complete black box to us - there was no reason given why it was taking so long and there was no one to contact regarding why. After not being able to submit a critical bug fix for 22 days to our players we decided that it wasn't the right place for us to launch on in the future.
So far I've been very happy with our decision to focus initially on Google Play. Launching first on that platform has allowed us to iterate on our latest game quickly, improving the experience continuously for players. Our players appreciate the quick improvements, and I'm not just talking about bug fixes here; we're also adding features to address player requests.
Once the rate of change slows we'll port it back to iOS.
The number of independent iOS Developers that are out there, who make a great living building a few apps and supporting their users grows everyday. They didn't alienate Apple, they reaped the benefits of a well thought out system that works for everyone.